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wrenches, pry bars, ax handles … anything handy.” A champion of weaker men, he was a first-rate bare-knuckle boxer, withthe sloping shoulders of a powerful fighter toughened by a hundred street battles. “Now my strategy back in New York was to settle the conflict as fast as I could,” Broderick said. “I would pick out the biggest guy the other company had to offer and take him on one to one—that’s how I got this”—he ran the tip of his index finger along the long, thin line trailing under his beard. “I usually got beat by powerhouses like Mose Cutter, but I rallied my men each time.” Broderick lost to the strongest the other companies had to offer. His enemies grew to respect him for standing up to them and never giving up.
    Even to those who knew him best, Broderick remained a strange, extraordinary lone man who was rarely happy, often gloomy. Even in his youth he wore a savage scowl upon his face. Sawyer suspected the tough Irishman never smiled because he was in mourning. “He has no family left anywhere in the wide world,” he said. Broderick, born February 4, 1820, in Washington, D.C., was the son of an immigrant father, a gifted stonemason and ornamental worker in marble. His father had carved the huge marble columns and capitals for the east front of the Capitol Building and the Senate Chamber and finished the interior decorative work in 1834. Broderick’s family moved to New York, where his father became superintendent of a marble yard. His father, of feeble constitution, died two years later from his extreme labors. When Broderick’s mother passed away in 1843, he cared for his younger brother. A year later his brother died in a construction site explosion when a bombshell in Duval’s Foundry Yard accidentally burst.
    He grew up in the roughest quarter of New York City, the notorious lower Manhattan slum the Sixth Ward, which contained the Five Points District. For five years he served an apprenticeship to a stonecutter in a yard at Washington and Barron streets. He called it one of the most laborious mechanical trades pursued by man, “an occupation that from its nature devotes its followers to thought, but debars him from conversation. I am the son of an artisan and have been a machine … I am not proud of this. I am sorry it is true. I would that I could have enjoyed the pleasure of life in my boyhood days, but they were denied to me, to my sorrow.” He cut stone with a toothless, water-and-sand-driven, soft-iron gang saw in fifteen quarries on the East Side and on the East Aspetuck River. On tougher jobs, he used a saw-toothed implement with diamonds brazed into a blade that could slice through anything. With the help of well-placed charges of gunpowder, he carved huge blocks from the quarries. While serving at a minor post at the U.S. Custom Housein New York City, Broderick joined Number Thirty-four on Gouverneur Street, where he worked their side-stroke, piano-style engine (so named because of the shape of its water box). This early pumper had seven-inch cylinders, a five-inch stroke, and a gooseneck—a swivel-jointed tube in the discharge pipe that let him accurately direct a jet of water. When Broderick, widely admired for his leadership, was promoted on May 13, 1844, his new helmet emblem, shaped like a detective’s badge, was inscribed with the words “Foreman,” “34,” and “D. C. B.” arranged in a neat rectangle.
    “Goldilocks,” one of the Red Rovers’ young runners, was so brightly golden haired that Broderick joked, “We’ll never need boys with signal lights when he is forefront at the rope.”
    Under Broderick, the Red Rovers challenged Sawyer’s Fourteen to a “washing.” To lose at a washing was one of the worst catastrophes that could befall a volunteer fireman. To play water on a fire, the engines had to line up from the source of water to the fire, one engine pumping water into another, and so on down the line. If, in the process of transferring