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Chicago
Death Trap
The
Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903 Nat
Brandt Introduction by Perry R. Duis and Cathlyn Schallhorn
February
2003 cloth, 0-8093-2490-3, $25.00 240
pages, 6 x 9, 48 illus. New in Paperback
“Chicago
Death Trap vividly
tells the story of a theater that wasn’t properly designed despite its
owner’s public claim that it was “absolutely fireproof.” So many
safety rules were willfully ignored that in retrospect it is not
surprising that the Iroquois disaster remains the deadliest fire in the
history of any American city. Brandt . . . deftly lays out the story of a
tragedy waiting to happen in a city with a corrupt government and greedy
businessmen. . . . In the one hundred years since the fire, the worldwide
horror and anger over the Iroquois calamity has faded away. But Brandt’s
carefully documented, readable account reminds us what all the shouting
was about.” —Chicago
Sun-Times
“This
chilling narrative provides a minute-by-minute chronicle of one of the
most physically and psychologically devastating disasters of the twentieth
century. . . . Packed with eyewitness testimony, this gripping account
takes on a sense of dreadful immediacy as theatergoers, players, rescue
workers, and victims' family members recount the grisly horrors of that
afternoon and its aftermath. This superior piece of historical
investigative journalism will keep readers turning the pages until the
bitter end.” —Booklist
“Journalist [Nat] Brandt has written a riveting narrative of a tragedy that affected not only Chicago but the entire world. Public libraries will want to consider this readable book for their disaster collections while academic libraries that collect Chicago materials will find it essential.” —Library Journal
“Nat
Brandt has unearthed a plethora of interesting, off-beat, and unusual
tales and facts that balance a methodical minute-by-minute account of the
most horrific building fire disaster in Chicago history. . . . The depth
of research Brandt brings to the topic is the best compilation of
historical material dealing with the fire and its subsequent hearings that
I have ever read.” —Richard Lindberg, author of Return to the Scene of the Crime: A Guide to Infamous Places in Chicago
“[F]ew
who pass through [the Ford Center for the Performing Arts Oriental Theater's]
doors realize that the building sits on the site of one of the most
horrific tragedies in American history: the Iroquois Theatre fire that
claimed the lives of six hundred and two people, over two-thirds of them
women and children, on the afternoon of December 30, 1903. As Nat
Brandt’s fascinating narrative reveals, this is a multilayered story
that illuminates many aspects of life in the city and on the stage.” —Perry R. Duis and Cathlyn Schallhorn, from the Introduction
On the afternoon of December 30, 1903, during a sold-out matinee performance, a fire broke out in Chicago’s Iroquois Theatre. In the short span of twenty minutes, more than six hundred people, two thirds of whom were women and children, were asphyxiated, burned, or trampled to death in a panicked mob’s failed attempt to escape. A century after the fire—the deadliest in American history—Nat Brandt provides the only detailed chronicle of this horrific event to assess not only the titanic tragedy of the fire itself but also the municipal corruption and greed that kindled the flames beforehand and the political cover-ups hidden in the smoke and ash afterwards.
Advertised
as “absolutely fireproof,” the Iroquois was Chicago’s most modern
playhouse when it opened in the fall of 1903. With the approval of the
city’s building department, theater developers Harry J. Powers and
William J. Davis opened the theater prematurely to take full advantage of
the holiday crowds, ignoring flagrant safety violations in the process.
During the matinee on this particular Wednesday, all 1,724 seats were
filled and an additional two hundred people were standing.
Midway
through the second act, a spark from a defective light ignited a drop
curtain and the blaze spread quickly to the scenery. Roof vents designed
to handle smoke and heat were sealed off, and the fire curtain snagged
before it could shield the audience from danger. A blast of gaseous fumes
shot across the auditorium from an open stage door and asphyxiated
hundreds of theatergoers almost instantly. Others were trampled or burned
to death in the panic that ensued as they struggled to escape through
locked exits, succeeding only in piling body upon body as the flames
closed in.
For
days afterward, Chicago mourned as relatives and friends searched
hospitals for missing
loved ones. The aftermath of the fire proved to be a study in the
miscarriage of justice. Despite overwhelming evidence that the building
was not complete, that fire safety laws were ignored, and that management
had deliberately sealed off exits during the performance, no one was ever
convicted or otherwise held accountable for the enormous loss of life.
Lavishly illustrated and featuring an introduction by Chicago historians Perry R. Duis and Cathlyn Schallhorn, Chicago Death Trap: The Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903 is rich with vivid details about this horrific disaster, captivatingly presented in human terms without losing sight of the broader historical context.
Veteran journalist Nat Brandt is the author of ten previous books, including The Man Who Tried to Burn New York and The Town That Started the Civil War. The former editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly, Brandt was also an editor for The New York Times and managing editor of American Heritage. He is the cocreator of the PBS television series Crucible of the Millennium, for which he also served as head of research.
Excerpts from Chicago Death Trap . . . “The
youth running the elevator to the top-floor dressing rooms, Robert Smith,
could not see and could hardly breathe as he guided the elevator up to the
sixth floor. He found one chorus girl there, then stopped at the fifth
floor to take on others. The smoke was so thick that he had to search for
the girls and then drag them into the elevator. The elevator itself had
caught fire and was burning near the control lever. To start the car,
Smith had to put his left hand into the flames. But he managed to get the
elevator down to the main floor of the stage.” (p 35) “James
J. Hamilton, a trunk handler, was leading a group of ballet members to
another coal hole in the rear of the building. He broke the cover with his
bare hands, then lifted men and women in their costumes through the
opening. Some of the men were still wearing their helmets. Incredibly, one
supernumerary insisted on carrying his spear with him, but Hamilton
threatened to brain him if he didn’t drop it and move quickly through
the escape hole.” (p 39) “Seated
six rows from the back of the parquet, Harold C. Pynchon and a schoolboy
friend also tried to escape by what they took to be an emergency exit on
the north side of the theatre, but they, too, could not get the door open.
The two youths turned and fought their way into the Grand Stair Hall, only
to find that one of the doors to the lobby was locked, as well. Pynchon
kicked through the glass panel of the door and squeezed through it. His
friend never made it.” (p 47) “George
E. Smith and his wife were trying to make their way around the crush of
people when Smith spotted, to his left, a young girl raise her arm, then
sink down as some people fell on her. Caught by the fallen bodies, the
girl nevertheless was able to give Smith one arm, then the other. He
pulled her free. But in the struggle, her clothes were ripped off. Smith
and his wife led the girl, naked and bruised, to safety.” (p 48) “Mrs.
W. F. Hanson made it out of the theater only because someone seized her. A
man presumably, but she never knew who it was. Dazed, she was tossed and
dragged along an aisle and lost consciousness. But everyone else in her
theater party—eight relations—were killed.” (p 53)
“For
Harriet Bray, what was supposed to be her Christmas present turned into a
dreadful nightmare. Clothing and hair singed, the eleven-year-old girl had
to jump the remaining twelve feet to the ground from the fire escape. Her
father caught her in his arms. ‘I’ll always remember,’ she said,
‘crawling beneath the legs of the horses who pulled the fire equipment,
how they stood motionless in the face of all that chaos.’” (p 56)
“Never
before, and never since, have so many persons been killed in a fire in
America. In terms of the toll of human lives, the Iroquois Theatre fire
was—and still is—the worst fire in the nation’s history. In all, 602
men, women, and children died as a result of the conflagration. The toll
was so extraordinary that the Cook County coroner’s office, too
overwhelmed to perform a postmortem on every individual, took the
expedient of declaring that, no matter how badly burned or mauled the
victims were, the all had died of asphyxiation.
“An
initial list of victims, prepared by the office of Coroner John Traeger in
the latter part of January 1904, before more than thirty more victims died
of their injuries in hospitals, bears the names of 570 individuals.
Most—300—were Chicago residents, but the rest came from as many as
twelve states other than Illinois and as many as eighty-five other cities
and towns, mostly in the Midwest. As might be expected, they represented a
cross-section of the holiday matinee audience. Of them, 420 were female,
150 male.” (pp 86–87)
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