Great Baltimore Fire - Legacy

Legacy

As a result of the fire a city building code was adopted. Public pressure, coupled with demands of companies insuring the newly re-built buildings, spurred the effort. The process took seventeen nights of hearings and multiple city council reviews.

A national standard for fire hydrant and hose connections was adopted by the National Fire Protection Association. However, inertia remained, and conversion was slow; it still remains incomplete. One hundred years after the Baltimore Fire, only 18 of the 48 most populous U.S. cities were reported to have installed national standard fire hydrants. Hose incompatibility contributed to the Oakland Firestorm of 1991: although the standard hose coupling has a diameter of 2.5 inches (64 mm), Oakland's hydrants had 3-inch (76 mm) couplings.

H. L. Mencken survived the fire, but the offices of his newspaper, the Baltimore Herald, were destroyed. The Herald printed an edition the first night of the fire on the press of the Washington Post, in exchange for providing photographs to the Post, but could not continue this arrangement as the Post had a long-standing agreement with the Baltimore Evening News. For the next five weeks the Herald was printed nightly on the press of the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph and transported 100 miles (160 km) to Baltimore on a special train, provided free of charge by the B&O Railroad.

Mencken relates the fire and its aftermath in the penultimate chapter of Newspaper Days, the second volume of his autobiography. He writes, "When I came out of it at last I was a settled and indeed almost a middle-aged man, spavined by responsibility and aching in every sinew, but I went into it a boy, and it was the hot gas of youth that kept me going."

The fire is also memorialized in the folk song "Baltimore Fire." (Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers, Columbia Records 15509-D, May 6, 1929.)

Fire fire I heard the cry

From every breeze that passes by

All the world was one sad cry of pity

Strong men in anguish prayed

Calling out to the heavens for aid

While the fire in ruins was laid

Fair Baltimore the beautiful city

More recently, the Baltimore-based rock band J Roddy Walston and the Business memorialized the fire in "Nineteen Ought Four," on their album Hail Mega Boys.