So New York shot up. In 1890, the tallest building reached 18 storeys. By 1899, the Park Row Building stretched to 31 stories, and in 1908, the Singer Building soared even higher to 41 stories. Vertical expansion allowed the city to create more residential and commercial space, but that space needed to be heated, powered, and watered.
The New York Steam Company
To solve this, New York turned to district heating, an invention of Birdsill Holly (1820–94), a self-made man from Lockport, New York. Holly understood the problems of nineteenth century cities deeply. As urban populations swelled, fire risk became catastrophic: large parts of Manhattan would be destroyed in three great fires between 1776 and 1845. Early hand-pumped fire engines could deliver only 30 gallons of water per minute. Among Holly’s earliest patents were water pumps such as an ‘elliptical rotary pump’ – the precursor for his steam-powered fire engine in 1856.
His ‘Holly System of Direct Water Supply and Fire Protection for Cities, Towns and Villages’ provided a constant supply of water at pressure to both homes and fire hydrants, lowering costs and removing the need for reservoirs and standpipes. It was so successful that 23 other cities copied it, without crediting Holly, and were later forced by the U.S. Supreme Court to pay him damages. In the 1870s, he began work on a skyscraper project in Niagara Falls, which he then took to Long Island, suggesting that overcrowding could be improved by building upward. Mocked as ‘the farmer from the west’, he abandoned the project altogether and went home to Lockport.
Holly returned to plumbing. Drawing from his research in steam-powered pumps, pipework, and urban density, he began to create plans for a district-level heating system. If he could distribute steam to buildings as he had water, then multiple buildings could be heated by a single boiler, reducing fire risk and centralizing heating logistics. He began by running steam through one and a half inch pipes, later upgraded to three inch pipes supported by wooden trenches insulated with asbestos. The steam would be produced in a boiler in his basement at 31 Chestnut Street and passed across his garden into the houses of his neighbors.
By 1877, he launched the first practical district-scale test of his system. Over the course of the year, the network was extended to the surrounding area as Holly ironed out the problems and registered customers. Each stage necessitated new inventions: valves used to draw steam off the mains, regulators to stabilize pressure, steam traps to handle condensation, brackets to handle the thermal expansion of the pipes, and meters to measure the flow rate and bill customers accordingly.