December 4, 1902 – Fourteen men
lose their lives in a fire at the Lincoln Hotel at 176 Madison Street, a
converted business block that the city’s fire marshal calls the worst firetrap
he has seen. The building went up in
1873, just two years after the Great Fire, and despite its proximity to that
tragic event, it was built with wooden partitions, a single wooden staircase,
and windows less than a foot in width.
Six months before the fire two electric elevators were installed as the
building was being converted into a hotel.
The shafts of those elevators, enclosed within wooden casings, formed flues
that provided a draft for the fire once it began. One of the newly installed elevators blocked
all but 20 inches of the main stairway, stairs that should have been over twice
as wide. There was only one fire escape
in the four-story building, and that was reached by way of a partitioned
six-foot by eight-foot hotel room that contained two beds. When the lights went out and the elevators
failed early on in the catastrophe the residents found themselves in darkness
and smoke, some with no way to escape.
The night clerk discovered the fire at 5:40 a.m. and alerted as many
guests as he could. 125 people began
frantically trying to find a way out of the burning building, some by jumping
out of narrow windows to the roofs of lower business buildings to the east and
west. Firefighters initially could not
make their way up the one stairway and were forced to fight the fire and try to
save those trapped in the building by placing ladders against the west side of
the building. Accompanying the tragedy
was a condemnation of the city’s inspection process with a special focus placed
on Chief Building Inspector Kiolbassa, of whom Fireproof Magazine said, “At his door lies the record of more
torture and death brought to suffering, helplessness, as the direct result of
his incompetency, than has ever before been charged to a public officer in the
history of civic government.” [Fireproof Magazine, Volume 1; No. 5., p.
45.]
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3 comments:
Thanks to the YouTube page, "faces of the forgotten", I am learning about this tragedy.
Such a sad story. Faces of the forgotten teaching true history.
Same here
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