Three men in vests and shirt-sleeves, one wearing a green eyeshade, stood on the ledges of three adjoining fourth-floor windows, peering down at us through a curtain of snow. The man in the window nearest the Times was panicked; his forearms upraised, fists clenched, he was shaking them violently up and down, his mouth wide-open and screaming meaninglessly.

Our ladder was too short: Rising between a pair of windows, it touched the building wall just above the third floor, well below the three men on the fourth. I didn't know what to do, and looked around frantically; half a dozen yards behind me Julia stood out in the street staring up at the burning building, and something about her expression made me run out beside her and turn to look, too. And now I saw the entire face of the building.

I have, as I always will, I think, a copy of The New York Times of the following morning, February 1, 1882. The entire front page and most of the second is filled by an account of that awful fire. I don't want to put down what Julia and I saw now; instead I will quote directly from the Times.

…the upper windows… were seen to be full of living forms. Terror-stricken faces of men and women peered down through the smoke upon the thousands of their fellow-creatures below, stretching out their hands for aid, and shrieking loudly for rescue. [I'll see that forever; the way they held out their hands.] The mingled smoke and flames gave to the faces an unearthly hue, and the shrieks, mingled with the roar of the fire and the hoarse calling of the firemen, came to the ears of the surging crowd below like voices from the tomb. The firemen were doing all that men could do, risking their lives fearlessly in the effort to save those of the imprisoned sufferers, but their movements, rapid as they were, seemed slow enough to the suffocating creatures in the burning building. To reach them by the stairway was impossible, so quickly had the fire done its work. The firemen raised ladders, but they only reached to the third story, and time was necessarily consumed in raising the shorter ladders to increase their length. Meantime those in the building saw death steadily and surely advancing upon them from the rear, and the preparations to save them from the outside seemed endless….

Julia screamed, her hand rising to her mouth: The panicked man had jumped, his body slowly turning in a complete somersault as he fell, his legs pumping furiously and instinctively against the air for a foothold that didn't exist. We swung our heads away an instant before he struck the walk.

Two firemen were running toward us from the Times Building carrying a wooden table; the angry little man in the top hat was shouting and beckoning at me, and I ran back to the ladder. We all stooped, gripped the legs, heaved up the ladder, and staggered sideways with it, the top sliding and bouncing along the building wall high above till it rested between and below the windows in which the remaining two men were crouched. Flickers of flame had begun darting out the tops of their windows, and occasional coils of smoke rolled out and up. The firemen had reached us, they shoved their table under the ladder legs, and we set the ladder down on it, and looked up the face of the building.

The ladder top was closer but still well below the two men. But under these two windows ran a sign; I couldn't read it through the snow and the smoke rising from the windows below. Now one of the men crept out onto the sign, crawled to a point over the ladder, turned, and hanging from the sign's front edge, lowered himself, his feet feeling for and finding the topmost rung. He let go, knees bending, grabbed the ladder top, then scrambled down fast as he could go. The little man in charge had been shouting at the second man: "You will be safe in a moment! Remain calm!" And now the second man reached the ladder like the first. As he clattered down, the little man was beaming, grabbing each of our hands, and giving it a shake. "I am Anthony Comstock. My heartfelt thanks! God be praised!" he was saying.

The two firemen stood waiting, each with his hands on the ladder; the moment the man on it dropped onto the street, they began cranking it down. They yelled a thanks to us, told us to get the hell across the street before we were killed, and we all ran across Park Row, ducked under the police ropes holding back the crowd lining City Hall Park, then turned to look back across the street.

I heard a sound from Julia; she was crying, and she slowly turned her head away from the burning building. It was a sight I don't think the modern world ever sees. Only the outer walls of that building were stone; the entire interior — floors, window frames, doors — was wood. So was nearly every object of furniture in all its offices and rooms. Even the walls and ceilings were wooden lath under plaster. And over the years the building had turned gunpowder-dry. The fire had almost literally exploded through the entire street floor, and swarmed up both flights of stairs to the next. Now broad pennants and gouts of flame leaped high, red, and frantic from every window of the lower floors; they actually seemed to be trying to climb higher. With those flames, thick sooty smoke roiled and twisted, flowing hotly up and out from the top of every one of those windows. The wind pushed down Park Row in bursts, the air thick with flying snow, and for a long moment or two the flames would bend with a gust of the wind, flickering and trembling, fighting to stand erect and reach up the face of the building again.

Any time I close my eyes and remember, I can see the horrible color of it: the dark grimy face of the old building, the terrible orange-red-and-black of the huge wild flames and rolling smoke, the spidery red lengths of the ladders, the people on the ledges mostly in white-and-black but one girl in a long vivid green dress, all of it seen strangely, nightmarishly dreamlike, through a white curtain of swirling snow.

We watched, thousands of us strung along the park edge and the east wall of the post office standing in absolute silence except for the steady pump of the engines, the shouts of the firemen, and the thin cries of the people high on the ledges. Those on some of the third-floor ledges were rescued fast, though the windows over the Observer sign were solid flame now. The last of the third-floor people were already climbing or being carried down; one girl hung limp over a fireman's shoulder as he brought her down, her arms swaying loosely down the length of his back. Suddenly the entire crowd moaned; a few of the extension ladders were apparently long enough to reach the fourth floor but as the topmost extensions were cranked up past the third floor now, the thicket of telegraph wires strung above the sidewalks pressed against the faces of the extensions. Without shifting the ladder bases impossibly close to the face of the buildings, the tops couldn't get past the wires.

Half a dozen firemen had lifted one ladder and, using it like a vertical battering ram, were trying to jam it past the wires by sheer force. We saw thin black threads of wire tauten, snap, and fall, the ends flying, and the ladder top burst through. Two more ladders were forced up this way, and we watched people scurry down, sometimes completely disappearing in black smoke. Other ladders couldn't get through, and we saw a man, and then a woman, hang from a ledge, feet dangling, and — at a shout from the fireman on top of the ladder — drop onto it, the fireman balanced, legs wrapped around the rungs, waiting to grab them.

Two men stood on the ledge of a fifth-floor window. Suddenly the glass of the window bulged, a ball of red-smeared black smoke rolled out between them, and I saw the shards of glass fly far out over the street, twisting and falling, splintering the light as they fell through the flying snow. The window gone, the heat was too much and the tail of one man's coat was smoldering and smoking as the men dropped to their knees, turned to face the building, then lowered themselves by their hands from the ledge, feet thrashing as they felt for and then found a toehold on the raised ornamentation set in the building's face over the fourth-floor windows. But now the flames were roaring up from the fourth-floor windows, too, and I'm certain they'd have died in seconds from the heat and combustion gases if a fireman hadn't seen them, lifted the stream of his hose from the third-floor window into which he'd been pouring it, and doused the two men. He kept it up, alternating the stream between the third-floor windows and the two clinging men until a ladder was forced through the wires to the fourth floor. A fireman swarmed up it, and must have shouted, because one of the two men shifted himself hand over hand a foot or so to one side, then dropped squarely onto the ladder, landing just below the fireman. It must have hurt and may even have sprained or broken something because he came down the ladder very clumsily — but alive. The second man, too, swung himself over the ladder, and dropped onto it.