The Great Fire of Eighteen Forty-Five

On the morning of April tenth, eighteen forty-five, a maid in a house on Ferry Street lit a fire under a washbasin to heat water. The flames spread to the icehouse next door. Within hours, Pittsburgh's downtown had ceased to exist.

The city that burned was built almost entirely of wood. The streets were narrow, lined with wooden sidewalks and wooden buildings crammed against each other. There were only two water mains in all of downtown, and the pressure in them was inadequate for the distances involved. The wind that day was near gale force. There had been no rain for six weeks. And floating through the industrial air was an invisible accelerant: a mixture of coal soot, flour dust, and cotton fibers from the mills that lined the rivers.

By the time the fire was out, nearly sixty acres of the city center were ash. Twelve hundred buildings were destroyed. Twelve thousand people lost their homes or businesses. Two people died, which was, considering the scale, almost miraculous. The damage in eighteen forty-five dollars was estimated at twelve million. In today's terms, that is approximately four hundred million dollars.

The disaster exposed everything Pittsburgh had refused to see about itself. The city had grown faster than its infrastructure, its fire capacity, and its building codes could keep up with. Business leaders and city officials, surveying the ruins, made a decision that shaped the Pittsburgh that exists today: they would rebuild in brick and iron. Wooden downtown construction was banned. The rebuilding was swift. Within two years the city center was substantially reconstructed, in harder materials, with wider streets.

Pittsburgh looked at its own ruin and turned it into an argument for what the city could be. That willingness to rebuild from catastrophe would be tested again, many times, over the next century and a half.