store of Crandall, Aylsworth & Haskell at 218-224 North Los Angeles Street, was gutted and the store of the Pacific Crockery and Tinware Co. at No. 228 was "almost totally ruined" in a fierce blaze on May 28, 1898, when the fire department had to sound a general alarm, "calling every company in the department to the scene" for the first time in more than a year. The fire began in a pile of excelsior used in packing goods. Workers attempted to quench the blaze with a hose, but in vain, so an alarm was sent from a fire alarm call box on Requena Street. A contemporary account reported: ... the heat was so great that it was not possible for the firemen to enter the building [so] ... lines of hose were stretched to the tops of adjacent buildings, and wherever there was an opening through which water could be directed, a stream was poured into the burning structure. ... The large Babcock truck was placed directly in front of the building, and the aerial ladder was raised. On this two streams were placed, and they poured water into the two upper floors of the building, ... [and yet] the fire spread through the building until the whole interior was like a furnace ... Half an hour after the fire started[,] the part of the south wall which extended over the top of the building ... fell. Among the thousands of persons who blocked the streets in front of the building, the cry went up that there was a fire company caught under that wall. Instantly there was a rush made of other firemen and scores of citizens in the place eager to render any assistance possible. The alarm was groundless, however, for the men who were working under the wall had seen it swaying and had stepped back just in time to escape being crushed under the falling mass of bricks. The owner of the Pacific Crockery and Tinware Company next to the burning building refused to allow firemen to fight the blaze from the interior of his store, so the men had to retire. Then the north wall of the building collapsed and smashed through the roof of the Crockery and Tinware Company's store, "setting it on fire in fifty places." The wholesale wool house of S. Phillips caught ablaze, but the flames were extinguished. The stock