In itself, this is relatively good footage of a fire at a riding academy on Manhattan Island, and it also provides a revealing look at film-making in its era. With a running time of almost three and a half minutes, it's relatively long for a feature of its time and genre, and thus it allows you to see how the techniques for this kind of footage were developing. Most of all, this footage and its history demonstrate the competitive and opportunistic nature of the movie business at the time.
The most noticeable thing about the footage itself is the frequent use of panning as the camera surveys the aftermath of the fire. The panning is not always smooth, but they do seem to know how to use it to relatively good effect. The footage also contains a good variety of the kinds of sights that you would expect to see, given the situation.
This is the kind of movie that could not have been planned for, and it meant that the film-makers had to be ready to go upon receiving word of a fire or other such event. More than that, as film historian Charles Musser indicates in his notes to Kino's DVD collection of Edison movies, this is an example of footage that was later re-packaged and sold as footage from a different event entirely. As such, it is an early (and not entirely honest) example of stock footage, of a kind. So it is an interesting example of the practices of its era.