Less than a week after British troops marched into New York in September 1776, a quarter of the city they had just captured went up in flames — and 250 years later, no one agrees who lit it.
The blaze broke out after midnight on September 21, near Whitehall Slip at Manhattan’s southern tip. According to an eyewitness, a prisoner named John Joseph Henry, it started in the Fighting Cocks Tavern. Dry weather, strong winds, and tightly packed wooden buildings did the rest, and by the time a shift in the wind stopped the flames, 400 to 1,000 buildings were gone.
Among the losses was the original Trinity Church. A block away, St. Paul’s Chapel survived, as it would again survive the collapse of the World Trade Center 225 years later, in the same month.
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