Читать книгу The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918 онлайн

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“Give us one of your real Moscow fires,” sighed the Sun in the first week of its existence.

The prayer was answered a little more than two years later, when about twenty blocks south of Wall Street, between Broad Street and the East River, were consumed. The fire started late in the evening of Wednesday, December 16, and all that the Sun printed about it the next morning was one triple-leaded paragraph:

POSTSCRIPT—HALF PAST 1 O’CLOCK—A TREMENDOUS CONFLAGRATION is now raging in the lower part of the city. The Merchants’ Exchange is in flames. Nearly all the blocks in the triangle bounded by William and Wall Streets and the East River are consumed! Several hundred buildings are already down, and the firemen have given out. God only knows when the fire will be arrested.

On Friday morning the Sun had two and a half columns about the fire, and gave an approximately correct estimate that seven hundred buildings had been burned, at a loss of twenty million dollars. The calamity provided an opportunity for the fine writing then indulged in, and the fire reporter did not overlook it; nor did he forget Moscow. Here are typical extracts: