matthew goulish : lecture in the shape of a bridge collapsing


B: 6. delirium

In 1904 Coney Island's Dreamland amusement park opens with 17 public exhibitions including #14: Fighting the Flames - a 250 foot long, 100 foot deep building without a roof within which a square of a city has been built, showing houses and streets with a hotel in the foreground, and where four thousand firemen inhabit, permanently, this metropolitan "set", recruits from the fire departments of this and nearby cities who know their business thoroughly, and who wait in the wings of the synthetic block with four engines and hose wagons, an extension ladder truck, a water tower, an ambulance and a battalion chief's wagon.
An alarm rings; the men leap from their beds and slide down the brass poles; the hotel is on fire with people inside it, flames on the first floor cutting off their escape; more people throng the square, shouting and gesticulating; the engines arrive, then the water tower, hose wagons, extension ladder truck, the battalion chief, and the ambulance, which runs over a man.
The flames creep up to the next story, the inmates in the windows driven up by fire and smoke until they reach the top floor when an explosion is heard and the roof of the building falls in - yet the hysterical guests are saved, the fire put out, the audience satisfied, and the city block prepared for its next performance.
The choreographed spectacle says the city is this: an astronomical increase in the potential for disaster, narrowly exceeded by an equally astronomical ability to avert it.
In May, 1911, the lighting system that decorates the façade of Dreamland's exhibition #8: End of the World, short circuits, and sparks start a real fire, fanned by a strong sea wind.
Only weeks before, a superior fire-fighting apparatus has been installed, with new water mains added to the hydrants, but somehow the ducts have not been connected to the Atlantic, and as the real firefighters arrive, they find no more pressure in the system than in a garden hose.
The firefighters of Fighting the Flames are the first to desert their dormitories and the confines of Dreamland, and only the midget firefighters of exhibition #4: Lilliputia - confronted with the real thing after 2,500 false alarms - put up a real fight, saving a small piece of their city - the fire station. hear the waves strike the shore
In three hours Dreamland burns to the ground.

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