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and frames from the United States Coffee House crashed at their feet. Suddenly the Square, which lay on the slant side of a hill, was hot as a brick oven. Next door to the United States Restaurant was the Parker House, the first considerable house in the city. A regular two-story home with two stores, a saloon, and an entire second floor given over to gambling tables, it rented for an astonishing $150,000 a year.
    Twenty yards away, Robert Smith Lammot was dressing for work when he gazed out his window. The Parker House was belching clouds of rough-textured smoke. Flames were surging wildly around every crack. Clouds of smoke were boiling from both ends. Inside, piles of gold and silver coins melted into slag. Lammot, frantically gathering up his valuables, then recalled a dreadful fact and rushed to his window. “Stored powder!” he shouted to the crowd below. “The Parker House has dozens of barrels of gunpowder in its basement! Run for your lives.” That got a reaction.
    Under showers of sparks, the mob transformed itself into an elemental force, a panicky human stampede more terrible than the fire. As the thousands scattered, the stored powder in the Parker Housebasement detonated, shattering the building and setting off munitions in nearby basements. A few citizens, suddenly in the middle of a battlefield with cannon on both sides, made halfhearted passes at the flames with canvas sacks and blankets. Others slathered walls with mud.
    E. A. Upton, onboard one of the abandoned ships in the cove, saw the flames and rowed to shore. As he dropped onto the sandy beach, he realized he had pulled on the wrong boots. By then the fire was spreading rapidly down the Square. Upton remembered his stored trunks at the Merchants Exchange Hotel and frantically hobbled up Montgomery Street to hire a drayman. The road, a foot deep in mud, was over the hubs of most carts. For eight dollars he persuaded a ferryman to convey his trunks to the wharf and for another three dollars to row them out to his ship. Young John McCrackan, a Connecticut lawyer and artist who also lived inside the Ghost Fleet, joined Upton on the dunes. Together they ran toward the Square.
    “The streets,” McCrackan recalled, “were perfectly heaping with all kinds and descriptions of goods besides gold and silver which was melted up.” The exploding Parker House had one benefit. It reminded Broderick how to slow the fire. During his marble-mining days on New York’s East Side, he had carved blocks from a quarry with well-placed charges of gunpowder and used that technique fighting fire. “We must pull down and blow up a line of houses,” he ordered. “If we throw kegs of powder into three or four of the burning buildings, we might isolate the blaze and pull the rest down.” The impact would either smother the flames or leave the fire nothing to burn. He selected several wine stores along Washington Street, but before demolishing them allowed people to help themselves. When the proprietor of one store refused to have his emporium blown up, Broderick hauled him out by his collar, tossed him onto a heap of bricks, and exploded the adobe building. Still limping, Upton was passed by two men carrying a man hurt in an explosion. “Almost every store that was burned contained more or less powder and liquor,” he said, “and explosions were taking place every moment, some of which were tremendous.” A powerful north wind built, a freshening gale that sent sparks dancing and carried the blaze to three hundred houses. Feverish men axed the ground timbers of homes in the fire path and toppled them on their sides by pulling on ropes fastened to their roofs. Each time a building collapsed, flaming debris propelled down the side away from the fire torched neighboring structures. Slippingfrom one roof to another, the fire created its own bucket brigade of flame all the way down to the cove.
    All morning the conflagration raged along the new fingerlike wharves as