I am poring through old issues of the New York Times. Having used key words like “4 killed,” I have now turned to “arson.”
Wow there were a lot of arsons in New York and New Jersey in these decades. (Of course the Times did not tend to report crime news from outside the metro area in those days,) Lots of deaths. Horrible stuff.
I seem to recall there was some sort of change in insurance law that was commonly held to be the root cause of these crimes. I have forgotten the details. Can anyone out there help me understand this phenomena?
This New York Times article suggests that it was more profitable for the landlords to burn down older buildings and collect the insurance proceeds than to rebuild them.
No matter how safe one tried being inside, the fires came. We noticed it slowly, with two-family homes and small apartment buildings emptying out, then stripped for pipes and wires, and finally torched — there was more money in insurance than rebuilding. Arsonists working for landlords would at least warn tenants of impending fires so they would not be asleep at home. Some people took no chances and slept with their clothes on.
There was also a documentary called “Decade of Fire” about this period in the city’s history. Here is the New York Times review of it.
When I lived in Saskatoon in the '80s, we would get ABC/NBC/CBS from Detroit. Every Hallowe’en, we’d see local news stories warning kids about wearing light-coloured clothing and looking both ways before crossing the street so you don’t get hit by a car. Then we’d switch over to the Detroit news and their stories would be like “the fire department hopes that Devil’s Night fires don’t burn the city to the ground this year”.
There was a confluence of factors. Arson for profit was one, but there was also a deliberate reduction in firefighting resources in the lower socioeconomic class areas of the city. NYC contracted out to RAND to run a computer model on how to save money on city services. One of the outcomes of that model was to close fire companies in the poorest neighborhoods. Delayed responses to fires allowed them to do more damage, which helped the downfall of those neighborhoods. Neighborhood is going down the tubes, might as well burn down my building and let the insurance company write a check for it. It turned into a pretty substantial death spiral, and is now a case study for what not to do (still gnored by plenty of municipal leaders).
A great book about the whole ordeal :
The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City–and Determined the Future of Cities by Joe Flood
Isn’t that usually the case when socioeconomic factors weigh in heavily on a government decision? Racism under the mask of “well, the computer said it was a good idea.”
The book goes into a lot of detail on the racism aspect, as well as some shenanigans on forced gentrification type urban renewal as I recall (it’s been about 10 years since I last read the book). The whole affair was a travesty from start to finish.
Since I used to live in Hoboken, NJ, I got to hear some of the history of arson from the 70s/80s. In Hoboken, developers identified buildings that they wanted to buy to redevelop into more upscale/luxury condos. If people living in the building didn’t want to move out, they were often burned out. There is a documentary about that time called “Delivered Vacant”. Link is here: https://www.offthegridproductions.com/film/delivered-vacant/
There was a consistent pattern of arson investigations in the northeast during the 70s and 80s and beyond. When a deadly fire occurred an immigrant was always blamed.
My father died in this incident. (It would have made more headlines, had John Lennon not been murdered in NYC, four days later).
It’s an interesting story – an unusual case of a judge overturning a jury’s verdict. We’ll never know for sure if Marin (the Guatemalan immigrant) caused it, but it looks to me like the judge was probably correct – that there wasn’t sufficient evidence to convict him.
I ended up with a career (such as it is) that basically focuses on helping US citizens better appreciate Latin America and its people (including those who have immigrated here.) Not because of the fire…but who knows the ways of karma.
Excuse my personal interjection. Back to the thread topic: The Stouffers fire did help lead to some improvements in flammable carpet materials, lighted exits in meeting rooms, and sprinkler systems, so that’s good.
It’s good that improvements were made but even now inspectors who allow these conditions rarely face any consequences. You may recall the key evidence of a bottle of accelerant was never produced at trial. The determination that the fire was arson, started with an accelerant has never been well established and was based only on a hunch by a police inspector because the fire spread so quickly.