On January 9, 1912, just after 5 a.m., Philip O’Brien, an employee at the Café Savarin restaurant in the Equitable Life Building, lit the gas for a stove in his small office at 12 Pine Street, on the corner of Broadway. That’s all it took to take down the formidable building in only a few hours. Completed on May 1, 1870, the eight-story Equitable Building at 120 Broadway was considered the first skyscraper in New York City (it held the record for 14 years as the world’s tallest building at 130 feet). It also featured the first passenger elevators in the city (Otis hydraulic elevators). The building occupied a site that had once been a tulip garden (1600s), a public pleasure garden with fruit trees called Vauxhall Garden (late 1700s), the National Hotel (early 1800s), and a shop famous for its French cordials and confections (1800s).

The building was home to some of the most well established banking, insurance, and law offices of the Gilded Age, such as the Hanover Fire Insurance Company, Mercantile Trust Company, Union Pacific, and the exclusive Lawyer’s Club. The main tenant and owner was the Equitable Life Assurance Society; hence, the building was often called the Equitable Building or the Equitable Life Building. In the basement of the Equitable Building, where Kaiser the cat worked as head mouser, safe boxes and vaults were filled with several billion dollars’ worth of securities, stocks, and bonds.

The Café Savarin, which opened in 1888, occupied all eight floors of the Equitable Building. Philip O’Brien’s office — described more like a small booth — was in the basement among the vaults and a receiving room for supplies. Not too far away were the steam elevators and dumb waiters that opened at each floor. The basement was also a favorite hunting ground for Kaiser, a black and white cat that had been on rat patrol at the Equitable Building since about 1907.

On this morning, Philip O’Brien must have been distracted, because he admitted to throwing the still-lit match in the garbage. Less than 20 minutes later, his office was engulfed in flames. As Philip and other employees tried to extinguish the flames, the fire spread to the elevators and dumb waiters, giving it access to the entire Equitable Building. As the fire raged inside, the winds were gusting up to 68 miles an hour outside, making the sub-freezing temperatures even colder. At 5:34 in the morning, the first fire alarm was pulled at Box 24 on the corner of Pine and Nassau streets. At 5:55, Deputy Chief John Binns transmitted second and third alarms. This brought Chief of Department John Kenlon and Fire Commissioner Joseph Johnson to the scene.

With the fire raging out of control, Brooklyn fire companies were also called in to help – it was the first time in the history of the city’s fire department that Brooklyn responded to a Manhattan fire. Police Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo (who had resigned as fire commissioner shortly after the deadly Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911), ordered police officers to shut down the Brooklyn Bridge to allow the responding companies to get to the Equitable Building as fast as possible. At about 6 a.m., the first of six casualties occurred when three waiters of Cafe Savarin were trapped on the mansard roof after trying to escape to the top floor by elevator. Firefighters tried to rescue them, but the ladders were three stories too short. By the time the firefighters tried to rescue them with a rope-rifle shot from a neighboring building, the roof had begun to collapse. The trapped men jumped to their deaths onto Cedar Street. Fire Battalion Chief William Walsh and Captain Charles Bass of Engine 4 were also killed in the fire when the building caved in while they were doing a search on the fourth floor. Fireman James G. Brown of Ladder 1, who was with Walsh and Bass, survived after being hurled through a door into another wing of the building by the air pressure of the collapse. His efforts to retrieve Walsh and Bass from the building failed, not for lack of desperately trying.

At the time of the collapse, William Giblin, the president of the Mercantile Deposit Company, a clerk, and a watchman became trapped while searching for important documents in a massive vault. Giblin and the clerk were rescued from the basement two hours later, when firefighters were finally able to hack through the two-inch steel bars in the windows. The watchman did not survive. As the morning wore on, the temperatures dropped even more. Soon Broadway and nearby streets were coated with layers of ice, hoses were frozen solid, fire apparatus were jammed, and the firemen were covered in icicles. By the time the fire was finally contained at 9:30 a.m., the Equitable Building was an ice-covered tomb in ruins. Four days after the Equitable fire started, workers were finally able to crack through the ice and search for the body of Battalion Chief Walsh. It took many hours to free his frozen corpse from the ruins. The following day, the body of watchman William Campion, his hand still frozen to an iron bar on a window, was carefully removed from the cellar.

On January 25, 16 days after the fire started, workmen who were trying to salvage the contents of the cellar vaults and safe boxes found a “sad wreck of a cat” in the front part of the lower floor. Kaiser, who apparently had more than nine lives, had miraculously survived the conflagration. She was weak and hungry, and grateful for the warm saucer of milk and beef chop that they gave her. For hours the men tried to lure Kaiser out of the building, but she wouldn’t budge from her charge. Even as one portion of the building after another collapsed or was demolished, she refused to leave. She simply moved from one corner to another until at last, there was nowhere left to hide. Eventually, the men had to force her into a crate and carry her out of the building she had called home for the past five years. Miss Edna Blanchard Lewis, a pioneer female insurance broker (she was called “the only woman insurance broker in the world”), reportedly received permission to adopt the cat and take her home to Morningside Heights. Kaiser—renamed Lucky—lived out the rest of her nine lives in style.

Kaiser the cat wasn’t the only animal that had survived the fire. A black guinea pig later named Miss Bacillus was also discovered during the salvage operation. Somehow, the poor guinea pig had survived 16 days in the extreme cold, imprisoned in a small cage without any food or water. Miss Bacillus had been brought to the Equitable Life Building by Dr. A.S. Wolf, who had an office on the third floor of the Pine Street side of the building. Dr. Wolf was reportedly conducting some “experiments” with the guinea pig for medical insurance purposes. Although this part of the building had not been destroyed by the fire, the office had been completely damaged by water and ice, and so no one thought to look in the room for survivors, human or otherwise. It wasn’t until Dr. Wolf heard a very faint squeak while recovering personal items from his office that the guinea pig was discovered.

Dr. Wolf let the guinea pig out of her cage, and she immediately scampered across the office to where he stored her food. When he brought her back outside, hundreds of people who were waiting their turn to go into the building to retrieve their contents from the safe deposit boxes gathered around the cage in awe. Dr. Wolf reportedly gave his guinea pig to Henry W. Ward of Washington, D.C., whose young son was mourning the recent loss of his pet guinea pig. In March 1912, Miss Bacillus and Kaiser shared the spotlight at the Woman’s Industrial Exhibition.

In 1913, a new 36-story Equitable Life Building was constructed on the site. Noting its fireproof elevator shafts and doors, the president of the contractors said that “the new Equitable Building will be the nearest to an absolutely fireproof building in the world.”