Chicago's Awful Theater Horror Part 5

FIND BUSHELS OF PURSES.

"Five bushel baskets were filled with women's purses gathered by the police. A huge pile of garments was removed to a near-by saloon, where an officer guards them pending removal to some more appropriate place. The shoes and overshoes picked up among the seats fill two barrels to overflowing.

"The fire manifested itself in the flies above the stage during the second act. The double octette was singing 'In the Pale Moonlight' when the tragedy swept mirth and music aside, to give way to a more somber and frightful performance. Confusion on the stage, panic in the auditorium, phenomenal spread of the incipient blaze, failure of the asbestos fire curtain to fall in place when lowered followed in rapid progress, with the holocaust as the climax."

But to return to the narrative of what happened immediately after the first alarm, as gathered by the collaborators of this work. There was a wild, futile dash--futile because few of the terrified partic.i.p.ants succeeded in reaching the outer air. Persons in the rear of the theater building knew full well that a holocaust was in progress. There fire escapes and stage doors thronged with refugees, half clad and hysterical chorus girls flocking into the alley, and crackling flames leaping higher and higher from the flimsy stage and bursting from windows, told only too plainly what was in progress within. At the front, half a block distant, in Randolph street, ominous silence maintained. A mere handful of people burst out, those who had occupied rear seats and pushed by the ushers who sought to restrain 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 ma.s.sive pile of steel, stone and terra cotta, with its brave and shimmering veneer of glistening marble, stained gla.s.s 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 mult.i.tude, 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 pa.s.sages 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 gra.s.s 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 circ.u.mstance 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 h.o.r.n.y 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 mult.i.tude 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 h.e.l.l.

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 a.s.sistance dashed across into the heat and smoke and dragged forth many more who had reached the platform only to fall before the deadly blast. Then the rescuers were beaten back and the fire fiend was left to claim its own.

And claim them it did, searching them out with ruminating tongues of flame. Over every inch of paint and decoration, every tapestry, curtain and seat top it licked its way with insinuating eagerness. It pursued its victims beyond the confines of the theater walls, grasping in its deadly embrace those who lay across windows or prostrate on galleries and platforms. Thousands gazed on in helpless horror, watching the flames bestow a fatal caress upon many who had crept far, far from the blaze and almost into a zone of safety. With a gliding, caressing movement that made beholders' blood run cold it crept upon such victims, hovered a moment and glided on with sinuous motion and what approached a suggestion of intelligence in searching out those who fled before it. A shriek, a spasmodic movement and the victims lay still, their earthly troubles over forever.

A few minutes later, possibly not more than half an hour after the discovery of the fire, when the firemen had beaten back the flames to the raging stage another procession moved across that same plank again. It moved in silence, for it was a procession of death. The great tragedy began and ended in fifteen minutes. Its echoes may roll down as many centuries, compelling the proper safeguarding of all places of amus.e.m.e.nt, in America at least. If so, the Iroquois victims did not give up their lives in vain.

When the removal of the victims across the improvised bridge over death alley ended the tireless official in charge of that work, James Markham, secretary to Chief of Police O'Neill, had checked off 102 corpses. No attempt was made to keep count of the dead as they were removed from other portions of the theater and by other exits. The counting was done when the patrol wagons, ambulances, trucks and delivery wagons used in removing the dead deposited their ghastly loads at the morgues.

The instance cited was not an isolated example of heroism, but rather merely a striking instance among scores. Police, firemen and citizens vied with each other in the work of humanity. Merchants drove out customers and threw open their business houses as temporary hospitals and morgues.

Others donated great wagon loads of blankets and supplies of all kinds and the munic.i.p.al government was embarra.s.sed by the unsolicited relief funds that poured in. All manner of vehicles were given freely for the removal of dead and injured. So informal was the removal of the latter that many may have reached their homes unreported. For that reason a complete list of the injured may never be secured.

An ill.u.s.tration of the possibilities in that direction is found in the case of one man who wrapped the dead body of his wife in his overcoat and carried it to Evanston, many miles away, where the circ.u.mstances became known days later when a burial permit was sought. Another is the case of an injured man who revived on a dead wagon en route to a morgue and was removed by friends.

All these and other details are elaborated upon elsewhere, together with the touching story of the scores of young women employed in the production, "Mr. Bluebeard," who would have been stranded penniless in a strange city a thousand miles from home but for the prompt and n.o.ble relief afforded by Mrs. Ogden Armour.

CHAPTER II.

FIRST AID TO THE INJURED AND CARE FOR THE DEAD.

On the heels of the firemen came the police, intent on the work of rescue.

Chief O'Neill and a.s.sistant Chief Schuettler ordered captains from a dozen stations to bring their men, and then they rushed to the theater and led the police up the stairs to the landing outside the east entrance to the first balcony.

The firemen, rushing blindly up the stairs in the dense pall of smoke, had found their path suddenly blocked by a wall of dead eight or ten feet high. They discovered many persons alive and carried them to safety. Other firemen crawled over the ma.s.s of dead and dragged their hose into the theater to fight back the flames that seemed to be crawling nearer to turn the fatal landing into a funeral pyre.

O'Neill and Schuettler immediately began carrying the dead from the balcony, while other policemen went to the gallery to begin the work there.

In the great ma.s.s of dead at the entrance to the first balcony the bodies were so terribly interwoven that it was impossible at first to take any one out.

"Look out for the living!" shouted the chief to his men. "Try to find those who are alive."

From somewhere came a faint moaning cry.

"Some one alive there, boys," came the cry. "Lively, now!"

The firemen and police long struggled in vain to move the bodies.

The raging tide of humanity pouring out of the east entrance of the balcony during the panic had met the fighting, struggling crowd coming down the stairs from the third balcony at right angles. The two streams formed a whirlpool which ceased its onward progress and remained there on the landing where people stamped each other under foot in that mad circle of death.

In a short time the blockade in the fatal angle must have been complete.

Then into this awful heap still plunged the contrary tides of humanity from each direction. Many tried to crawl over the top of the heap, but were drawn down to the grinding mill of death underneath. The smoke was heavy at the fatal angle, for the majority of those taken out at that point bore no marks of bruises.

Many, and especially the children, were trampled to death, but others were held as in a vise until the smoke had choked the life from their bodies.

It was toward this that the firemen directed O'Neill and Schuettler as they rushed into the theater. The smoke was still heavy and the great gilded marble foyer of the "handsomest theater in America" was somber and dark and still as a tomb, except for the whistling of the engines outside and now and then the shouting of the firemen. Water was dripping everywhere and stood inches deep on the floor and stairs.

Two flickering lanterns shed the only light by which the policemen worked, and this very fact, perhaps, made their task more horrible and gruesome, if such a thing were possible.

GREAT PILE OF CHARRED BODIES FOUND EVERYWHERE IN THEATER.

All through the gallery the bodies were found. Some were those of persons who had decided to stay in their seats and not to join in the mad rush for the doors and run the risk of being trampled to death. Many of them no doubt had trusted to the cries, "There is no danger; keep your seats!"

They had stuck to their seats until, choked by the heavy smoke, they had been unable to move.