Remembering the Iroquois Theater: America’s Deadliest Fire
Location: LaSalle Street entrance to City Hall, 121 N LaSalle St, Chicago, IL 60602; 41 53' 2.07" N, 87 37' 55.24" W
Like many cities, Chicago has experienced its own share of tragedy and hardship throughout history. Most notable among them is the relationship the city shares with catastrophic fires. Many Americans know of the “Great Chicago Fire of 1871,” a conflagration that burned for two days, killing nearly 300 people and leaving over 100,000 Chicagoans homeless. Yet a devastating fire in 1903, just 32 years later, resulted in twice as many fatalities in a matter of 15 minutes. This nearly forgotten tragedy remains the largest loss of life from a single building fire in U.S. history. This is the story of the Iroquois Theater Fire.
The Iroquois Theater fire occurred on December 30, 1903. The six-story theater, located at 24 West Randolph Street in the heart of Chicago’s burgeoning theater district, had opened less than five weeks earlier, claiming on its playbill to be “absolutely fireproof.” As author Jack Gottschalk wrote in his book Firefighting, the matinee audience consisted mainly of mothers and school age children enjoying a midweek performance while on holiday break. Patrons were packed into the venue, exceeding the 1,724 seat capacity. With an estimated 2000 in attendance that afternoon, even the isles were full of eager theater goers for the standing room only performance. As the audience settled in for the second act of the musical comedy Mr. Blue Beard staring Broadway icon Eddie Foy, a lighting fixture ignited a canvass backdrop high above the stage. The theater’s fire safety system utilized only an asbestos safety curtain, designed to provide a firebreak between the stage and auditorium seating, and a chemical powder extinguishing agent, which could be manually dispensed by the in-house fireman as needed. Both features were rendered useless — the chemical powder did nothing to smother the fire suspended mid-air and the curtain malfunctioned, failing to lower as intended.
To escape the blaze looming above their heads, actors fled the stage through a back door. As the actors exited the theater, icy air rushed through the door and into the theater, breathing new life into the fire. The introduction of fresh oxygen pushed a massive fireball across the entire auditorium. The fire grew larger. Mothers and their children push more frantically through crowds, fighting to reach one of the 27 doors to escape the building only to find that most of the exits had been chained shut. The chains meant to keep the public from sneaking into the theater without paying now trapped many of the patrons inside. The theater goers who made it to one of the three unchained exits soon realized that the doors opened inward and were rendered useless by the rush of people crushing one another in a futile attempt to escape.
The Iroquois Theater fire resulted in 602 fatalities, making it the worst single building fire in U.S. history. This tragedy resulted in countless changes to locally and nationally recognized fire safety standards including outward opening doorways, working fire alarm systems, wider isles for egress, and trained ushers to guide patrons in an emergency.
While the legacy of the Iroquois Theater fire remains forever reflected in fire safety standards for public assembly spaces, the 602 lives lost are memorialized on a sculpted tablet created by famed Chicago artist Laredo Taft. Though left and forgotten in a basement storage space for a period of years, this bronze bas-relief sculpture is now mounted in Chicago’s City Hall near the LaSalle Street entrance. It serves as an understated yet moving tribute to an event that forever changed the course of fire safety standards.
Ted Berger is a contributor to Monumental USA.
Monumental USA is dedicated to highlighting local monuments and the human stories that lay at their foundation. The desire is to reinvigorate civic pride and sense of ownership through interesting monuments to events and personalities great and small across the nation, with a special focus on local and perhaps obscure or forgotten memorials.
