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A fireplace adds a lot of beauty to your Little Germany, NY home. Fireplaces are an excellent place to curl up with a good book, to spend some quality time with your loved ones, and just to sit back and relax while enjoying the warm glow (especially when the cold winter temperatures roll in!) However, once the fire has gone out and the embers have been extinguished, many property owners fail to recognize the importance of fireplace cleaning, or they realize but are unaware of how difficult it is.
Though they’re beautiful when they’re burning, fires leave behind a lot of debris, such as soot, ash, and creosote. Cleaning up the mess can be, well, messy. Plus (and more importantly), properly removing all of the waste that fires create is essential to maintain the efficiency of the structure, as well as your safety. How can you avoid the hassle that’s involved with cleaning a fireplace and ensure that the job is done right? – By hiring a reputable fireplace cleaning company!
Vacuuming, dusting, sweeping; there are a lot of cleaning jobs around the house that you can easily do on your own, but there’s one that’s better left in the hands of a professional: fireplace cleaning. Why? Here’s a look at some of the top reasons why you should seriously consider hiring a reputable company to clean your fireplace.
Believe it or not, cleaning out a fireplace requires a lot of knowledge and experience. The byproducts of fire – especially creosote – can be extremely difficult to remove. A seasoned professional will know exactly how to tackle that built-up debris and will be able to effectively remove it from all of the components within your fireplace; the damper, the firebox, the doors, the screens, etc.
The Right Tools and Equipment
Cleaning out a fireplace requires a lot more than just a vacuum and some sudsy water. A reputable fireplace cleaning professional will have all of the necessary tools and equipment to get the job done the right way; state-of-the-art vacuums, cutting-edge brooms, advanced solvents, and more. Sure, you could purchase these tools and supplies on your own, but do you know exactly what you’ll need or how to use them?
Greater Safety
Properly cleaning out a fireplace is vital for your safety. If the debris isn’t effectively removed, there’s a chance that the blaze will end up burning far beyond your fireplace; it could quickly engulf your entire home! Creosote, a byproduct of combustion, is highly flammable. Every time you use your fireplace, this sticky substance collects within all of the interior components, including the bricks, the damper, the doors, and even the screens. Creosote is a hard, sticky substance and it can be extremely difficult to remove on your own. To ensure the safety of your home and family, having a professional do the job is definitely in your best interest.
Improved Aesthetic Appeal
Dirty bricks, built-up ash, and soot; dirt and debris detract from the visual appeal of your fireplace. A professional will offer a range of services, such as fireplace brick cleaning, vacuuming, sweeping, dusting, and more. These services will restore the beauty of your fireplace so you can continue to enjoy its aesthetic qualities.
Savings
A lot of Little Germany NY homeowners assume that professional fireplace chimney cleaning costs will be more than they want to spend; hence the reason many people end up trying to DIY this all-important job. However, the truth is, cleaning a fireplace yourself can actually cost you a lot more than hiring a professional fireplace cleaning service.
Cleaning a fireplace requires numerous tools and supplies, the cost of which can be pretty high. Plus, if you damage the fireplace or you fail to properly clean it and a fire starts, the repairs can be exorbitant. Given all of these factors, hiring a professional will actually end up saving you money in the long run.
Ease
Between the setup, actually cleaning the fireplace, and then cleaning up after you’ve finished the job, fireplace cleaning can take several hours; not to mention the fact that it can be a very cumbersome task. If you aren’t keen on the idea of spending a day off covered in soot and ash and tidying up a huge mess, you should definitely hire a pro to clean your fireplace for you!
Peace of Mind
Given the money you’ll save, the ease, the improved safety, and the overall better results you’ll receive, when you hire a professional fireplace cleaner, you’ll have peace of mind knowing that the job will be done the right way.
If you live in the Little Germany, NY area and you’re looking for a professional fireplace cleaner, contact Ageless Chimney! With more than a decade of experience, our fully licensed, insured, bonded, and Better Business Bureau accredited company offers a full range of fireplace cleaning services and provides outstanding results. In fact, our long-time clients consider us the best fireplace cleaner in New York County, and that’s a title that we’re really proud of.
At Ageless Chimney, customer satisfaction is our top priority. Our highly trained technicians will go to great lengths to ensure that all of your needs are met. When you hire us to clean your fireplace, you can have complete confidence knowing that we’ll exceed your expectations.
Call 516-795-1313 today to learn more about our fireplace cleaning services, request a free estimate, or schedule an appointment! You can count on us to restore your fireplace’s beauty, functionality, and safety.
Little Germany, known in German as Kleindeutschland and Deutschländle and called Dutchtown by contemporary non-Germans, was a German immigrant neighborhood on the Lower East Side and East Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. The demography of the neighborhood began to change in the late 19th century, as non-German immigrants settled in the area. A steady decline of Germans among the population was accelerated in 1904, when the General Slocum decimated the social core of the population with the loss of more than 1,000 lives.
Beginning in the 1840s, large numbers of German immigrants entering the United States provided a constant population influx for Little Germany. In the 1850s alone, 800,000 Germans passed through New York. By 1855 New York had the third largest German population of any city in the world, outranked only by Berlin and Vienna. The German immigrants differed from others in that they usually were educated and had marketable skills in crafts. More than half of the era’s bakers and cabinet makers were Germans or of German origin, and many Germans also worked in the construction business. Educated Germans such as Joseph Wedemeyer, Oswald Ottendorfer and Friedrich Sorge were important players in the creation and growth of trade unions, and many Germans and their Vereine (German-American clubs) were also often politically active. Oswald Ottendorfer who was the owner-editor of the Staats-Zeitung, New York’s largest German-language newspaper, was among the wealthiest and most socially prominent German-Americans in the city. He also became the undisputed leader of the newly important German Democracy, which would help Fernando Wood recapture the mayor’s office in 1861 and elect Godfrey Gunther as mayor in 1863.
At the time, Germans tended to cluster more than other immigrants, such as the Irish, and in fact those from particular German states preferred to live together. This choice of living in wards with those from the same region was perhaps the most distinct and overlooked feature of Kleindeutschland. For instance the Prussians, who by 1880 accounted for nearly one-third of the city’s German-born population, were most heavily concentrated in the city’s Tenth Ward. Germans from Hessen-Nassau tended to live in the Thirteenth Ward in the 1860s and in the ensuing decades moved northward to the borders of the Eleventh and Seventeenth Wards. Germans from Baden by the 1880s tended to favor living in the Thirteenth Ward, and Württembergers began by the 1860s to migrate northward into the Seventeenth Ward. The Bavarians (including Palatines from the Palatinate region of western Germany on the Rhine River, which was subject to the King of Bavaria), the largest group of German immigrants in the city by 1860, were distributed evenly in each German ward except the Prussian Tenth. Aside from the small group of Hanoverians, who had a strong sense of self-segregation forming their own “Little Hanover” in the Thirteenth Ward, the Bavarians displayed the strongest regional bias, mainly toward Prussians: at all times the most distinctive characteristic of their settlement pattern remained that they would be found wherever the Prussians were fewest.
In 1845, Little Germany was already the largest German-American neighborhood in New York; by 1855, its German population had more than quadrupled, displacing the American-born workers who had first moved into the neighborhood’s new housing, and at the beginning of the 20th century, it was home to almost 50,000 people. From a core in the riverside 11th Ward, it expanded to encompass most of the 10th, 13th, and 17th Wards, the same area that later became known as the Jewish Lower East Side. Tompkins Square Park, in what is now known as Alphabet City, was an important public space that the Germans called the Weisse Garten. There were beer gardens, sport clubs, libraries, choirs, shooting clubs, German theatres, German schools, German churches, and German synagogues. A large number of factories and small workshops operated in the neighborhood, initially in the interiors of blocks, reached by alleyways. There were major commercial streets including department stores. Stanley Nadel quotes a description of the neighborhood at its peak in the 1870s:
At the beginning of the ’70s, after a decade of continuously rising immigration, Kleindeutschland was in its fullest bloom. Kleindeutschland, called Dutchtown by the Irish, consisted of 400 blocks formed by some six avenues and nearly forty streets. Tompkins Square formed pretty much the center. Avenue B, occasionally called the German Broadway, was the commercial artery. Each basement was a workshop, every first floor was a store, and the partially roofed sidewalks were markets for goods of all sorts. Avenue A was the street for beer halls, oyster saloons and groceries. The Bowery was the western border (anything further west was totally foreign), but it was also the amusement and loafing district. There all the artistic treats, from classical drama to puppet comedies, were available.