SYMHC Classics: Iroquois Theater Fire

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Today is the anniversary of the Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago, which took place one hundred and twenty years ago on December thirtieth, nineteen oh three. Fires tend to be some of the most devastating disasters that we talk about on the show, and this is one of the most devastating fires. But it was also one of the most requested episodes we had ever done at the time we recorded it. This originally came out December eighth, twenty fourteen. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Polly Pryme. Today we have a listener request by everyone. It certainly seems that way, it feels that way. It's something people have been asking us to do an episode on since we joined the podcast. And then next week I asked on our Facebook page for events specifically that people would like to hear about because our listener ideas list is about eighty percent people and Carmen, Carol and Aisha all asked to hear about this. I also want to give a special shout out to Aisha and I hope I'm saying your name correctly. Ayisha went through and answered so many people who asked about episodes that we actually already have. After I had like clocked out for the weekend, I came to work on Monday morning, and when I started plowing through that thread again, there were all these answers that it was great. And I will thank her too because I was away on vacation at the time, so she covered yes both us very kindly. That was awesome. So if you go to the movies today anywhere in the developed world, there's going to be an announcement before the feature reminding you to look for your nearest exit. If you like movies at all, you've probably heard it so many times that you don't really even think about it anymore. You probably also don't need to be reminded that it might be behind you, and you probably also just take for granted that if there's an emergency, you can push on the door and it will open. That's pretty standard in most Yeah, it's pretty movie theater standard business. Now. Not so in nineteen oh three, when Chicago's Iroquois Theater, which had only been opened for five weeks, caught fire and killed more than six hundred people, So he alert, this is not a peppy episode. No, And if you already feel depressed, so many people have asked us to talk about this, so so, so many. So, uh, if you're angry at another Dead women and Children's story, blame them. I don't know. You can maybe come back to this one later when you're in a lighter mood, and it will be quite so impactful on your your well being. Yeah, and I personally have been trying to stick with more hopeful story since we're heading into the holiday season, and this is oddly even more appropriate because it happened during the holiday season. Yeah. So yeah, we'll make great efforts to do peppier ones in the next the next several episodes at least. So. The Iroquois Theater on Randolph Street in Chicago was, as Tracy said, just a moment ago nearly knew when it burned. It opened on November twenty third of nineteen oh three, and it was six stories tall and described by Eddie Foy, who was on stage for its last performance, as quote one of the finest that had yet been built in this country. A palace of marble and plate glass, plush, and mahogany and gilding. Its foyer was immense. It had these sixty foot ceilings and a grand staircase on either side, and then the backstage accommodations for the performers and the orchestra were similarly very well appointed. It was also supposed to be entirely fireproof, and as we've talked about in past episodes, including the Woman on the Grove, park In, fire was a really huge threat to hotels and other public buildings. Various architects, planners, and builders tried their hand at coming up with a way to build a fireproof building. Theater fires in particular, had a huge potential for catastrophe, so being fireproof was a really big deal. And in addition to its construction, there was an asbestos curtain that was supposed to protect the audience from any kind of fire that started on the stage. Chicago's building commissioner, George Williams and its fire inspector Ed Laughlin called it quote fireproof beyond all doubt, but not everyone was so convinced as that. William Clendon, in the editor of Fireproof Magazine, had inspected the Iroquois Theater that summer before it opened and actually found it woefully lacking. Among his points, there was no draft to draw fire up into the loft instead of allowing it to spread out into the audio. There were exposed reinforcements around the prosenium arch, there was too much wood trim everywhere. There was also no fire alarm, no standpipe, and no sprinkler over the stage. So while the building itself was widely touted as being fireproof, if a fire did start, there was all kinds of completely flammable stuff inside of it, and a fire was very likely to spread unchecked without a way to either summon the fire department from on the property or control the fire until help arrived. At full capacity, the theater was supposed to seat one thousand, seven hundred and twenty four people, but December thirtieth of nineteen oh three was a particularly busy day. School was still out for Christmas break and the theater had been packed with nineteen hundred people in a standing room only show, although some reports put the number even higher than that, and unfortunately nearly all of them were children and their mother. The show that day was a musical, and it was called Mister Bluebeard. It starred vaudeville comedian Eddie Foy in drag as the role of Sister Anne, and he was backed up with a troop of five hundred along with a full orchestra. This play was an adaptation of Grim's Fairy Tales that had originally opened on Drury Lane in London, and it was touring with all the original props and scenery and a lot of the original cast. And you may wonder how a play about blue Beard would be okay for children, And in this version all of Bluebeard's murdered wives are restored to life, and like many musicals at the time, it was mostly a framing device for a bunch of songs, so it focused less on the actual story of blue Beard and his murderous spreeze. As you know if you've ever been in a play, stage lights are really really hot. And in the second act, eight couples took the stage for a number called in the Pale Moonlight, and about three fifteen in the afternoon, one of the painted canvas backdrops caught fire. It was in the vicinity of a spotlight. There are various explanations for exactly what happened. One is that the backdrop brushed against a reflector of the spotlight, which was extremely hot. Another is that it actually blew blue a fuse. Another is that just something went wrong and a spark shot out. Regardless, this oil paint covered canvas backdrop started to smolder, and a stage hand named William mcmollin saw it happen and actually tried to put it out with his hands like you would hit out something small that was smoldering, but he couldn't reach it from the catwalk where he was standing. Also on hand was an on site firefighter who tried to put the fire out with two tubes of a product called kill Fires. This was according to an advertisement in the Los Angeles Herald the following year. Quote a dry compound in a tin tube and weighs less than three pounds, so its primary component was bicarbonate of soda baking soda. And it probably would have done fine for the task of putting out a grease fire in a kitchen, but on the vertical surface of a burning oil paint covered canvas, it was not sufficient to do the job at all, and the fire started to spread. Yeah, it was basically meant to smother a fire out and no falling off of it. Yeah, there was literally no way to do that on a vertical hanging surface. So at first the audience didn't know anything was wrong because the fire, as fire generally does, climbed upwards, and the first things that really caught were everything in the fly space above the stage. This was full of curtains and painted canvas backdrops and other scenery that was suspended above the stage area. But the audience's lack of awareness about the situation changed rather quickly as the various flies and curtains caught fire and started to fall, still burning, onto the stage. So things are going to become pretty horrifying in a minute. And before they do, let's take a brief word from a sponsor that sounds grand. What kind of brace ra impact. As soon as burning scenery started to fall onto the stage, the actors, i mean some of them, continued on in their roles and some of them really started to panic. People in the audience also started to panic, and Eddie Foy, who'd been in his dressing room when the fire started, ran out to find out what the commotion was. He had actually brought one of his children, a little boy named Brian, to the show, and since there weren't any of seats available, he'd let Brian sit in one of the wings. When Foy saw what was happening, the first thing that he did was find his son and give him to a stage hand to try to keep it safe, and then he ran downstage to try to calm the audience. He told them not to get too excited, that everything was under control. It became pretty clear quickly that it wasn't actually under control, because burning curtains started falling onto the stage at his feet. At this point, he yelled at the stage manager to drop the asbestos curtain, but that curtain got snagged on a light fixture and it jammed part way down its track. Boy stayed on the stage. He really did his best to calm the audience, and while the people in front who could see and hear him, did try, or did at least seemed to try to take a more orderly, calm approach for the exits. At this point, the people in the balconies were already completely in a panic. The actors and dancers, completely terrified, fled the theater through the stage door. When they did, a huge blast of air came in through that door and forced the flames under the asbestos curtain come down part way, and now it was just sort of being drafted out underneath it into the audience. The events that should have allowed the inrushing air to escape through the roof were nailed shut. These were also supposed to contain fans to draw the air out, but those had never been finished. The result of this combination of fire and airflow was an enormous fireball, and it spread out over the heads of the people who were on the first floor of the theater, and according to reports, it actually brushed the balconies. Everything in the house that was flammable caught fire, and the audience started to flee for the doors. As the stage literally started to collapse, Foy looked up and saw that the asbestos curtain itself was now burning. It was basically too thin and it wasn't rein forced, so once the fire got to it, it literally fell apart. Boy's actions were really pretty heroic during all of this. He stayed on stage as long as he could, trying to encourage people to calmly seek safety, until finally the blinding smoke and terror for the safety of his own son sent him out the stage door as well, and he was reunited with his little boy outside. As he left, the cables holding the last of the flies and curtains in the loft gave way, and the whole burning mass of scenery fell to the stage, causing a second fireball to erpt through the house of the theater. The Iroquois Theater did indeed have a lot of exits, twenty seven of them in total, although there was one report that said there were thirty, with twenty seven of them locked, but some of them were actually obscured by drapes. Others have been blocked in an effort to keep people from getting into the show without buying a ticket, and those that could be opened by the audience used an unfamiliar design and people did not know how to get them open. They had kind of a weird, fiddly lever thing that would have been tricky and even under good circumstances, but by terrified people in a building filling with smoke, they were next to impossible. Also, just before we came in here I found a report that the actual doors leading from the balcony to those grand staircases had also been locked to try to keep the people in the balconies from getting to the better seats in the lower levels of the theater without paying for them, so as people tried to push their way out, the situation only got worse. Smoke filled the theater and no one could see, and there were also no emergency lights that would have helped guide people to the exits. Those who made it to the doors first were actually crushed against them by the people behind. People who fell while trying to reach safety were trampled to death. Casualties even continued outside the theater because the fires spread up the side of the building under the fire escapes, So people who had been in the balconies and actually managed to get out onto the fire escape saw that it was impassable and they tried to jump. A lot of them died when they landed, and later waves of people who jumped survived only because they landed on the bodies of the people who had died in the jump previously. Then that got even worse because the people jumped after them crushed the people who had initially survived their descent. And I need to break from this story. It's so awful. It's one of those things that sounds almost ridiculous in just the levels of horror that keep kind of layering on top of one another, it gets worse and worse. Yes, yeah, So we're going to take another brief pause or a word from a sponsor. So to get back to the Iroquois Theater fire. It was all over in about fifteen minutes. Because there was no fire alarm in the theater a state each hand had to run to the nearest fire station to summon help. Firefighters had the blaze extinguished within about half an hour. There wasn't really much left for them to do when they got there because the fire had burned up just about everything that was flammable. By that point. The people who had survived the crushing rush for the exits had all nearly died of smoke inhalation. Firefighters found piles of bodies up to ten deep at the exits and clogging all of the aisles. In total, five hundred and seventy five people died that day out of the nineteen hundred that were there, so that equates to about thirty percent of the audience. Nearly all of the victims were women and children, and thirty more people died of their injuries in the following weeks, and hundreds more were injured by the whole event. Most of those killed had been in the balconies. A very few people were almost miraculously pulled out from under the bodies of others, which had protected them from the smoke and the fire. The whole thing was obviously devastating to Chicago's families, with the overwhelming number of victims being moms and their children. Was the deadliest fire in Chicago history, far out pacing the Great Chicago Fire, which killed about two hundred and fifty. Was also the deadliest theater fire in United States history, and I think it's still also the largest single building fire death toll. The cast, having escaped through the stage door, was almost unscathed. The only fatality among the performers was a tightrope artist named Nellie Reid, who was supposed to be part of a flying ballet and had been in the loft above the stage when the fire started. She died of her burns a few days after the incident. When all of this happened, it was a huge scandal. Even though having twenty seven exits and an asbestos curtain and a non on site firefighter sounds like it's good from a fire safety standpoint. A whole series of inquests and investigations followed the tragedy, and every single one of them unearthed all kinds of problems in terms of safety and oversight. The Chicago Daily Tribune actually sponsored its own investigation, and it later published an enormous list of faults and wrongdoing. The theater itself had actually been in violation of fire code before its opening, but city officials got complimentary tickets and they looked the other way. In addition to all the problems we mentioned earlier, there were no hooks for taking down burning scenery, there were no fire extinguishers, and there was no training for the staff about what to do in the event of an emergency. Had all the proper codes been followed and had basic safety precautions been in place, many lives would have been saved. Yeah, this is a tragedy that a lot of times gets a lot of credit for revolutionizing fire safety, which in some aspects is true. But in other aspects there were actual elements of the fire code that would have saved lives and were not followed, and city inspectors did not do anything to prevent the theater from opening before those faults were fixed. Although the theater manager, and several Chicago public officials were indicted. None of them were ever charged. The owner of the theater was charged and convicted, but that charge was later reversed. The only person who ever did jail time in conjunction with this fire was a tavern keeper whose business had been used as a temporary morgue, and he was convicted of stealing from the dead. None of the victim's families received any sort of restitution, apart from one class action suit whose members each received seven hundred and fifty dollars. The mayor of Chicago at the time was Carter H. Harrison, and he was one of the people who was indicted after the fire. Afterward, he shut down more than one hundred and seventy theaters, churches, and other gathering places to have them reinspected. He also passed ordinances requiring that all theater doors be clearly marked and open outward in the direction that traffic would need to go in an emergency. And as devastating as this fire was, the building itself was actually mostly unharmed. It closed down, and it reopened a year later as the Colonial Theater. It was then torn down in nineteen twenty six to make room for the Oriental Theater. It is now the Gertrude Sea Ford Center for the Performing Arts. There's also a memorial to the disaster in Montroe's Cemetery in Chicago, and today, as Tracy mentioned at the top of the episode, just about everywhere has laws saying that exits have to be clearly marked and that you have to be able to see them from the inside, even if you can't get in from the outside. As I was working on the outline for this, I was reminded of the SS Sultana episode Yes and which people ignored safety to make extra money. I feel like we have had other episodes also about people ignoring safety to make extra money. I know there are definitely definitely episodes in the archives about people ignoring safety to make extra money. I would like the world to learn a lesson from this history and stop ignoring safety to make extra money. Yeah. I mean, it's one of those sort of horrible indicators of you know, that aspect of human nature that you will prioritize cash flow over doing the right thing. It's not our finest hour as people. No, thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the art. If you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. 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