A Tale of Two Cities: 30 Church St. and the Bushwick Fires
The earliest fire-related research conducted by Brooklyn Poly appears to have been consulting work done on behalf of the New York Building Congress. Beginning in February 1962, Brooklyn Poly initiated a three year study resulting in a new building code enacted in 1968 (Rodengen 238). It's not clear from the available archival sources whether this project incorporated any experiments or research studies. However, by 1975, this early work was being cited as the origin of Brooklyn Poly's fire research efforts (DeCicco).
In 1967, the Center for Urban and Environmental Studies (CUES) was officially established at Brooklyn Poly under the leadership of Professor Paul R. DeCicco (Slywka). Although the center would come to focus on a variety of urban issues, the surviving collection in the CUES records suggests that its fire research group, led by DeCicco along with Professor Robert J. Cresci and William H. Correale, was its most significant component. By the 1970s, the fire research group had matured into a full fledged research center, located at the Old Brooklyn Fire Headquarters on Jay Street (DeCicco).
This era is best characterized by the two most prominent studies directed by DeCicco. These two sets of studies are, in some sense, a microcosm of New York City in the 1960s and 1970s. On the one hand, a new generation of gleaming, glass skyscrapers were rising in Manhattan, leading to public concern about the effects of large scale high rise fires. The construction of the World Trade Center in particular inspired two novels about high rise fires: The Tower by Richard Martin Stern and The Glass Inferno by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson, which in turn were developed into The Towering Inferno, the highest grossing film of 1974 (IMDb).
But it wasn't just the public that was concerned about the new skyscrapers that had come to dominate the New York City skyline. Officials at the Fire Department were worried too, and they had good reason. High rise buildings are especially susceptible to a phenomenon called the smokestack effect, where smoke and flames are funneled through the building's stairwells due to differences in air pressure between the stairwell and surrounding floors. DeCicco, in a 1977 article for the Washington Post, explained that "[b]ecause of this, smoke wants to get into the stairs, where people are supposed to congregate for their escape route. It couldn't be a worse place to be" (Claiborne).
These fears prompted the first major fire research study conducted by CUES in the form of a series of smoke tests at 30 Church Street in Manhattan. This building, which was set for demolition to make way for the construction of more buildings at the new World Trade Center, made for a perfect test bed for stairwell smoke tests.
The goal of the tests was to determine the feasibility of techniques used to increase the pressure in the stairwells of burning buildings, with the idea being that the higher the air pressure in the stairs, the harder it would be for smoke and flames to enter them. Stairwell pressurization schemes had been considered for some time, but there was no concrete data on whether they could be implemented effectively and whether escaping occupants would have difficulty entering the highly pressurized stairs.
Live fire tests are always tricky experiments to implement. These tests are sometimes described as "controlled fires," but this is really a misnomer. Once a fire is started, the only controlling forces are the laws of physics - laws that are inherently poorly understood, hence the need for experimentation. Thus, fires can be planned, but never truly controlled.
In the case of the 30 Church Street tests, located at the heart of Manhattan's financial district, DeCicco and the other researchers needed a guaranteed way to extinguish the fires once the tests were complete, as well as a reliable way to analyze smoke conditions during the burns and to assess ease of access to the stairwells during pressurization. All of this meant that firefighters had to be deliberately stationed inside the burning building during the experiment.
The live burn tests were ultimately successful. According to the final report co-authored by DeCicco, Cresci, and Correale, "measurements of smoke levels and direct visual observations made in the stair ... indicated that with as many as three doors wide open, the entire stairwell remained free of smoke.
"While the corridor and adjacent lobby areas on the fire floor were observed to have heavy smoke levels, the test stair provided a clear and safe passage for evacuation of occupants and an effective route by which firefighters could approach the fire location" (DeCicco et al. 57).
The experiment was not without its surprises, however. As wind picked up during the tests, researchers noticed unusual flow patterns in the building, presumably created by the unpredictable pressure gradients caused by the interaction between strong wind and the surrounding skyscrapers.
This prompted a further research study by Cresci, in which a scale model of Lower Manhattan was subjected to simulated wind conditions in a wind tunnel. Among the purposes of this experiment was to better understand how the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center would behave in an upper floor fire scenario. The results from this study were inconclusive, as Cresci was unable to replicate the flow conditions observed at 30 Church Street (Cresci).
CUES's work on fire safety was not limited to commercial high-rises. In the shadow of Manhattan's skyscraper building boom, residential neighborhoods in the outer boroughs of New York were facing a very different fire threat. Widespread economic decline led to what can only be described as an arson epidemic in Bronx and Brooklyn neighborhoods.
One Brooklyn neighborhood in particular, Bushwick, was a case study in how urban decline can lead to arson. The area had once been known for its vibrant breweries, but as the beer industry left the City, the neighborhood began to fall victim to blockbusting and other predatory development practices. As Denis Chavez explains in an article for the NYC Archives blog, "'Blockbusting' is a practice where real-estate agents and building developers intimidate white property owners to sell their homes at low prices and then sell those homes to racial minorities at marked up prices. The new families would buy from the real-estate agents and developers because prior to that most private property owners would not sell to minorities. ... It was around this time that landlords began burning down empty homes for insurance money. Many of the old wooden structures were easily ignited."
The pattern repeated itself in neighborhoods around the City, resulting in a dramatic uptick in structural arson, as recorded by the NYC Arson Strike Force. But arson in Bushwick was a particular threat because of the nature of Bushwick's buildings: 19th and early 20th century wooden rowhouses with ad-hoc electrical wiring and poorly insulated, connected cocklofts (CUES News).
With the situation deteriorating year by year, the Fire Department awarded DeCicco a grant of $20,000 to conduct experiments on how to mitigate the threat posed by structural arson fires. An even larger grant on the order of $1 million soon followed from the Housing Preservation and Development Funds, and by 1974, CUES was conducting full scale burn tests on condemned rowhouses in Bushwick (Cable).
The Bushwick fire tests demonstrated that connected cocklofts could be made impervious to fire by adding a small amount of cheap insulation material. The specific material used for the tests, an insulator manufactured by the United States Gypsum Company, could be purchased cheaply enough to cover an entire loft for just $50 (FormFunction). The tests also concluded that strategically placed sprinklers could slow the spread of fire long enough to drastically improve safety.
As the city recovered from the financial crisis of the 1970s and as more resources from the Federal Government were dedicated to addressing the issue of arson, the number of structural arsons soon declined to the point where they are now considered rare.
The 30 Church Street and Bushwick tests were not the only fire experiments conducted by CUES during that era. Numerous archival sources make passing mention of other related studies. However, the 30 Church Street and Bushwick tests are the only ones mentioned consistently and in enough detail for inclusion here.
Another gap in the archival record is the history of what ultimately happened to CUES. No evidence exists of research activity in the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, the absence of mention of any such activity in later USI grant documentation (as described in the USI section), strongly suggests that CUES was defunct by that point. The Old Jay Street Fire Headquarters is no longer part of the NYU Tandon campus, having been converted into affordable housing at some point in the 1980s, further cementing the early 1980s as the best guess for the latest point in time that CUES was still active.