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| 1908 NYC Fireman |
It's been decades—no, make that at least half a century—since I heard the term "fire-plug." You have to be a native New Yorker of a certain age to know what that refers to, and of an even older age to actually still be alive and not on life support to use the term. It's a fire hydrant. Huh? Yep.
In one of those great succinct nuggets of information that you can find when you read enough newspapers, I learned why fire hydrants in NYC were once referred to as "fire-plugs" by a segment of the population that was dying out in the 1960s and '70s: those born toward the end of the 19th-century or early in the 20th-century.
On of the human fixtures that inhabited the family flower shop when I was growing up there in the '60s and early '70s was Barney Greene, a retired NYC Grade 3 detective who sat in the chair by the front desk for short spells as he gave himself something to do by walking around the neighborhood. Barney lived in a brownstone on 17th Street, between 2nd and 1st Avenues, with one of his other bachelor brothers. My father went to grammar school with Barney's younger brother Eugene.
Barney was always dressed in a three-piece suit with a fedora, that he didn't take off. He carried his Detective's Special .32 caliber revolver in a shoulder holster that I only ever saw once when he was putting himself back together after using the shop's bathroom.
He didn't talk much, but sometimes came out with some information about his time on the force. When he started the cops slept in the precinct houses, like the fireman still do today in the fire houses. I never knew where we was assigned, but when I had a delivery once to Southern Boulevard in the Bronx he told me that used to be a bad neighborhood, a cop was killed there.
When I made the delivery the neighborhood didn't look so hot then either. Everyone seemed to be hanging out on the stoops. But no one bothered me, and we seldom got deliveries for the Bronx. I sure didn't complain about that.
Barney talked a bit about Lieutenant Charles Becker, the only NYC policeman to be given a death sentence, executed in Sing Sing prison in 1915. It's a famous story from a long time ago. Whether Lieutenant Becker was framed for the murder of the gambler Herman Rosenthal in Times Square in 1912 has always kept the story alive. I don't remember if Barney ever weighed in on the guilt or innocence.
It might have been from Barney that I first heard the term "fire-plug" to mean a fire hydrant. I thought nothing of it, or why the hydrant might be called a "fire-plug." Like most definitions, there is an origin, and this one was revealed when I read in a recent NYT story about sources of water to fight fires.
The above photo is from a larger piece about how hydrants are not the best source of water to fight the kind of fires that recently engulfed L.A. County.
Hydrants Weren't Designed for Wildfires
Above-ground fire hydrants have been around since the 1800s. Before the hydrants became common, firefighters often had to dig into the ground to reach wooden water mains to get water into their hoses. When the blaze was out, firefighters would then repair the water main with a "fire plug."
Imagine wooden water mains! Termites could close off your water supply. The mind boggles.
Fire-plug was the most commonly used reference to a fire hydrant, but not the only one. There was "Johnny pump," certainly a more colorful name. Where did that one come from?
The NYT article doesn't mention "Johnny pump" but the story got me thinking of that other term I learned, probably from Barney, as to what a fire hydrant might be called. And where does that name come from? Google to the rescue:
In 1830, John Giraud was one of the people credited with inventing the first fire hydrants. NYC firefighters nicknamed the hydrants "Johnny pumps."
Moving on from the sources of water to fight fires, Barney was also the person who I first heard use the term "shylock" every time he spotted Jack Schiff strolling through the Manhattan neighborhood of the flower shop at 18th Street and 3rd Avenue.
Jack Schiff was a money lender, a loan shark, a 6-for-5 guy, who if you borrowed $100 from you quickly owed $120 to pay off the debt. He was a shylock.
At the time, I didn't understand the pejorative term "shylock," stemming of course from Shakespeare's money lending character in The Merchant of Venice. We only did Macbeth and Hamlet in high school, and I didn't seek out any other Shakespeare works.
Jack Schiff didn't some into the flower shop because my father didn't borrow money from him. He borrowed money from someone at the Brooklyn Navy Yard where he worked in the Design Division when the shop needed funds to get a supply of flowers for an expected busy weekend.
The $100 he brought into the shop on Friday afternoons after work was returned as $120 on Monday to whomever my father borrowed the money from; 6-for-5.
There was someone else that a more sizable loan was secured from when my father thought be wanted to buy a bar, or for my short-lived college tuition needs. This was a fellow in a three-piece suit wearing a snap brimmed hat who came to the shop weekly who my Great-Uncle Pete took money out of the register to pay. I don't remember how long it took to pay this fellow off, but he had an office that I once took money to.
Eventually, the fellow, whose name I don't remember, sent his college-age daughter to collect the money. She was a pleasant young girl who was home from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Eventually, no one came to collect anything.
In the mid '70s, the family business went out of business, and there was no more need for loan sharks.
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