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| North Avenue, looking east (Google image) |
Every year as the
holidays approach Jill and I like to hit the Land of Nod store and scoop up a
few things for our two little granddaughters.
Nice store, just off North Avenue, plenty of parking, a big Crate and
Barrel store right next door, handy if the candle or patio place setting supply
is running low.
If we hadn’t turned
off busy North Avenue, we could easily picture ourselves n the sunny parking
lot of any good-sized strip mall in the suburbs. Yet, on this date, April 17, in 1953
exhausted Chicago fire fighters were digging through the smoldering remains of
the Haber corporation factory, looking for victims of the worst fire in the
city since a streetcar and gasoline tanker met at Sixty-Second and State
Streets between a streetcar and gasoline tanker in 1950, killing 32 people.
Sixty-two employees
punched the time clock that morning, but construction was taking place inside
the building and estimates put 100 persons inside the structure when the
explosion and subsequent fire began.
After that initial explosion on the first floor of the three-story
factory, the fire spread so quickly that witnesses said the whole building was
in flames within five minutes.
The first alarm was
turned in at 8:47 a.m. The firemen of
the Third Battalion arrived less than three minutes later. The battalion chief, Frank Thielman,
described what he saw upon arrival, “A sheet of flame was shooting out each of the
14 second floor windows. The sight was
awful. It was fury. We couldn’t get in to fight the fire. People were running wildly out of the
building, saying more were inside.
Others were jumping down from the third floor windows onto the roof of
the one story building adjoining on the east.”
[Chicago Tribune, April 17, 1953]
By 9:00 a.m. a 5-11
alarm was sounded, bringing 59 pieces of fire equipment to the scene. Ambulances, police squadrols, even police
cars, were pressed into service to carry victims to five different hospitals. Electricity was turned off in a 20-square
block area surrounding the scene.
Ventilating fans were placed on their highest setting in the subway
because of the smoke.
A mechanic, Ted
Mechnek, had just left his parked car on the way to work at a local business
when the initial explosion occurred.
“Glass flew all over the street,” he said. In just a second it seemed fire burst out all
of the second floor windows. In another
second a woman jumped from a third floor window to the roof of the one and a
half story receiving department. Then a
man jumped and turned to catch others as they jumped. Ten or 15 must have jumped that way, but the
smoke was so dense it was hard to tell the exact number. A man appeared at a third story window, his
clothing either burned or blown off.”
An inspector on the
third floor assembly line, Florence Haislip, said from her hospital bed at
Augustana Hospital, “We heard a tremendous explosion which shook the whole
building. I ran with about 60 other
women for the fire escape. Some of the
women were screaming in panic. I saw I
wasn’t going to be able to reach the fire escape, so I climbed thru a window,
hung by my hands and dropped.”
Even as the
recovery effort was continuing, Coroner Walter E. McCarron appointed a jury of
a dozen men that held its first meeting on April 17. Within a week it became
apparent that the loss of 35 lives might have been prevented if regulations had
been properly followed and appropriate precautions taken.
A building of this
size, the Assistant City Fire Commissioner, Anthony J. Mullaney, testified,
should have had three means of egress.
There were only two – an inner stairway that was unusable after the
explosion and a fire escape. City Building Commissioner Roy T. Christiansen
testified that the Haber company had failed to obtain building permits for part
of its remodeling work (some of which required the boarding up of an additional
stairway), and that a company executive had admitted that company officials
“winked at” employees who smoked illegally in Haber plants. [Chicago
Tribune, April 23, 1953]
By April 29 the
hearings began to move toward a conclusion.
Arvid M. Tienson, the chief supervising engineer of the Illinois
Department of Labor’s factory inspection division told the jury that he and an
assistant found two pieces of a duct from the building’s ventilation system that
had been blown away by the initial explosion.
There was no evidence of fire in the two pieces but each had “aluminum
dust fine enough to explode.” [Chicago
Tribune, April 29, 1953].
Mr. Tienson said,
“There had to be a power failure or blocking of the duct, and something to
trigger the explosion.” Witnesses had
testified earlier that a flash fire at one of the first floor buffing machines
had occurred.
In the end the
coroner’s jury declared the horrific event that killed 35 people and sent 32
others to the hospital an accident. The Tribune reported, “The jurors
reported unanimous agreement that there was negligence on the part of owners of
the property, the Hager corporation, and two companies – Ragnar Benson, Inc.
and Wipf Welding company – which were engaged in extensive remodeling of the
building at the time of the fire. But
the jury was unable to agree as to the degree of negligence in each case.” [Chicago
Tribune, May 6, 1953]
The owners of the
building, former Forty-Third Alderman Titus Haffa and members of his family, were
not mentioned in the jury’s findings although Coroner Walter E. McCarron said,
“If I were a member of the jury I personally would have held the owners of the
property and the companies to the grand jury for criminal negligence. However, this is your verdict and I accept
it.”
Separately, in
testimony before a committee set up by Alderman Cullerton of the Thirty-Eighty
ward to investigate the tragedy, Assistant Fire Commissioner Anthony J.
Mullaney said, “If existing ordinances had been followed, no one would have
died in the fire. The ordinances are
adequate to have covered the situation.
If they had followed the code in obtaining necessary permits for
remodeling, this wouldn’t have happened.
There was no direct means out of the building from the upper floors.”
Chicago lives by
the slogan “We Will,” but many times that attitude, which is future-oriented,
of course, throws the past into darkness.
That’s true of this location at North and Clybourn. Next time you head for Steppenwolf Theater or
the Crate and Barrel or stop in for a bite at Uncle Julio’s, you might think
about the lives that were changed on that block back in those mid-April days of
1953.
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| North Avenue, looking east (www.fireseenes.net] |
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5 comments:
My aunt died in this fire the year before I was born. I have several newspaper clippings that belonged to my mom. In fact, I was named after my aunt. Thank you for helping people remember the past/
My aunt too died in this fire. I wish I had the opportunity to know her.
My uncle, Juan Roman Rodriguez, died in this tragedy and I wonder if the Judge grant to the family of the dead ones, wife and children, any monetary compensation. He left a wife and 4 children and he was the breadwinner of the house. He went to Chicago from Puerto Rico and he was a veteran of the War World II.
I also had an aunt who died. My mother, who was her sister, migrated from Italy and never got to see her.From reading the story, these people were murdered. RIP
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