Multifamily property owners in the city were setting fires to their own buildings at a record rate, a report published 31 years ago this month showed.
City fire officials expected arsonists to burn down a record 9,500 properties in 1980 — that was up from 7,754 in 1979, and twice the number destroyed in 1977.
With the demand for rental apartments in struggling neighborhoods weak, landlords (mostly in Brooklyn and the Bronx) opted to illegally destroy their buildings in an effort to pocket the insurance money. Residential properties were targeted about 80 percent of the time.
“Arson will be a top priority,” said Charles Hynes, the city’s fire commissioner (and, since 1990, Brooklyn’s district attorney).
The impact on some neighborhoods was startling.
Between 1976 and 1977, for example, 1,140 multifamily properties were burned down in Bushwick alone. But 1980 was the turning point in the crisis, ending with 8,979 fires, fewer than anticipated. And the numbers fell in the following years. In 1984, for example, there were only 5,157 arsons citywide.
1930: MINI GOLF FILLS VACANT DOWNTOWN OFFICE SPACE
A miniature golf course known as Twelvetrees, one of the first putt-putt links constructed in a Lower Manhattan office building, opened 81 years ago this month. The 18-hole course at the now-demolished 35 Maiden Lane opened on the heels of a mini-golf craze that swept the country in the 1920s. But the course — which took its name from the building’s 12 supporting columns refashioned as oak trees — was reportedly the first installed in Lower Manhattan to fill vacant office space created by the Great Depression.
It wasn’t the only indoor course in Lower Manhattan. Another opened the same year in the Downtown Athletic Club, a newly constructed building at 19 West Street. In fact, entrepreneurs were opening so many mini-golf courses in office buildings that the Real Estate Board of New York got involved to keep costs down for building owners. At a meeting in January 1931, a REBNY official said the group had been able to keep insurance rates the same for buildings with a course, “provided it does not occupy more than 5,000 square feet.”
1902: FIRST STEEL-FRAME TOWER RAZED FOR GRAY LADY
Workers began what is considered to be the nation’s first demolition of a building constructed using the revolutionary steel-frame system 109 years ago this month, when they started dismantling the nine-story Pabst Hotel to make way for the New York Times headquarters.
Skeptics of the steel-frame engineering — which first came into use in the mid-1880s, leading to the proliferation of skyscrapers — thought buildings’ support structure would rust or weaken over time. “In the minds of a great many people the impression is firmly implanted that the steel frame will continue in use until a ‘skyscraper’ collapses in a pile of rubbish and a cloud of dust” as a result of corrosion, a writer in the Times wrote that year.
The deconstruction of the Pabst building at the intersection of 42nd Street, Broadway and Seventh Avenue gave developers the first chance to see the impact on a steel building over time. Upon taking it apart, they found there was very little change to the steel in the few years it was up.
The building — which had a hotel, restaurant and bar — opened in 1899 and was owned by the Pabst Brewing Company.
Adolph Ochs, then-publisher of the Times, bought the lease to the property and in 1904 opened the newspaper’s new headquarters, now known as One Times Square. That same year the square was renamed Times Square in honor of the paper, from Longacre Square.
Compiled by Adam Pincus