IN RECALLING THE IROQUOIS tragedy, Charles Collins always said he believed that the Chicago Fire Department “did a very fine job under difficult circumstances.”
Collins ended his sixty-year career in journalism at the Chicago Tribune, which he joined in 1930. After a few years of general assignment reporting at the Record-Herald, he realized his life’s ambition by becoming drama critic first for the Chicago Daily News, then for the InterOcean, and finally for the Tribune, where he once had the distinction of being barred from Shubert theatres for an extended period because of negative reviews he had written. In 1938, no longer the drama critic, he became the paper’s “A Line O’ Type Or Two” columnist. In his free time, Collins, who never married, was a novelist and librettist.
He would sometimes be called upon to write Iroquois pieces on the anniversary of the fire, but toward the end of his life he seemed to have become bored with the subject. Two years before his death in 1964, he told me that the tragedy had had no effect on him while he was covering the story. In the same interview, however, he said he could never forget the sight of one victim—a beautiful blond young woman, lying nude on a marble-topped table in Thompson’s Restaurant, “looking like a classic Greek statue carved in alabaster.”
Collins died believing that it was Ben Marshall, the young, relatively inexperienced architect, who was largely to blame for the disaster; the theatre was poorly designed because of its converging stairways. But Marshall went on to design other Chicago buildings, including the Blackstone Theatre, the Drake and Edgewater Beach hotels and the Polish Consulate. In a detailed oral history he recorded many years later for an architectural resource library at the University of Texas in Austin, Marshall discussed his career at length, but did not mention the Iroquois Theatre.
By 1935 the theatre horror had been forgotten by almost everyone except the survivors and their families. That same year, in a 361-page autobiography aptly titled Stormy Years, Mayor Harrison, who served five consecutive terms, devoted little more than three pages to the Iroquois tragedy. Saying nothing about his civic responsibilities, Harrison placed the blame for the fire on aldermen for dragging their feet on city fire ordinances, and maintained that “public hysteria” had forced the city council to close all Chicago theatres immediately after the fire.
Harrison died in 1953 at the age of ninety-three, after completing a second autobiography, Growing Up in Chicago, in which he made no mention of the tragedy.
Eddie Foy returned to the New York stage in 1904 after a few months in vaudeville, and took a leading role in a Broadway musical called Piff! Paff! Poof!! For years he received rounds of applause from audiences who remembered his act of bravery during the fire. Foy would eventually form an act with his children, billed as “The Seven Little Foys.” Particularly from New York audiences, he would always get a laugh by gazing at his children lined up on stage and remarking, “If I lived in Flatbush, it would be a city!” In the early 1950s Bob Hope played Foy in a film filled with innumerable errors in its representation of the Iroquois fire. Foy died in 1928 in the kind of environment in which he had spent most of his professional life: a hotel room while he was on a road tour. He was seventy-two.
Klaw, Erlanger and the despised Theatrical Trust ran into continuing competition from the equally aggressive Shubert Brothers. Both empires would suffer in the 1929 stock market crash, and the Trust would eventually disappear. The evening before the Davis trial finally ended in 1907, Klaw was the guest speaker at a Friar’s Club dinner in New York where he told his entertainment industry audience, perhaps only half in jest, “I had formerly been a newspaperman and a press agent, and I don’t know now why I ever ceased so being.”
Levy Mayer’s corporate law practice continued to flourish; because of his success in defending Powers, he went on to represent important theatrical figures of the day, including, among others, Klaw, Erlanger, the prominent producer Charles Frohman, the Shubert Brothers and Florenz Ziegfeld, creator of the Ziegfeld Follies. Mayer’s entertainment industry clients were only part of his burgeoning practice, which continues today as Mayer, Brown, Rowe and Maw, employing 1300 attorneys throughout the U.S. and overseas.
The beautiful Annabelle Whitford, who played the part of Stella, queen of the fairies, eventually became one of the Ziegfeld Girls. She retired from the stage in 1910 when she married Dr. Edward Buchan, one of the physicans who had done rescue work after the fire.
Will Davis continued in theatre management until he retired in 1914 and faded into obscurity.
Fire Marshal Musham, his reputation badly tarnished by the coroner’s inquest, quietly resigned his post in 1904, and died soon afterward. The six firemen facing disciplinary action who helped in the rescue operations at the theatre were reinstated. Musham’s white helmet is on permanent display at the Chicago Historical Society, which owns also the spotlight which is believed to have started the fire backstage.
Battalion Chief Hannon was transferred to a command outside the Loop.
The day after the disaster, Fireman First Class Michael Corrigan of Engine 13 was promoted for heroism to acting first lieutenant. Corrigan eventually became Chicago Fire Commissioner. It was said that no Chicago firefighter was killed in the line of duty during his tenure, which lasted from 1937 to 1955.
Charlotte Plamondon, the young debutante who leaped over the box railing and successfully escaped with the rest of her party, was so shaken by the experience that she was unable to return to school for many months. Unfortunately, she suffered the effects of another major tragedy, when her parents were among those lost at sea in the sinking of the Lusitania, torpedoed by a German submarine in 1915. Another Lusitania victim was the producer Charles Frohman, who had played an important part in the Theatrical Trust. His death shocked Broadway.
As happened in most other American cities, one by one, Chicago’s many morning and evening newspapers eventually disappeared. The colorful City Press Association split into two entities in 1910. The Press Association maintained control over the tube system, and the new City News Bureau handled all reporting functions. Both agencies are now defunct.*
Walter Howey, the enterprising Press Association reporter who hired a boy to disable telephones so that he could scoop the competition, eventually became city editor of the Tribune, quit in a row with its publisher, and became editor of the Herald-Examiner. There, according to legend still up to his old tricks, he once hired an actress to play a dying millionairess in an attempt to lure the rival Tribune into printing a bogus story. Howey was said to be the prototype for the colorful managing editor in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s celebrated play The Front Page.
An Iroquois Theatre Memorial Association was set up immediately after the fire to help the victims’ families. Among its first big contributors was Sir Thomas Lipton, the English tea tycoon. The association was dissolved during the Depression.
About 1910 the Iroquois Memorial Hospital was built in downtown Chicago at what was then North Market Street. Converted into a tuberculosis sanatorium around 1935, it was closed after World War II and then demolished. In the hospital had been a six-foot-high memorial to the Iroquois victims, a bronze bas relief designed by Laredo Taft, that disappeared when the hospital was torn down and was rediscovered years later in the basement of the City-County Building. It is now mounted on the wall inside the LaSalle Street entrance to City Hall. It has no explanatory legend.
A plan to erect an imposing memorial to the victims was never realized. Instead, a triangular marker was placed in a Chicago cemetery and an even smaller plaque was affixed to the wall of the lobby of an office building that was near the theatre. That building has since been demolished and the plaque has apparently vanished.
For many decades following the tragedy, survivors would gather every December 30 at City Hall to remember the victims. Former Fire Commissioner Corrigan would often attend these memorials, bringing along the alarm box he pulled that day. The so-called “Mercy Day” remembrances ended in the early sixties as the number of survivors dwindled.
The last survivor died in 1978 at the age of 86. She was Harriet Bray Crumpacker of Michigan City, Indiana, the little girl who had crawled beneath the legs of Engine 13’s horses after she escaped from the theatre by jumping into her father’s arms. She commented that for years after the fire, she never went to a theatre without looking carefully at the curtains around the proscenium arch. Her relative, William P. Crumpacker of Hammond, Indiana, says that family elders always admonished the children to look first for the exits when they entered any theatre. Certainly, for years hundreds if not thousands of families behaved in the same way.
William B. Warfel of Trumbull, Connecticut, whose master’s thesis for the Yale School of Drama was “Theatre Fire Prevention Laws in Building Codes,” said that his mother-in-law clerked in the late 1920s and early ’30s for an Illinois Supreme Court justice whose wife had survived the fire. One of Mrs. Warfel’s duties was buying theatre tickets for the judge, and her instructions were to buy seats only if they were adjacent to an exit. She had to go into theatres and confirm the seat locations before paying for the tickets.
The fire ended Chicago’s hopes of becoming the equal of the New York stage. Mr. Bluebeard was also dead; it would never again play in a U.S. theatre. Colored lobby cards of the show and production photos of the cast seem to have disappeared. Major theatrical collections in both the U.S. and England have material like that from other 1903 musical productions, but I could find no Mr. Bluebeard items.
It would be cold consolation to the dead and their families, but it could be said that the Iroquois victims did not die in vain. Out of the public outcry over the tragedy came stringent reforms in building and fire safety codes throughout the U.S. and in some European countries, not only in theatres but in other public structures including schools, churches and office buildings.
Floor plans clearly showing the location of exits began to be included in playbills—some theatres had begun this practice before the fire—and for years an announcement on playbill covers read: “Look around now, choose the nearest exit. In case of fire, walk, do not run. Do not try to beat your neighbor to the street.” The use of fireproof materials for scenery became mandatory, as did illuminated exit signs and exit doors that open out, rather than in. These injunctions remain in force today.
Shortly after the tragedy, citing “lessons learned,” the editors of the trade journal Fire and Water Engineering listed twelve points: stages must be protected by automatic sprinkler systems; exits must be unobstructed and marked by clearly visible signs; exit doors must open from the inside; emergency lighting is a necessity in theatres and other places of public assembly; adequate first aid and firefighting equipment and a fire alarm system must be installed and properly maintained; there must be a fire-resistant curtain at the proscenium opening of the stage that will close automatically without applied power; fire escapes should not be exposed to flames coming from doors or windows on lower floors; electrical facilities must comply with the electrical code; theatre employees should be trained in fire exit drills; scenery, curtains and other textile materials must be flameproof, and automatic vents must be installed over a stage. In addition, the editors pointed out that selling tickets to standees overloaded exit facilities and reduced the chances of orderly evacuation of the auditorium.
Days after the Iroquois burned, a letter from Andrew Carnegie appeared in the New York Herald urging the prohibition of combustible material on theatre stages: “As long as that liability exists there lie the seeds of panic in the audience, and it is the panic that causes disaster.” Carnegie’s concerns about mob panic were repeatedly proven prescient later in the century: two horrible examples were the 1942 disaster in Boston’s Coconut Grove nightclub in which 491 people died and hundreds were injured, and the 1944 Ringling Brothers’ Circus fire in Hartford, Connecticut, in which 168 people, two-thirds of them children, lost their lives.
The British system of routinely lowering an asbestos curtain at least once during a performance, in addition to permitting patrons at the end of a show to leave the theatre through all exit doors into streets, was generally hailed as the standard to be followed. Some London theatre executives nevertheless expressed reservations about human nature. The legendary Beerbohm Tree, proprietor of His Majesty’s Theatre, said, “When all is done, the fact remains that no one has ever invented a patent for stopping a panic.”
City school systems in general improved their fire drills, putting particular emphasis on the time it took to evacuate school buildings. Unfortunately, some municipalities took too much time to implement reforms. Five years after the Iroquois disaster, 171 children and two teachers died in a fire in a Cleveland suburban school where exit doors opened in and not out. Many of the victims were trampled in the crush.
Publications were inundated with all kinds of wild ideas and suggestions from readers on how to avoid an Iroquois catastrophe. Months after the fire, Popular Mechanics magazine printed details of a “water curtain … the fire curtain of the future,” the brainchild of former Boston Fire Chief John W. Regan. The chief’s radical solution involved a stage floor nozzle capable of shooting three sheets of water 150 feet wide and 60 feet high, “flaring out like a great fan,” separating the stage from the auditorium. The water curtain was tested on the streets of Boston but was apparently never used in a theatre.
Out of the Iroquois disaster came a device still in wide use today. Carl Prinzler, an Indianapolis hardware salesman, had tickets for the December 30 matinee but missed the performance for business reasons. Prinzler was supposedly so disturbed at the needless loss of life that he determined to solve one of the principal problems in the doomed theatre: the inability to open exit doors that were locked or bolted. Prinzler and his neighbor Henry DuPont, an architectural engineer, came up with a simple crossbar contraption that they called the “Self Releasing Fire Exit Bolt.” They marketed the bolt in 1908 through the Vonnegut Hardware Company of Indianapolis under the name VonDuprin, a contraction of Vonnegut, DuPont and Prinzler. Because theatres then were still installing mandated post-Iroquois safety improvements, the bolt, now commonly called a “panic bar,” was a commercial success and VonDuprin eventually became a division of the Ingersoll-Rand Company.
The Iroquois, its interior remodeled and its building updated to meet the fire code, reopened in 1904 as a vaudeville house, eventually renamed the Colonial Theatre. A building next door caught fire, frightening its audience. Eventually the Colonial was demolished to be replaced by the Oriental Theatre, a movie palace, now the Ford Center for the Performance Arts Oriental Theatre. On the sidewalk outside its entrance, a metal stanchion carries a history of the area, with a brief description of the tragedy and a picture of the ill-fated theatre that once stood on that spot.
A handful of relics, rarely if ever made public, are gathering dust in the vaults of the Chicago Historical Society. They include a wooden music stand from the orchestra pit, a bit of fabric from one of the curtains, a photograph of firemen in “Death Alley,” a splinter of wood from an escape plank, a piece of chair stuffing, a sliver from one of the exit doors and a square piece of balcony drapery. There is also a scorched dollar bill supposedly retrieved from a trouser pocket in Eddie Foy’s dressing room and a pair of women’s rubbers recovered from the theatre. The largest artifact of all, however, is the spotlight for the “Pale Moonlight” number, the light that caused the fire.
* The old City News Bureau is now the City News Service, owned by the Chicago Tribune.