Thirty-eight years in the FDNY taught me that every old tenement in New York can tell thousands of stories. So one afternoon, I walked a few blocks from where I’d spent the last 20 years of my career and came to the spot where 222 Chrystie St. once stood, hoping the place might tell me the story of what happened just before midnight on July 29, 1907.
The fire started in the grocery on the ground floor of the six-story tenement. More than 100 people were asleep inside, almost all Italian immigrants. Flames climbed fast, turning the stairways into chimneys and driving families onto the fire escapes. Some jumped into the courtyard below, choosing the fall over the heat behind them.
FDNY companies made desperate rescues, but by the time the fire was under control, 25 people were dead and nearly 30 injured. Neighbors reported an explosion, the grocer vanished, and police detained a burned man wandering near the scene. It became one of the worst residential fires in the city’s history, and in a neighborhood already shaken by Black Hand threats, it was never seen as an accident. The Black Hand was not a single gang but rather a loose network of extortionists who preyed on Italian immigrants with threats, bombs and letters marked with daggers…