NEW YORK CITY AND ITS FIRE DEPARTMENT.

NEW YORK CITY AND ITS FIRE DEPARTMENT.

In his message of January 1, 1905, Mayor McClellan thus speaks of the fire department of New York city; “The efficiency of the fire department has been largely increased during the year 1904, not only by the addition of 419 firemen, but also by the repair of an old fireboat, the building of a new one, and various improvements of that character. Precautions taken by the city government to prevent the recurrence of such a disaster as the Iroquois theatre fire in Chicago in December, 1903, have evidently been effective, for the insurance companies now recognise the diminished risk of such an event by reducing the rate of insurance in a marked degree. The most pressing need of this department at the present time, and of a part of the city, is the extension of the paid fire department system throughout the more thickly settled sections of the boroughs of Richmond and Queens.”

A woman and her two-year-old child were badly burned—the child possibly fatally—during a fire which swept the entire stairway of the fivestorv brick tenement house, 597 Amsterdam avenue, Manhattan, New York. The fire started at 2:30 a. m. on the ground floor at the foot of the stairs, a*’d the headway it gained pointed to_ incendiarism and the use of kerosense oil. The firemen and police made some fine rescues by their ladders and the fire escapes. Other tenants fled by the scuttle or by rigging up means of escape across the airshafts.