Lest We Forget: Chicago's Awful Theater Horror. Everett Marshall

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СКАЧАТЬ them and quiet their fears. Loiterers about the ornate lobby scarcely sniffed a suggestion of impending disaster before the fire apparatus began to arrive with clanging bells.

      Those ushers who held back the straining, anxious spectators who sought escape at the first mild suggestion of danger – for what widespread woe are they responsible!

      Mere boys of tender years and meager experience, what knew they of the awful possibilities behind the spell of excitement upon the stage? Only two weeks before there had been an incipient blaze there that had been extinguished without the knowledge of the audience.

      Like all the rest of the world that now stands in shuddering wonderment, these boys scoffed at the thought of real danger in the massive pile of steel, stone and terra cotta, with its brave and shimmering veneer of glistening marble, stained glass of many hues, rich tapestries and drapings, and cold, aristocratic tints of red and old gold. And so with uplifted hands they turned back those whose sense of caution prompted them to leave at the outset. Surely disaster could not overtake the regal Iroquois in its first flush of pomp, pride and superiority. It was their sacred duty to see that no unseemly break marred the decorum established for the guidance of audiences at the Iroquois, and that duty was fully discharged.

      Thus it was that the wild hegira did not begin from the front until the arrival of the fire department. Then pandemonium itself broke loose. All restraining influences from the stage had ceased. At the appearance of the all-consuming wave of flame sweeping across the auditorium the boy ushers abandoned their posts and fled for their lives, leaving the packed audience to do the same unhampered.

      Unhampered – not quite! Darkness descending upon the scene, doors locked against the frightened multitude, fire escapes cut off by tongues of flame and exits and stairways choked with the bodies of those who died fighting to reach safety hampered many – at least the six hundred carried out later mangled and roasted, their features and limbs twisted and distorted until little semblance to humanity remained. After the first wild dash, in which a large portion of those on the main floor escaped, the blackness of night settled upon the long marble foyer leading from Randolph street to the auditorium. It settled in a cloud of black, fire laden smoke – death in nebulous forms defying fire fighter and rescuer alike to enter the great corridor. None entered, and, more pitiful still, none came forth.

      While this situation maintained in front a vastly different scene unfolded in the rear. The theater formed a great L, extending north from Randolph street to an alley and, in the rear, west to Dearborn street. This last projection, the toe of the L, was occupied by the stage, theoretically the finest in America, if not in the world. Thus the auditorium and stage occupied the extreme northern part of the structure, paralleling an alley extending on a line with Randolph street from State street to Dearborn street. This alley wall was pierced by many windows and emergency exits and was studded with fire escapes built in the form of iron galleries, and stairways hugging close to the wall leading to the alley.

      To these exits and the long, grim galleries of fire escapes the herded, fire-hunted audience surged. Those who reached doors that responded to their efforts found themselves pushed along the galleries by the resistless crush behind. As was the case in front, half way to safety another stream of humanity was encountered pouring out at right angles from another portion of the house. Coming together with the impact of opposing armies the two hosts of refugees gave unwilling and terrible answer to the time worn problem as to the outcome of an irresistible force encountering an immovable body. Both in front and rear great mounds of dead spelled annihilation as the answer. In front over 200 corpses piled in a twenty-foot angle of a stairway where two balcony exits merged told the terrible tale, and rendered both passages useless for egress, the dead being piled up in wall-like formation ten feet high.

      In the rear an alley strewn with mangled men, women and children writhing in agony on the icy pavement, or relieved of their sufferings by death, lent eloquent corroboration to the solution of the problem.

      It was in the rear that the true horror of the fire was most fully disclosed. There no towering mosaic studded walls or kindly mantle of smoke shut out the horrid sight. From its opening scene to its silent, ghastly denouement the successive details of this greatest of modern tragedies was forced upon the view to be stamped upon the memory of the unwilling beholder with an impressiveness that only death will blot out.

      After the first great impact had hurled the overflow of the fire-escape gallery into the alley yawning far below, the crush of humanity swept onward, downward to where safety beckoned. When the advance guard had all but reached the precious goal, with only a few feet of iron gallery and one more stairway to traverse, the crowning horror of the day unfolded itself. Right in the path of the advancing horde a steel window shutter flew back, impelled by the terrific energy of an immeasurable volume of pent up superheated air.

      The clang of the steel shutter swinging back on its hinges against the brick wall sounded the death knell of another host of victims, for in its wake came a huge tongue of lurid flame, leaping on high in the ecstasy of release from its stifling furnace. Fiercely in the faces of the refugees beat this agency of death. Before its withering blast the victims fell like prairie grass before an autumn blaze. Those further back waited for no more, but precipitated themselves headlong into the alley rather than face the fiery furnace that loomed up barring the way to hope.

      It would be well to draw the curtain upon this awful scene of suffering and death in the gloomy alley were it not for one circumstance that stands forth a glorious example of the heights that may be attained by the modest hero who moves about unsuspected in his daily life until calamity affords opportunity to show the stuff he is made of. High up in the building occupied by the law, dental and pharmacy schools of the Northwestern University, directly across the alley from the burning theater, a number of such men were at work. They were horny handed sons of toil – painters, paper hangers and cleaners repairing minor damage caused by an insignificant fire in the university building a few weeks before. One glance at the seething vortex of death below transformed them into heroes whose deeds would put many a man to shame whose memory is kept alive by stately column or flattering memorial tablet.

      Trailing heavy planks used by them in the erection of working scaffolds, they rushed to a window in the lecture room of the law school directly opposite the exit and fire escape platform leading from the topmost balcony of the theater. By almost superhuman effort and ingenuity they raised aloft the planks, scarce long enough to span the abyss, and dropped them. The prayers of thousands below and a multitude stifling in the aperture opposite were raised that the planks might fall true. All eyes followed their course as they poised in mid-air, then descended. Slow seemed their fall, a veritable period of torture, and awed silence reigned as they dropped.

      Then there arose a glad cry. With a crash the great planks landed true, the free ends squarely upon the edge of the platform of the useless fire escape, the others resting firmly upon the narrow window ledge where the painters stood defying flame, smoke and torrents of burning embers and blazing sparks hurled upon them as from the crater of a volcano.

      Death alley had been bridged! Across the narrow span came a volume of bedraggled humanity as though shot from a gun. A mad, screaming stream, pushed on by those behind, simply whirled across the frail support, direct from the very jaws of death, the blistering gates of hell.

      Only for a moment, a brief second it seemed, the wild procession moved. Yet in that limited period scores, perhaps hundreds, poured from the seething inferno – practically all that escaped from the lofty balcony that was a moment later transformed into the death chamber of helpless hundreds. Then the wave of flame, previously described, swept over the interior of the theater, greedily searching every nook and corner as though hungry for the last victim within reach.

      The last refugees to cross the narrow span, the dizzy line sharply drawn between life and death in its most terrifying aspect, staggered over with their clothing in flames, gasping, fainting with pain and terror. The workmen, students and policemen who had rushed to their assistance СКАЧАТЬ