Chief Nevins, who had just arrived on the scene, ordered the bridge taken down and the firefighters had just commenced cutting the span from the burning building when the burning refinery walls began to sway, signaling its impending collapse. There was a covered second story bridge connecting the refinery to the boiler house on South Second Street that could allow the fire to spread. They realized that wind might spread the conflagration to other sugarhouses and there was the real possibility that all Williamsburg could burn down. The firefighters were hampered by a lack of hydrants close to the great refinery. A brilliant glow of flame filled the foggy night sky, which could be clearly seen far away in Queens and even in northern Manhattan. As they went higher and higher they could be seen in other neighborhoods and soon the alarm bells and the shooting flames attracted crowds of fascinated onlookers. The flames raced upwards in the seven stories that faced Kent Avenue. The flames had reached the pan filter rooms, adding coal to the already hot blaze. As the sugar burned it glowed in a rainbow of colors, the beauty of the flames masking their deadly effectiveness.Ĭhief Smith, immediately realizing the scope of the blaze, called in a third and fourth alarm as other companies rushed to the scene. A number of vats of alcohol blew up, sounding like cannon fire. Firefighters had to move back from the building’s façade due to amazing heat of the fire.
The heat from the fire was so intense that many of the fire fighters developed blisters on their faces. Fueled by tons of sugar, the fire was racing upwards and flames could soon be seen in many of the windows.
When the firemen and company employees looked up, they realized that it was already probably too late. Outside the factory the first fire companies quickly deployed, frantically setting up ladders, while spreading out hoses. But soon, choking fumes reached the area where they were unloading the barrels and they had no choice but to abandon the plant. Other workers were removing stacks of records, while some others were trying to wheel out barrels of sugar. Dense masses of potentially flammable vapor poured into the areas where the workers were now using the hose to douse the blaze. The fire moved both upwards and downwards at an alarming speed. The fireboat Havemeyer even appeared on the scene from Manhattan, trying to douse the flames, but all the firefighters’ efforts were in vain. Four horse-drawn engines responded to the first alarm and four additional companies also answered the second alarm, but twelve minutes had elapsed since the fire was reported, and this interval had given the fire time to spread. There were precious minutes of indecision, which wasted critical time in finding and turning on the water spigot for the hose. About fifty hands on duty at the plant rushed to refinery, grabbing hoses and attempting to put out the blaze. The watchman pulled an alarm, alerting the plant’s workers and sending a signal to the fire department. Dense smoke quickly filled the room and flames soon leapt from storeroom. The night shift was just appearing at 4pm when watchman Edward Haman began to smell smoke and found the flames in a storeroom on the refinery’s first floor. Three watchmen, two superintendents and two assistants remained in the refinery. For a quarter century they had refined huge amounts of sugar without incident, but their luck would run out that January day.Īt about three o’ clock in the afternoon, Theodore Havemeyer made his customary inspection of the plant and noticed nothing suspicious. The presence of steam, thousands of moving parts that could cause sparks in the refinery and the highly flammable sugar all made fire a grave risk. Having been in the sugar business for more than eighty years, the Havemeyer family knew the danger that fires often broke out in sugar refineries. The refinery, the largest building in Williamsburg at the time, was nine stories high, covering an entire block on Wythe Avenue between South Third and South Fourth streets and stretching some two hundred feet in from the street to the East river shore. On a frigid January night, the Havemeyer and Elder Refinery, which would forty years later be renamed as Domino, went up in one of the most spectacular fires the area had ever witnessed. January 9th marks the one hundred thirty-sixth anniversary of one of the most destructive fires in North Brooklyn.
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