[Ice-encrusted Fire Truck,Tuesday Jan. 9, 1912 at the Equitable Building]

Item Details

New York, Rosenfeld, [1912 or later]

Acceptable (see images)

Morris 'Rosy' ROSENFELD (1884-1968, photographer).

[Mechanical Crustacea, or, Ice-encrusted Fire Truck attending the fire on Tuesday Jan. 9, 1912 at the Equitable Building, 120 Broadway, New York.] [New York: 1912 or later]. Photograph on glossy paper (sheet size: 7 7/8 x 9 7/8 inches), with ‘M. Rosenfeld, N.Y.’ blindstamp to lower right corner and ink stamp to verso ‘M. Rosenfeld / Photographer / 116 Nassau St., New York’.

Condition: two small dings to image area, light toning to verso of paper.

A startling / unsettling image from a photographer known for his images of yachts ! – this 1912 image presages a number of subsequent movements in art: surrealism and (semi) abstraction, inter alia.

‘The old Equitable Building was constructed in stages beginning in 1869, 10 years after the company was founded. Eventually, it rose to 10 stories, tall enough in its day that the rooftop observation deck was a popular tourist attraction and the site of the city’s weather bureau.

“This substantial building, not unlike a massive fortification, served as an object lesson — the stability of the structure seeming to typify the future strength and magnitude of the society,” William Alexander wrote in “A Brief History of the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States,” published in 1929.

Shortly after 5 a.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 9, 1912, a small fire began in a basement office serving the Cafe Savarin. After causing moderate damage, it found a greasy dumbwaiter shaft that ran to an eighth-floor kitchen. Then the conflagration really began. The first fire alarm was sounded at 5:34 a.m.; four engine companies and two ladder companies responded.

A second alarm at 5:55 brought John Kenlon, the chief of the department, and five more companies. Third, fourth and fifth alarms were sounded, and more and more firefighters arrived on the scene, cater-corner from Trinity Church. Finally, at 7:48 a.m., a special call went to Brooklyn for nine more engine companies and four more ladder companies.

This should have been more than enough to defeat the fire. But the bitter, blustery cold turned the hose streams into frozen spray.

“Ice seemed to form in the very air,” The Times reported. “It clogged the apparatus, rooting the pieces to the frozen streets. It settled in cloaks over the men themselves so that they had to be chopped and thawed out from time to time that they might go on with the work.

“And it settled over the building in a gleaming sheath of white that made the fire a wonderful thing to see. Ice converted the ruined building into a fantastic palace, with the rainbows arching at every turn as the sunlight filtered through the spray and smoke.”

The account continued, “And of all the spectacles that kept crowds staring fascinated from opposite streets and windows, the strangest was that of two despairing hands — a dead man’s hands thrust through the bars from one of the basement vaults. It was all of the man that could be seen, and as the afternoon drew to a close the ice mound on the pavement grew layer by layer, till even the hands were hidden from view.”

New Yorkers might have had a hard time that day imagining a catastrophe sufficient to make them forget the fire at the “fire-proof” Equitable Building any time soon. But four months later, on April 10, the Titanic set out on her maiden voyage to America.’ (archive NYTimes).