Great Fire of London Pearson. Another monument marks the spot where the fire stopped: the Golden Boy of Pye Corner in Smithfield. According to the inscription, it was evidence of God's wrath on the City of London for the sin of gluttony that the fire started at Pudding Lane and stopped at Pye Corner. The Great Plague epidemic of 1665 is believed to have killed a sixth of London's inhabitants, or 80,000 people, and it is sometimes suggested that the fire saved lives in the long run by burning down so much unsanitary housing with their rats and their fleas which transmitted the plague,
Great Fire of New York (1776) Great Fire of New York (1776) The Great Fire of New York was a devastating fire that burned through the night of September 20, 1776, and into the morning of September 21, on the West Side of what then constituted New York City at the southern end of the island of Manhattan. It broke out in the early days of the military occupation of the city by British forces during the American Revolutionary War. The fire destroyed about one third of the city, while some unaffected parts of the city were plundered. Many people believed or assumed that one or