My family lives in a heavily-trafficked part of Brooklyn, and most nights you’ll hear the occasional whine of fire engine sirens through our living room window. But the torrent of sirens early on the morning of September 17 was enough to briefly rouse me from bed.

I found out later that day that a five-alarm fire involving more than 200 firefighters had ripped through a 150-year-old artists’ warehouse in the neighboring area of Red Hook. It was one of the biggest New York has experienced this year, and though no one was killed, the work of more than 500 artists may have been destroyed.

The Red Hook fire was a tragedy for New York’s already struggling artistic community, but it got me thinking about the state of urban fires in the US today. As long as cities have existed, fires have been a threat. Rome famously burned to the ground in 64 CE — though not, as was long assumed, at the hands of the Emperor Nero — while the diarist Samuel Pepys described how “even the very stones of churches” burned in London’s Great Fire of 1666.

Here in the US, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 consumed 3.3 square miles of the city, and left 100,000 people homeless. As late as the 1970s, the Bronx in New York was for a time averaging as many as two fires per hour, part of an endless conflagration that ultimately destroyed 80 percent of the borough’s housing over the course of the decade.

As the Red Hook disaster shows, fire is still a threat, especially to older buildings. But beneath the sound of those sirens is a story of underappreciated progress toward ever greater safety. Compared with 1980, the........

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