Not long after noon, a cry of “fire” echoed out from an open third floor window, sending the block of lower Broadway between Prince and Spring into a panic. A second shout, this time with more specificity: “Barnum’s Museum is on fire!” Though accidental, it became one of the man’s greatest spectacles. The $1 million museum was engulfed in flames.
The building was rendered uninhabitable, and nine around it were damaged or destroyed in its wake. Miraculously, no humans were killed, but horror stories of the tightly confined animals emerged in its wake. The New York Times reported the story of a bear found alive within the ruins, only to be hunted and captured in the streets of lower Manhattan. Most grisly of all, however, was the report of a pair of beluga whales captured off the east coast of Canada. After attendants vainly attempted to extinguish the flames with water from their tanks, they were left to boil to death in the building’s basement.
For a moment, the horror show gave way to brief beauty. The early-March cold snap froze the fire brigade’s water to the building’s facade. It was a stunning sight, newly formed icicles clinging to the windows and railings, glistening in the mid-day sun.
Barnum, however, had finally had enough. “Will you please state that I have retired entirely from the museum business, and that the Barnum & Van Amburgh Company have dissolved,” the showman wrote in an open letter. He stuck to his word. The New American Museum would be the final such building to bear his name during his lifetime.
Two years later, at age 60, he would enter business with which he would ultimately become synonymous. Forty-five miles southwest of Milwaukee, in the small town of Delavan, Wisconsin, he would establish the "P. T. Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome" – his first traveling circus.
It was a long way from his early glory days in the Big Apple. That Barnum was altogether finished with the museum business, however, wasn’t a huge surprise. The 1868 fire was the third blaze in four years.
The first had been the most benign of the trio. As the American Civil War drew to a close, the Confederate Army of Manhattan set out to light the island ablaze. Operatives began setting fires around the borough in an attempt to overwhelm first responders, but most of the 19 fires either failed to start or, in the case of P. T. Barnum's American Museum, were quickly contained. The eight-man “army” was suspected in the next two fires, though both were ultimately deemed to be accidental in origin.
It was the second fire that went down among the most intense in city history. For nearly a quarter-century, the original American Museum was New York’s greatest draw. Over its life, 38 million customers paid a quarter to pass through its doors – a mind-boggling figure in a young country of less than 32 million. The museum was a mix of natural history, theater and the sideshow spectacle that would become Barnum’s legacy.
Some of New York’s finest shows played out on the stage in the massive Lecture Room. An entire zoo was housed inside the building, packed full of live, exotic animals. The 25-inch-tall General Tom Thumb grew in stature to find himself in the good graces of both Abraham Lincoln and the Queen. Conjoined twins Chang and Eng and Zip the Pinhead were permanent attractions, as was the infamous Fiji Mermaid – a taxidermied young monkey’s torso sewn on a fish’s tail.
Barnum was not above placing newspaper stories declaring his exhibits a fraud to drive more attendance. He also, infamously, inserted “To the Egress” signs throughout the museum. Curious visitors followed them, only to find themselves back on the street – previously unaware that the attraction they were seeking was a synonym for “exit.”
A second fire, eight months later, burned the massive structure to the ground. Rumors of the harrowing incident spread quickly, including the tale of one fireman who fought off a tiger with an ax, before carrying a 400-pound woman to safety on his shoulders. But reality was every bit as fantastical.
“The snakes are loose!” a patron shouted, before an explosion sounded. Another screamed, “the elephant is coming!” as the massive land mammal panicked at the sound of the fire engine siren screaming toward the building. A witness described a hundred people rushing to escape the blaze, with 15 jamming themselves through a window cutting and scraping bodies in the process.
“Not a few men made their way over the eight-foot iron fence into St. Paul's Churchyard, while many hundreds sped down the street nearly to the river before they dared to look behind them,” the account notes. “The loss of hats, canes, coats and watches, the rolling in the mud and reckless trampling over each other, would have been most ludicrous but for the perilous danger. When all was over, the inventory of smashed hats and bare heads was enough to raise a laugh even from KNOX, whose fine hat-store was in imminent danger of the fate which afterward [befell] it.”
In describing the fire, The Times noted Barnum’s well-known penchant for “humbuggery,” before striking a solemn tone to describe the gravity of all that had been lost.
“Birds of rarest plumage, fish of most exquisite tint, animals peculiar to every section, minerals characteristics of every region, and peculiarities of all portions of the earth, costly, beautiful curious and strange, were crowded on the dusty shelves of room after room, where they attracted the earnest attention and studious regard of the scholar and the connoisseur,” the paper wrote. “All this has gone. Almost in the twinkling of an eye, the dirty, ill-shaped structure, filled with specimens so full of suggestion and of merit, passed from our gaze, and its like cannot soon be seen again.”
Sources:
Disastrous Fire https://www.nytimes.com/1865/07/14/archives/disastrous-fire-total-destruction-of-barnums-american-museum-nine.html
Articles on the burning of Barnum’s museum https://www.musicingotham.org/event/121357
Barnum's new American museum, no. 539 & 541 Broadway, N.Y. https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.05603/