Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

IN CIVIL WAR TIME

61

and of every sinister quarter had moved in a body upon
Murray Hill. The overflow ran each way into Fortysecond Street, thronging the vacant corner lot where the
Bristol apartments afterward stood. I have since seen
many dense crowds at big fires, but none like this. It was
a crowd not merely of spectators but of participants, or
candidates for participation in whatever evil might be
done. They were there to burn, to plunder and rob, to
catch fugitive negro orphans, if possible, and kill them
on the spot.
The burning asylum lighted the entire neighborhood.
We could see from above not only the movements and
acts of the rioters, but at times the individual faces and
the expressions thereon. Some of the mob were struggling
to get nearer the front of the asylum where the firemen
were fighting like demons to do their duty, whatever their
sympathies; particularly to preserve the lines of hose
connection from the constant attempts to cut them. Now
and then a geyser spurted at one of the unguarded hydrants. There would be a stampede to avoid a ducking,
then cheers from the mob and jeers at the Harry Howard
men. A rioter in a tattered straw hat, perched on the coping of the reservoir terrace just opposite, chanced to look
up and espy some incautiously exposed head on our battlements. He yelled and pointed. A hundred faces were upturned, plain in the firelight. There were angry shouts
and shaking of fists in the air. We on the roof incontinently
drew back farther behind the merlons.
At midnight the throng had thinned. The roughs remaining tore boards from fences and built bonfires along
the sidewalk. Then came a new phase of our experience

as riot observers. We saw carriages driven rapidly up the
Avenue, to be stopped and surrounded at Forty-second
Street. There would be a brief altercation with the hackman; he would be made to descend from his box and open
the carriage-door; then a longer and evidently predatory