58 dead in Chicago hotel fire (6-5-46)

The Evening Star (June 5, 1946)

58 dead, 200 hurt as fire traps hundreds in Chicago loop hotel; three explosions precede blaze

Disaster worst in his experience, marshal says

CHICAGO (AP) – At least 58 persons were killed – many suffocated in their beds without being awakened – today in an early morning fire that swept through the 22-story La Salle Hotel in the heart of Chicago’s loop district.

Fire department sources estimated about 200 persons were injured.

The first alarm was turned in at 12:35 a.m., when most of the 1,100 guests had retired for the night. Within 10 minutes the first three floors were engulfed in flames and both of the main street exits from the 37-year-old hostelry were impassable.

300 rattle blaze

Five extra alarms were sounded and more than 300 firemen battled the blaze bringing it under control about 3:30 a.m.

Most of those who were burned had been housed on the third, fourth, fifth and sixth floors. About the sixth floor, smoke and panic claimed their victims. At least 10 persons died as they leaped from their rooms and fell to the street or in a courtway.

On many of the bodies which overflowed the county morgue there were only a few fragments of burned clothing, which crumbled when touched. Most were clad only in negligees or robes.

Fire Marshal Michael Corrigan, calling the fire the worst in his 35 years of experience and “one of the hardest to explain,” said firemen had heard three explosions, spaced about a minute and a half apart, before the fire was discovered.

John Flanagan, chief house detective at the La Salle, said the fire started in the No. 5 elevator shaft. He quoted Detective Edward McNamara as saying the operator of the No. 5 elevator rushed into the lobby and said there was fire in his pit.

Fire spreads fast

Several persons with fire extinguishers went to the reported location of the fire, and the fire department was summoned, arriving in five or six minutes.

“But it was simply appalling the way the fire spread,” Mr. McNamara said. “In a twinkling the whole lobby was a mass of flames. From then on, everything was chaos.”

Coroner A. L. Brodie called an inquest this morning, and said he would use prominent hotel managers and engineers for members of the jury.

Firemen and volunteers rushed into the hotel to control the blaze and assist the guests from the building. Smoke and heat rushed to the upper floors through the elevator shafts, permeating all the halls and filling the rooms. On the fourth floor, seven bodies were found in a crawling position. The victims had been headed toward a fire escape, and had been overcome on the way.

On a glass canopy were found the bodies of a mother and her child, arms banding one another. Both were burned beyond recognition.

The figures of many persons appeared in windows, as if they were planning to leap. Even as flame and smoke menaced those in the windows, firemen cautioned: “Sit tight – we’ll get you out.”

Rescue ladders were quickly raised and more than 50 persons were rescued. Military police and shore patrol members banded together with police, firemen and other volunteers to stretch nets in the street to catch those who chose to leap. One woman was carried down a fire escape by a fireman and rushed to Passavant Hospital. Almost on arrival, she gave birth to a baby.

“If only some of them had not been panicked they might have been saved,” said Fire Marshal Corrigan.

A temporary morgue was hastily set up in the City Hall, only a block from the hotel. More than 600 policemen were called to the scene, and aided in carrying the dead, assisting the injured and shepherding the lightly clad and homeless persons who had escaped. More than 50 Red Cross people assisted.

First-aid facilities were established in the City Hall, and all available ambulances, from public and private agencies, carried victims to five hospitals.

Register destroyed

The hotel’s register was destroyed in the fire and an emergency list of those who had not been injured was compiled by police, to aid in answering the pitiful pleas of those seeking loved ones.

Other loop hotels quickly volunteered shelter for those driven from their rooms. Cots were set up in ballrooms and other guests in the nearby hotels shared their rooms with the dispossessed.

One fireman was killed and 20 to 30 were injured in battling the fire and smoke.

Many of the fleeing guests tried to carry personal possessions with them, but in many cases the loads grew too heavy and the corridors were lined with abandoned belongings, and a pile was assembled in the streets.

There were many stories of individual heroism. Taxicab drivers waiting at the hotel for fares went to the upper floors to assist. Walter Boris, an employee of the Chicago Elevated Lines, was credited with carrying 12 persons from the third floor.

Mr. Boris said he came on one couple overcome in their bed. He carried them to the bathtub, covered them with wet towels and called help. Police then evacuated them on stretchers.

Thousands of spectators gather

All streets were blockaded one or two blocks away from the hotel, situated at Madison and La Salle streets, in Chicago’s financial district, to keep back the thousands of spectators who gathered. This morning, the blockades remained in place and additional thousands, working in buildings in the roped off area, had to secure special permission to pass.

The hotel was opened in 1909 and City Building Commissioner Paul Gerhardt today said it had never been cited for any violation of the building code. The Fire Prevention Bureau said a warning had been addressed to the hotel on May 10, listing 10 points which needed correction, and giving the hotel 15 days to comply. Chief John L. Fenn of the Fire Prevention Bureau said warnings had been issued on various instances since 1927, resulting in corrections by the hotel.

Teams of bystanders formed for hotel fire rescue work

CHICAGO (AP) – Chicago’s financial district was thrown into wild, tragic, screaming confusion early today by the spectacular La Salle Hotel fire.

Firemen quickly mobilized bystanders into teams to assist guests. Three Chicago youths found elderly Claude Stratton of Sullivan, Indiana, and Miami, Florida, a small, slender man attempting to aid his 75-year-old wife, Winifred, down a 16th-floor fire escape. She was almost overcome from smoke.

They placed her in a chair and carried her to safety. Mr. Stratton, at St. Luke’s Hospital, later rewarded the three with a $500 check.

One hysterical unidentified woman rushed up to firemen on the street and screamed: “My sister had a heart attack on the 13th floor and she’s dying. I tried to help her but she told me to go.”

Blind woman escapes

In contrast, coming down the fire escape, displaying unusual calmness, was a blind woman clutching the harness of a seeing eye dog. They got to the street all right.

Meyer Goldberg, a Detroit jeweler, said the halls were a “pandemonium of women screaming.” He said he formed seven of them into a chain and led them by matchlight to a 12th floor fire escape.

Coming down, he related, the 10th floor entrance was blocked by a crippled man who was carried to safety, shouting “I’m crippled.”

An Army major assisted his wife, to the street, while carrying their young son on his other arm.

Fire Capt. Vincent Malex and three of his company climbed up to the Madison Street marquee:

“The heat and smoke were unbearable up their,” he gasped.

D. Scott Taggart, 35, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, a salesman, said he ran into a fourth-floor room and saw two people lying in the smoke-filled room. Firemen then came through the window to rescue them, but Mr. Taggart heard the firemen say “this man looks dead and the other might be.”

E. C. Harmsen, 33, of San Francisco, said he was in a cocktail lounge on the first floor “when I noticed flames breaking into one side of the room.”

“1 ran to the lobby. More flames were licking the uprights of the elevator shafts. Even as I looked, the fire spread to the ceiling and I beat it for the street.”

One of the rescuers, Bernard Trasca, a sailor stationed at nearby Glenview Naval Air Station, said he found a legless war veteran, hopping around frantically on his artificial legs, looking for a cane.

The sailor said he picked up the wounded veteran and carried him down the fire escape. He did not learn his name.

Fred Malorrus of St. Louis said when he opened the door of his fifth-floor room he was “almost knocked down by the black smoke.”

Phone operator overcome

“Even in the smoke,” he said, “I could see five bodies in the hallway. I closed the door quickly and got out on the ledge outside, thinking to myself that I would jump if the firemen didn’t come pretty quick. They got to my room in a few minutes and led me out.”

Miss Julia Barry, the hotel’s chief night telephone operator, was overcome by smoke in her second-floor cubbyhole. Two waiters dragged her to the street.

Shortly after the fire started, a white-haired man appeared at a sixth-floor window, waving his arms and screaming. He disappeared, then reappeared and dropped this note: “I will kill myself if I am not saved.”

Firemen rescued him.

Hotel fire takes life of Lutheran missionary

CHICAGO (AP) – A meeting of Lutheran missionaries at the La Salle Hotel, scene of a fire early today, ended tragically for the Rev. A. F. Schmitthenner of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.

Only recently returned from 23 years of missionary service in India, Mr. Schmitthenner was trapped on an upper floor and burned to death.

At least three others attending the Lutheran Foreign Missions conference were injured: They were: Dr. Lawrence M. Stavig, president of Augustana College, Sioux Falls, South Dakota; the Rec. Dr. Ralph Syrdal, pastor of the Norwegian Lutheran Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Dr. Fred J. Fiedler of Reading, Pennsylvania, secretary of the conference.

200 died in Chicago’s Great Fire in 1871

CHICAGO (AP) – Today’s disastrous fire in the La Salle Hotel, described by Fire Commissioner Michael J. Corrigan as the worst hotel fire in the city’s history, was not the largest conflagration in Chicago in loss of life.

The most spectacular fire in Chicago was the Great Fire in October 1871, in which 200 lives were lost and property valued at $200,000,000 was damaged. The fire destroyed 18,000 buildings and burned over 2,100 acres.

Other big fires in Chicago:

  • July 10, 1893: 17 persons were killed in view of 30,000 Columbian Exposition visitors in a fire which destroyed the cold storage building on the fairgrounds.

  • December 30, 1903: The Iroquois Theater fire in which 575 lives were lost.

  • December 22, 1910: Twenty-four men, including Fire Chief James Horan, met death in blaze that destroyed Morris & Co. packing plant.

  • March 15, 1922: Losses of $8,000,000 from fire which swept the Burlington Railroad’s skyscraper office building at Jackson Boulevard and Clinton Street.

  • April 13, 1931: Eleven men lost their lives when they were trapped by fire and poisonous gases in an intercepting sewer tunnel 35 feet underground at 22nd and Laflin Streets.

  • May 19, 1934: Chicago stockyards, property damage, $10,000,000.

  • January 1, 1945: General Clark Hotel, 14 perished.

Phone operator dies, refusing to quit post

CHICAGO (AP) – A switchboard operator who refused to be dragged from her post last night died in the La Salle Hotel fire because she insisted on remaining behind to notify guests.

W. H. Bradfield, assistant night manager, told police he tried to drag Mrs. Julia Barry, 44, from her post on the second floor, but she refused to leave. Mr. Bradfield suffered facial burns.

Mrs. Barry, a widow, had been employed by the hotel 11 years.