medal for
saving the life of a woman at the disastrous fire
in the old "World" building, on January 31, 1882.
The ladder upon which he stood was too short.
Riding upon the topmost rung, he bade the woman
jump, and caught and held her as she fell.]

Seventeen years ago the collapse of a Broadway building during a fire
convinced the community that stone pillars were unsafe as supports.
The fire was in the basement, and the firemen had turned the hose on.
When the water struck the hot granite columns, they cracked and fell,
and the building fell with them. There were upon the roof at the time
a dozen men of the crew of Truck Company No. 1, chopping holes for
smoke-vents. The majority clung to the parapet, and hung there till
rescued. Two went down into the furnace from which the flames shot up
twenty feet when the roof broke. One, Fireman Thomas J. Dougherty, was
a wearer of the Bennett medal, too. His foreman answers on parade-day,
when his name is called, that he "died on the field of duty." These,
at all events, did not die in vain. Stone columns are not now used as
supports for buildings in New York.

So one might go on quoting the perils of the firemen as so many steps
forward for the better protection of the rest of us. It was the
burning of the St. George Flats, and more recently of the Manhattan
Bank, in which a dozen men were disabled, that stamped the average
fire-proof construction as faulty and largely delusive. One might even
go further, and say that the fireman's risk increases in the ratio of
our progress or convenience. The water-tanks came with the very high
buildings, which in themselves offer problems to the fire-fighters
that have not yet been solved. The very air-shafts that were hailed as
the first advance in tenement-house building added enormously to the
fireman's work and risk, as well as to the risk of every one dwelling
under their roofs, by acting as so many huge chimneys that carried the
fire to the windows opening upon them in every story. More than half
of all the fires in New York occur in tenement houses. When the
Tenement House Commission of 1894 sat in this city, considering means
of making them safer and better, it received the most practical help
and advice from the firemen, especially from Chief Bresnan, whose
death occurred only a few days after he had testified as a witness.
The recommend