Buckets to Hoses: The Fire Department of The City of New York

Nicholas Constantinesco, John Paul Cashman, Alexander Cuniglio Junior Division Website Category

As a result of the Tweed Charter and the Draft Riots, unrest haunted the volunteer fire departments. The decision to transform the New York City volunteer fire department into a unified, paid, professional department resulted in a department that was more reliable and more beneficial to the people.

The idea came to us for what topic to do from Mr. and Mrs. Cashman. We knew we wanted to do something about the fire department. Mr. and Mrs. Cashman suggested the changing of the volunteer fire department to paid. This was interesting to us because we have s general interest in the fire department. Then we did a little research and decided that this topic was perfect for us. We ended up participating in National History Day because our whole school participates and it is a project for our history class.

We found our sources in many ways such as getting interviews, going to museums, finding websites that had information that was helpful to us, and going to find old newspapers from the time of our topic from the microfilm collection at the Bryant Park

and the Grand Army Plaza libraries. Our most valuable source was a dissertation made by Donald J. Cannon. This has everything there is to know on the switch to a paid department. Also on every page there are at least five footnotes with sources in all of them.

Our ideas on our topic changed as we did our research. This happened because we understood the turning points of the Fire Department of The City of New York. The more research we did made the topic make more sense overtime because of the more in depth information we found. The dissertation source helped us tremendously in understanding the topic more, because of research collected by a historian who studied our topic for many years of his life.

We decided which information would be included in our project by determining which information had the most important information. We wanted detail, but not too much. The dissertation was used a lot in our project. We put our entry together by writing annotations with much detail and based each entry on what we found. Each entry included a brief summary of what we found and wrote in the annotations.

Some problems we overcame were allocating research tasks, and where we were going to find sources. We overcame the problem of finding our 500+ page dissertation. The man who wrote the dissertation had died a few years ago and we thought we would never find the information, but we did. Other then this, we did well overcoming setbacks. This topic is very important to study because it saved many lives as well as prevented many deaths, and led to a very complex and efficient system that eventually became the model for the world. This has been a valuable learning experience because we were able to understand how the very brave people that protect us, got their jobs and it gave us a greater appreciation for those services.

The conclusions we have drawn are: The decision to transform New York City volunteer fire department into a unified, paid, professional department resulted in a department that was more reliable and more beneficial to the people.