"CANARIES IN A COAL MINE"

THE CROSS MOUNTAIN COAL MINE DISASTER

On December 9, 1911, a tiny flicker of flame from a coal miner’s lamp ignited an explosion that caused a disaster in the small town of Briceville, Tennessee that is still being felt today. During the early morning hours of that fateful day, the deadly explosion – killing 84 men and boys who had just entered the mine – sent a cloud of smoke and dust billowing more than 100 feet into the air. Five miners survived the blast, while the rest died from the initial concussion or suffocated on the poisonous gases that filled the mine shafts.

Briceville became a town that “echoed with the cries of widows and children.”

After the Civil War, coal became king in the areas around Knoxville, where towns like Briceville would spring to life. Such areas were rebuilt more quickly than other parts of the South, in part because of a resurgence in manufacturing and mining. Coal provided the power to begin this industrial revival and it was discovered that a 46-inch-thick layer of the mineral called the Coal Creek seam ran through the mountains. Mine entrances began to dot the countryside, all operated by a company out of Knoxville. They opened the Fraterville and Thistle Mines, as well as the Cross Mountain Mine. In 1877, a series of labor disputes forced the company to bring in convicts to replace the striking miners. That unrest prompted the company to invest in the latest equipment to trim its labor force in its Cross Mountain Mine.

That mine opened in 1888, and Briceville grew up around it. At one point, it was the biggest town in Anderson County, with a population of 6,000 and boasting its own opera house. By 1911, the Cross Mountain mining operation included two power plants to furnish electricity. Coal was cut from the seam using electric chain-driven machines and hauled out on electric rail cars. The mine was designated as “methane-free” since the flammable gas was rarely detected there. It was considered one of the safest in the region.

But as in far too many cases where terms like “unsinkable” and “fire-proof” are used, disaster came to the Cross Mountain Mine in 1911.

On December 9, a portion of the roof collapsed inside of the mine and apparently freed a pocket of methane gas. A miner carrying a lamp with an open flame who had gone to check on the roof collapse touched off the initial explosion. And utter devastation followed.

Reminders of the tragedy linger today in the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains. Some of the reminders are tombstones, some arranged in concentric circles around a central monument in one hillside cemetery, while others are scattered in the Briceville Church Cemetery. Inscriptions carved into markers include the poignant farewell message that 22-year-old miner Eugene Ault scrawled on barricade boards as he slowly suffocated: "I guess I have come to die. Air is not good now. Well, all be good and I aim to pray to God to save me and all of you."

The tragedy left other legacies, too, including rescue techniques that saved many lives in the future. In addition, the phrase "canary in a coal mine" originated in Briceville. For the first time, rescuers carried the caged birds into the Cross Mountain Mine as an early-warning system to alert them to changes in air quality. The explosion had rendered much of the air inside the mine deadly with afterdamp, the asphyxiating mix of toxic gases. According to an article in a 1912 issue of Popular Mechanics, "As long as the birds remained cheerful and hopped about in their cages, it was known that all was well with the surrounding atmosphere. But suddenly when the birds began to droop and gasp for breath it was realized that the traces of the deadly 'afterdamp' were present and the unmasked volunteers with no oxygen equipment had reached the place for them to stop. The canary birds drew the line of safety."

More importantly, it was the use of oxygen equipment that was first used at Briceville that became essential to future rescue efforts. The Cross Mountain Mine explosion was the first time that the U.S. Bureau of Mines, which was created 1910, mounted a full-scale rescue effort. Staff members from the Knoxville office arrived hours after receiving word of the disaster. Those rescuers used self-contained breathing apparatus as they combed the dark shafts of the mine, looking for survivors. Almost miraculously, five miners were found alive behind a barricade they erected far inside the mine 58 hours after the explosion. By that time, everyone had given up hope and the stories of the rescued miners were plastered across the front page of newspapers across the country.

And there were strange stories connected to the disaster as well...

The Cross Mountain Mine disaster occurred less than a decade after another nearby coal mine tragedy. That one was inside of the Fraterville Mine, located just a mile away, and it occurred in May 1902. Both mine explosions occurred at the same time – 7:20 a.m., or just shortly after the miners reported for work. At Cross Mountain, though, many men were spared by luck. The normal workforce was 125 miners, but only 89 went inside that morning.

One of them, Hugh Larue, claimed to be spared by a dream. His wife, who had a nightmare the night before of "scores of miners with their heads blown off," refused to make him lunch. Unsettled by her recounting of the nightmare, he stayed home that day.

Colonel Isaac Williams, a teenager at the time, had been barred from working on the day of the disaster. He had been forbidden to enter the mine because he'd refused to cross a picket line a short time before. It turned out to be a decision that saved his life. Williams did assist in the rescue effort, though, going deep into the mine to retrieve the bodies of his friends and co-workers. As he walked along the railroad tracks toward the mine, he later said that “every house along the way echoed with the cries of widows and children."

The man who led a rescue effort in the Fraterville Mine, Phillip Francis, also headed an effort at Cross Mountain. When he arrived at the mine, he found the same sorrowful scene awaiting him – scores of women and children, weeping and in great distress. When the initial plume of dust and smoke had risen over the town, they had flocked to the entrance to the mine, fearing the worst.

As the men from the Bureau of Mines worked to pump the poisonous gases from the mine, rescue workers edged through the darkness, hoping for a miracle. More than two days after the explosion, rescuers found a door in the mine with instructions on where one group of miners had gone. Following directions, they located a barricade, tore it down and found the miners huddled inside.

One of the miners was a man named William Henderson. The first thing that he asked for when rescue workers found him was tobacco for his pipe. He could survive without food and water, he told them, but it about killed him because he didn't have any tobacco.

REDUCED TO ASHES

The Final Curtain at the Brooklyn Theater

On December 5, 1876, a crowd of excited theater goers packed into the Brooklyn Theater in New York City to see a heldover show called “The Two Orphans.” When the curtain rose for the final act, no one had any idea that it really was the final act, or that in less than 30 minutes, nearly 300 of them would be dead.

Built on the site of the old St. John’s Episcopal Church, the Brooklyn Theatre opened its doors on October 2, 1871. The theater was intended to be one of the premier production houses in the sister cities: Brooklyn and New York. Within a short time, it became highly respected within the legitimate theater. The structure, which seated 1,600 patrons, was an L-shaped building on the corner of Washington and Johnson streets, just one block from the former Brooklyn City Hall. The Dieter Hotel was tucked into the “crook” between the two wings of the theater. The larger of the wings housed the proscenium theater with the rear stage wall fronting onto Johnson Street. Included in the proscenium theatre wing was the auditorium seating area, the stage, dressing rooms and storage for scene decorations, flats, furniture and props. To accommodate bringing in and removing large scenery flats and props, there were 20-foot-wide scene doors opening onto Johnson Street. The stage doors, located on the same side as the scene doors, were smaller but still wide enough to allow people carrying large loads to enter with ease. Though these doors were readily accessible to the stage, they were used solely for production purposes and never available to the general public.

As “The Two Orphans” was nearing the end of its run, materials for the next two productions were already being stored at the theater. The backstage area, usually fairly open and spacious, was now packed with stored items. These extra materials made it difficult for actors and support personnel to navigate backstage and in the wings. The managers ordered that the fire buckets filled with water be removed, so people would not knock them over and spill them while trying to maneuver around all the extra set pieces. The additional flats were piled up against the back wall, blocking the fire hose apparatus.

The smaller wing, fronting on Washington Street, was the public face of the Brooklyn Theatre. Here were the public street entrances, the main and secondary box offices for ticket sales, the lobby and the staircases leading to the two balconies. The production offices were located on the upper floors of this wing.

Each of the theater’s three seating levels had its own special designation and commanded different ticket prices accordingly. There were six hundred floor-level seats in two sections known as “parquet” and “parquet circle.” Parquet circle seats were the best of the floor seats and tickets sold for a dollar fifty. Parquet seating was very close to the stage and considered to be less desirable so the cost was lower at seventy-five cents. The lower balcony, known as “dress circle.” contained 550 seats and tickets sold for one dollar. The “family circle,” made up the upper balcony and seated 450 patrons. These seats were farthest from the stage and nearest the ceiling so tickets were just fifty cents. The most choice and elegant seating was in eight private boxes, four on each side of the stage. Each box held up to six seats at a premium ticket cost of ten dollars.

The theater’s architect, Thomas R. Jackson, was very conscience of safety. He designed the structure so that it could be completely emptied within five minutes in case of emergency, even though there were no external fire escapes. In addition to the public entrances and the large scene and stage doors, he built three special exits into the long wall that made up the far side of the seating auditorium at ground level. These were large six-foot-wide double doors opening onto Flood’s Alley, which in turn led to Washington Street. One set was near the rear corner, the second in the center of the wall and the third just in front of the stage. Although these doors were kept locked to thwart intended gate crashers, the ushers had keys so they could be opened easily and quickly.

The staircases were also designed for ease and safety. The main flight from the dress circle on the first balcony was ten feet wide and opened into the box office lobby. There was also a narrow emergency staircase on the opposite side of the balcony that lead to the Flood’s Alley exit nearest the stage.

The family circle had a different design than the parquet and dress circles on the two lower levels. It had only one exit staircase leading from the upper balcony. Though it was a generous width at nearly seven feet, guests still needed to traverse two full flights separated by a long corridor. As was the custom of the day, the theater’s family circle was viewed much as the steerage on a ship. Third class ticket holders were basically third class citizens. They had a separate entrance, separate box office and a separate set of stairs, so they could not mingle or interact with those patrons in dress circle or parquet.

On that fateful night in December 1876, there were nearly 1,200 people inside the Brooklyn Theatre including over a hundred theater employees and members of the acting company. The house manager reported that they had sold approximately 250 tickets for parquet and parquet circle, 360 tickets for dress circle and 400 for family circle. Not quite a packed house, but still, a very sizable crowd for a frigid Tuesday night.

The lighting for the body of the theater was provided by gaslights. The stage itself was lighted with gas-lit border lights equipped with reflectors. These lights were ignited by an electric spark and the level of light from each was controlled by regulating the gas flow. To ensure that these “open-flame” lights didn’t ignite drops, props, furniture or curtains, they were covered with a protective wire frame, intended to keep objects at least a foot away from the flame.

The fifth and final act of “The Two Orphans” involved a major setting change. This act was to take place inside an old, derelict boathouse, poor Louise’s family home. First, the drop and borders from the previous scene were raised into the fly space and the new set moved onto center stage. The set was a simple wooden frame draped with dark brown painted canvas. There was little in the way of set pieces, just a pallet of straw in the center of the “boat house.”

It was just past 11:00 p.m. on December 5. The border drop from the previous scene had been raised and the stage crew was preparing the stage for the boathouse scene. Shortly before the curtain was to rise, stage manager J. W. Thorpe noticed that a border that had just been raised into the fly space had a broken frame corner and seemed to be hanging down at an angle, as if it had snagged on something. More importantly, he saw a small fire, not much larger than a fist, burning in the torn corner. Apparently the drop had gotten caught on the protective wire cage over one of the boarder gaslights and had ignited.

Kate Claxton, star of the show, had taken her place on stage and was lying on her back upon the straw pallet. Also on stage were two other actors, Henry Murdock and J. B. Studley. Waiting in the wings for their entrance cues were Mary Ann Farren and Claude Burroughs. Everyone had taken their places. Everything was ready to go. The audience was waiting.

Thorpe was unable to get to the fire hose that was behind the stored flats on the back wall and the fire buckets had been removed. He thought that the fire could be easily extinguished, and not wanting to disrupt the play, he directed two nearby carpenters to put the fire out and for the curtain to be raised for the final act.

Waiting to start the scene, Kate heard a rumbling sound “as if the roof were coming down” as the two carpenters, armed with long poles, were attempting to beat the fire out over their heads. Kate, looking up as she lay on her bed of straw, could see sparks floating down from the flies. But the curtain went up and she began the scene, delivering her first few lines without hesitation. As she lay there, Lillian Cleaves knelt just behind her on the other side of the canvas, out of sight of the audience, and whispered, “Save yourself, for God’s sake! I am running now!”

More sparks and tongues of flame drifted down and were now in full view of the audience. Mary Ann Farren came on stage and knelt next to Kate, as if she were playing her roll, but instead whispered that the fire was steadily gaining. The audience, seeing the smoke and flames jumped up and began to lunge about as panic overtook them. A few, who were seated closest, tried to crawl up onto the stage. J.B. Studley, one of the actors on stage, tried to take command of the situation by addressing the audience directly. He stepped to the edge of the stage and shouted out at them that, “The play will go on and the fire will be put out. Be quiet. Get back in your seats.” The crowd began to quiet and some returned to their seats.

Kate, in a further attempt to quiet the crowd, stepped forward and tried to tell the audience that the fire was part of the play and to remain calm. Within seconds, it became apparent that this could not be true as sparks continued to rain down. As she spoke her last words, a burning piece of wood fell to the stage at her feet and all attempts to calm the crowd were abandoned and panic took over, on the stage and in the audience. Most of those in the stage area made their way to the large stage doors and out to safety, a route blocked from audience members by the growing fire.

As the crowd attempted to flee en masse, head usher Thomas Rochford was able to unlock the emergency exit onto Flood’s Alley at the rear of the floor seating area. Audience members in the parquet and parquet circle easily found their way out through that exit or to the Washington Street foyer. However, when Rochford opened the rear exit door, a rush of fresh air reinvigorated the fire and it rushed towards the back of the auditorium and up toward the balconies.

The story was quite different on the dress circle level. Almost no one knew of the emergency stairs on the opposite wall from the main staircase. In a panic, people will nearly always try to exit the same way they entered. And so, those in the dress circle all headed toward the main staircase that would take them directly into the Washington Street lobby and then out into the street. This should have been a simple process, but for the panic. As the frenzied crowd rushed toward the stairs, it quickly became jammed. Some stumbled and fell, and others piled on top of them. Feet were tangled up in the balusters. Still others pulled and clawed at those in front, trying to climb over the mass to get to safety. Escape became next to impossible.

Fortunately for these poor trapped individuals, the First Precinct Police Station was just next door so assistance was quickly at hand. Several police officers and theater employees, working at the bottom of the stairs, were able to untangle the crowd as the crush pushed them down toward the exit. Nearly everyone from the dress circle eventually made it out of the building. Almost all of their injuries stemmed from falls or the massive crush, rather than from the fire.

An anonymous witness described the scene in the dress circle balcony for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “With few exceptions, the audience in the orchestra [floor seats] rushed headlong toward the doors. Those in the dress circle followed suit, and the most fatal and appalling evils resulted. Bereft of calmness and self possession...the panic stricken throng dived headlong forward, using brute force to escape the disaster which was still comparatively distant, and which was only converted from an ordinary accident into an awful calamity by that very ruthless and reckless haste. The weaker went down before the charge of the stronger, and women and children were the sufferers, as usual. In the body of the theater and in the corridor scores were crushed and jammed almost to death, and many were thrown to the floor and trampled on.”

In the family circle, conditions were far worse. The seating area with the most people had the poorest evacuation possibilities. Within seconds, all 400 of the family circle patrons moved toward their only exit. As in the dress circle, the stairs became immediately jammed with bodies packed in so tightly that almost no movement was possible. Down below, the fire was raging, sending heat and smoke toward the ceiling where it collected in the upper balcony. In a short time, those who were trapped up next to the ceiling began to collapse, unable to breathe in the thickening smoke and hot gasses.

In the Washington Street lobby, District Engineer Farley and fireman Cain along with several policemen and theater janitor Mike Sweeny, had finally succeeded in clearing the dress circle stairs. They made their way up to the dress circle balcony but found no signs of activity. They then opened a connecting door to the family circle stairs. Met with thick black smoke, they were unable to continue any further. They shouted up but got no response. They heard no human sound or movement upon the stairs. Believing that everyone who had been sitting in the family circle had already escaped, Farley ordered everyone out of the building. Within minutes of their evacuation, large cracks appeared in the theater wall along Johnson Street. Just under half an hour after the tiny fire was first spotted, bystanders heard a giant crash as the entire wall collapsed into the burning theater, just feet from where the fire had started.

It took only a matter of minutes for anyone arriving at the site to acknowledge that the building was lost. When Brooklyn Fire Department Chief Engineer Thomas Nevins took command just before 11:30 p.m., he understood that his job was not to save the theater, but to keep the fire from spreading to other buildings. The Dieter Hotel, nestled in the crook of the theater, was at the greatest risk. With its lower profile, the chance that floating embers and burning debris landing on the roof and setting it alight was very likely. Several other buildings in the general vicinity were also in jeopardy. Nevins ordered that fire-fighting apparatus be positioned throughout the area, on and around buildings most likely to catch and spread the fire. As for the Brooklyn Theatre, she would burn herself out without any possibility of being saved.

Several of those who had made their escape, found refuge in the police precinct next door. At some point in the night, Kate Claxton was found standing alone in the frigid street, still wearing only the thin, ragged costume of Louise, her character in the play. She seemed to be in a daze, not really aware of the chaos around her. After being led into the police station she sat quietly, only occasionally asking of the whereabouts of some of her fellow actors.

The fire raged into the night, the crowd of onlookers grew; some merely curious, others frantic with worry as they searched for friends and loved ones among the survivors. Despite the growing number of people inquiring about the missing, authorities believed that few, if any had been lost to the fire. A physical search had been done of the dress circle balcony and it was found to be empty. No one had been able to get into the family circle balcony but rescuers had found no evidence of anyone still up there. They believed they had every reason to be optimistic.

Uncontrolled until well after 1:00 a.m. when the Flood’s Alley wall collapsed, the fire began to burn down. At about 3:00 a.m., Chief Nevins made his first attempt to enter the building through the Johnson Street lobby into the vestibule but was forced back by heat and smoke. Eventually, he was able to enter the building to just inside the lobby doors where he found the body of a woman, sitting on the floor propped up against a wall. She was horribly disfigured and her legs had been largely burned away. Nevins exited the building with a new understanding that where there was one body, there would likely be many more. He kept his discovery to himself, fearing the crowd might storm the crumbling building.

No one entered the building again until well after 6:00 a.m. The fire was nearly out and nothing remained of the auditorium except for a very small portion of the vestibule (seating area) nearest the lobby doors. The entire structure had collapsed into the cellar. Chief Nevins decided it was time to take in a recovery party.

The first sight that greeted them was a mass of charred and tangled debris in the cellar toward the rear of the auditorium. As they descended into the rubble, they made a grim discovery. The tangle of debris was in reality a tangle of human corpses. They had fallen into the cellar when the family circle balcony and staircases collapsed. Though their bodies were horribly burned, they had fallen victim to the smoke and heat long before the flames had reached them.

News rose from the smoldering crater that as many as twenty people had perished. The search, and body removal continued but by 9:00 a.m. the number had risen to nearly seventy. Within two more hours, twenty more were added to the growing total. By early afternoon the true depth of the tragedy became apparent as the estimation surpassed two hundred.

It would take nearly three days to remove all the bodies from the building’s wreckage. Some had been scattered when the balcony collapsed and became tangled in the debris. The task was made particularly difficult by the extremely poor conditions of the remains. Recovery became problematic as many body parts disintegrated at the slightest touch. Some bodies simply fell apart when rescuers tried to lift them from the floor of the cellar.

The crowd around the ruins grew throughout the day. Worried, distraught, and sometimes frantic people wandered from person to person, officer to officer, imploring of anyone who would listed for information about some missing person. In several cases, the only reason someone might have been thought to have been at the theater was that they didn’t come home that night, didn’t appear for work the next morning, or simply hadn’t been seen since the previous evening.

The city morgue filled quickly. An unused market was found nearby on Adams Street for the overflow. In the end, the market floor provided the best location for the victim’s remains and shreds of clothing, jewelry and personal items that survived the inferno. Identification was going to be difficult as most faces were burned beyond recognition. In many cases, the damage from the fire was so great that even gender was not evident. The victims who were identified were largely done so by personal items found on or near the bodies.

With the large open market space of the temporary morgue, human remains, extracted from the theater, could be prepared and arranged for viewing in the hopes of possible identification. A steady flow of mourners passed through the office of Kings County Coroner Henry C. Simms, requesting passes to enter the morgue. As they moved up and down the rows of the dead, they were guided by an official because so many had collapsed or passed into fits as they saw something they recognized on a particular body. As each individual was identified, their body was removed to their home or that of a family member. This procedure ensured a fairly rapid and simple reduction in the mass of human bodies laid out upon the floor. Regrettably, it also ensured that mistakes in identification would surely be made as well.

Brooklyn fell into a period of mourning. Funerals were held all over the city. Several neighborhoods and organizations held memorial services for the victims of the fire. Prayer vigils and special church services and masses were performed for those who died and their friends and families.

Nearly 100 of those who lost their lives in the Brooklyn Theatre fire could not be identified. The City of Brooklyn secured a large plot in the Green-Wood Cemetery to use as a mass grave. A large arch-shaped common grave was dug for those who remained unidentified and for families who couldn’t afford to pay for private burials. One hundred and three people, in donated coffins trimmed in silver, were laid to rest in the common grave, arranged with their heads towards the center of the arch. Over two thousand mourners braved the bitter cold to attend the graveside service and mourn the victims. After two hours of speeches, ceremonies and music performed by a sixty- voice German choir, fresh soil was shoveled over the long lines of coffins creating a large burial mound topped with a floral crown and cross. Later, the mass grave was marked with a thirty-foot-tall granite memorial, engraved with a brief history of the disaster. The memorial, also purchased by the City of Brooklyn, was placed atop the mound.

The final number killed would fluctuate for several days. It was hard to determine how many complete bodies could be made up from the piles of arms, legs, heads and torsos, and impossible to account for the body parts that had burned completely away. Henry Simms, the Kings County Coroner announced the death toll as 293 on Friday, but later scaled that back to 283. The number engraved on the memorial marker erected in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery was 278. That number is by no means definitive however as researchers have estimated the true number is likely nearer to 300. Regardless of the final count, the horrific tragedy could not be denied, nor its impact on a stunned city.

Three years after the Brooklyn Theatre had been reduced to ashes, Haverly’s Theatre was built on the same site, but was torn down just eleven years later. The next structure was a simple office building, used by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle until it went defunct. The approximate site is now a lovely wooded park-like seating area just north of the New York Supreme Court Building. Sadly, there is no marker of any sort, recalling or commemorating the terrible tragedy that had taken place there.

For the first two days, while the recovery efforts were continuing, much of the work going on inside the ruin and guard duty around the crumbling structure was done by the Brooklyn Police Department. Many of these men had been working around the clock with very little rest. They were near exhaustion and there were few officers on their regular patrol of the city. It was noted in the Brooklyn Union that: “The city is comparatively uncovered, and if New York thieves should make raid it would, no doubt, be highly successful.”

One hundred members of the Thirteenth Regiment of the New York National Guard presented themselves to the Brooklyn Police Commissioner, offering their services to take over for the police officers, that they might get some rest and return to their regular duties protecting the city. The Fourteenth Regiment did likewise and it was determined that they would rotate duties every twelve hours until the work was completed. The Fourteenth Regiment would have the night shift, starting at 6:30 p.m.

Those long nights in the frigid December weather must have worn heavily on the men of the Fourteenth. At first, they kept busy, as there were still crowds of mourners, curiosity seekers and scavengers. Soon enough, the crowds began to thin down to almost nothing after the bodies had been removed and the novelty of the tragedy had worn off. The long, dark vigil had gradually become a quiet one. The men walked or stood their posts and chatted quietly when they had occasion to pass each other.

But the nights were not completely quiet. As the guardsmen spoke in hushed tones, their attention was on occasion called to the cellar floor, where they reported hearing the soft sound of a woman’s sobs. This would continue until someone would call down for the woman to come out; that it was dangerous, especially at night, and that no one was allowed inside. Two of the men went so far as to venture into the building to find and escort her safely out. They later described what they saw as the dark, shrouded shape of what they thought was a woman. She was walking through the debris, bent over and weeping, as if she were looking for something. She stopped here and there as if to peer into some cavity, then moved on. One of the men climbed toward her to entice her away from the danger, but she simply vanished as he got closer. They knew that there was no other way out and that she hadn’t gone past them. They left the cellar area frightened and confused, but wondering if a poor lost soul was left searching for someone she had gotten separated from on that terrible night. The mysterious apparition appeared two more times over the next week, then was seen no more.

This story is an excerpt by Rene Kruse from the book AND HELL FOLLOWED WITH IT by Troy Taylor and Rene Kruse. 

DEATH AT THE COCOANUT GROVE

The Horrors of America's Worst Nightclub Fire

On November 28, 1942, one of the worst nightclub fires in American history took place at the famed Cocoanut Grove in Boston. The most elegant club in the city, started in 1927 and taken over a few years later by wealthy gangsters, was destroyed in less than 15 minutes and the blaze claimed the lives of nearly 500 people – and left an eerie haunting behind. 

The Cocoanut Grove, named after the famed Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel, started out as a Boston restaurant turned speakeasy. Musician Mickey Alpert had conceived of an idea for a roaring twenties’-style nightclub for Boston. With hundreds of thousands in financing provided by California mobster and swindler Jack Berman (hiding out in Boston), Mickey turned a vacant building near the Boston Common, located in what is now Bay Village, into a fine eatery with top-notch entertainment. After several owners (all mob-connected), the floor space of the Cocoanut Grove was multiplied several times as adjacent buildings were acquired and added to the Grove’s original footprint. The design of the place was to reflect the tropical setting of Casablanca. The walls were lined with imitation leather and the ceilings were draped with thousands of yards of satin. Six pillars, three on each side of the dance floor, were designed to look like palm trees, with large paper palm fronds extending far out over the floor in a circular pattern. An elevated area called “the terrace” was inside the main dining room just off the foyer. Wrought iron railings had been installed along the edges of the terrace, which created a feeling of separation and maintained prime views of the floorshow for VIPs.

The dark basement was created as the Melody Lounge, an intimate area that was so successful that it had to be enlarged twice, finally ending up in an octagon shape that was roughly 35 by 18 feet, in the center of the lounge. This place was to be a bar, pure and simple. No floor show, no dancing and no fancy food. The only entertainment was a singer, playing the piano on a small revolving stage. The basement was also given an exotic feel. There was one soft light in the center of the room, aimed at the floor, and neon lined the underside of the bar. The only other illumination was from the tiny seven and one-half watt lights that twinkled out from the fronds of the imitation palm trees in the corners. The dingy walls were hidden by flimsy paneling and the ceiling was covered with nearly 2,000 square feet of dark blue satin over wooden slats. This was meant to give the customers a feeling of sitting beneath a star-filled night sky. The draped satin extended up the ceiling of the staircase leading from the Melody Lounge to the main floor. 

As the club was expanded, it was done without any concern about the design. No attention was paid to the original layouts of the different buildings the Grove had consumed; they just kept adding and adding. The result was a confusing maze of coat check rooms, dressing rooms, restrooms, service rooms, kitchens and store rooms connected to each other and the three large public rooms by winding and twisting corridors, and to the basement Melody Lounge by a single narrow stairway. Scant attention was paid to Boston’s fire codes either. Thanks to mob connections in the Building Department, licensing boards and elsewhere, the owners could pretty much do whatever they wanted. 

By 1942, shortly before it was reduced to ashes, the single-story Cocoanut Grove was an amalgam of six interconnected buildings, fronting on the south by Piedmont Street, on the north by Shawmut Street and Broadway Street on the east. The Grove’s original size had nearly tripled. There were three large public rooms with three bars, a dining room, a dance floor and a stage for the band. During fair weather, the roof above the dance floor could be electrically rolled back, revealing the night sky and allowing patrons to dance under the stars. The basement had been converted into the dark, intimate Melody Lounge. The newest expansion, The New Broadway Lounge, had opened only 11 days before the fire.

Saturdays were always packed at the Cocoanut Grove and November 28, 1942 was no exception. Legal occupancy was listed as 460 but on that evening, with extra tables and chairs covering every square foot of floor space, over 1,000 patrons were enjoying a night out at the Grove. Among the merrymakers was Buck Jones, the famed cowboy celebrity, star of more than 200 movies. In town promoting war bonds on a bond tour, he was having dinner with a group of fellow promoters. As a VIP, he was seated with his party on the terrace. 

In the Melody Lounge, people drifted back and forth between the basement and the dining room or the dance floor or the restrooms, but as the night went on, the lounge filled up with nearly 400 guests. In one corner, a sailor and his date were enjoying the privacy created by the dim lighting. As their passions heated up, or because the young woman grew shy, the sailor reached up and unscrewed the tiny light in the artificial palm tree over their heads. Goody Goodelle had just started playing the piano and singing Bing Crosby’s new hit, “White Christmas,” when head bartender John Bradley looked up and noticed that their corner was now pitch black. 

Annoyed with the sailor but too busy serving the customers lined up four deep around the bar, Bradley called out to Stanley Tomaszewski, a 16-year-old bar boy, and told him to get the light back on right away. Tomaszewski walked over to the corner and politely explained that it was dangerous having the light out and he had to get it re-lit. Unfortunately, the bulb had fallen completely out and it was far too dark for young Stanley to see the socket inside the tree. Striking a match, he found the socket and got the bulb back on. He blew out the match, dropped it to the floor and stepped on it to make sure it was out. 

As Tomaszewskiy returned to work, he heard someone shout that there was a fire in the top of the palm tree. John Bradley ran from behind the bar and together, the two young men pulled and batted at the tree attempting to put the fire out. As other employees ran to help by throwing pitchers of water on the tree, the scene became almost comedic and witnesses chuckled at their hapless attempts. As the burning fronds were finally pulled down, Bradley looked up in time to see the satin fabric above the tree start to smoke and then burn. A ball of fire erupted from the corner, feeding on the fabric-covered ceiling, and rapidly spread across the room heading for the open staircase. 

Don Lauer, a Marine private, jumped onto a chair and tried to use his pocket knife to cut the fabric down to stop the fire from spreading, but he was too late. In mere seconds, the entire ceiling was a sheet of blue and orange flame, dripping fire onto the frantic patrons below. Almost immediately, the crowd panicked as hair and clothing began to burn. The crowd moved toward the only exit they knew -- the narrow staircase -- and the fire did the same. As the fire reached the staircase, it continued on its path, burning away at the fabric ceiling over the stairs. The staircase quickly became jammed, as four hundred people tried to escape the inferno, not knowing that the fire was taking the same route, in search of the fresh oxygen on the main floor. 

Ruth and Hyman Strogoff were Wednesday and Saturday night regulars at the Melody Lounge. They spotted the “little fire” and deciding not to take their chances, headed toward the stairs. Ruth believed that she and Hyman were among the first to reach the foot of the stairs but by that time, the fire had spread and the crowd began a mass rush behind them. In their frenzy to escape, several people grabbed and pulled at Ruth and Hyman to get past them and Hyman went down. Though Ruth pulled hard on his arm, she was unable to get him up. He was held fast to the floor as screaming men and women trampled on him to get past, or by those who simply collapsed on top of him. Within a matter of seconds, there was a growing tangle of bodies at the bottom of the stairs. As Ruth’s hat and jacket caught fire, she was pushed up the stairs by the moving mass, after which she rolled on the floor to put her own fire out. Knowing there was nothing she could do for her husband and that he was likely already dead, she was forced to leave him behind. Before the night was over, hundreds of others would have to face the same terrible choice of having to leave loved ones behind that they might themselves survive.

Gunner’s Mate Matt Lane was farther back in the crowd. When he finally reached the bottom of the stairs, the way was completely blocked with bodies, some dying, some already dead. He jumped onto the railing and used it to pull himself along as he climbed over the others to make his escape. He had come to the Cocoanut Grove with his friend Don Lauer, who had tried to slice the fabric from the ceiling only moments before. He would never see Don alive again. 

The way to safety wasn’t easy. The frightened patrons had to make their way up a narrow flight of 15 steps, past the locked emergency exit at the top, then make a U-turn to the right and down a 10-foot hallway, then another right turn around an office and coat check room for 28 feet, then another right turn and 12 more feet across the foyer to the revolving door opening onto Piedmont Street. All of this with a fire raging over their heads and thick black smoke filling the air around them. 

The owners had ordered all the service and emergency exits to which the public had access to be locked while the club was open. This was intended to keep patrons from sneaking out without paying their check. 

Many terrified, confused people never made it out of the basement Melody Lounge. They were overcome by the thick choking smoke or by the heat resulting from the fire. They weren’t aware that there was an exit door in the back of the lounge, as it was disguised with the same paneling used on the walls. It would have taken them down a hallway, up three steps and to an outside exit. The exit door was partially blocked by a sewer pipe so it only opened about 18 inches. But none of that mattered. No one found the door so no one was able to escape that way. 

Two of the people who survived inside the Melody Lounge were Daniel Weiss, a bartender, and singer-pianist Goody Goodelle. They dowsed napkins with water and held them to their noses and mouths to breathe through and then lay on the floor until the fire had passed out of the room and up the stairs. They then crawled along the floor and into the kitchen, where they escaped through a barred window. The fire had been mainly limited to the ceiling so when firemen made their way down the steps to recover the bodies, they found much of the furniture was hardly damaged. The fire had moved on in little more than a minute or two. 

When Melody Lounge customers finally stumbled to the main entrance off the Piedmont Street foyer, only the first few were able to make their way through the revolving door before it was completely clogged by the crush of people behind them. They were unaware that there was a conventional exit door right next to the revolving door. Welansky had installed a coat check room in front of it, with a large wooden coat rack blocking the door from sight. It is questionable however, whether this door would have saved many lives as it swung inward and would have been forced shut by the crush of the crowd.

In a strange irony, at 10:15 p.m., while Stanley Tomaszeswky and John Bradley were trying to put out the small fire in the palm tree, the fire department was responding to an alarm for a car fire just three blocks from the Cocoanut Grove. It only took a few minutes to put out that small fire, and a firefighter noticed what he thought was smoke coming from the area of the Grove. As the firefighters headed toward the club to investigate, people started running toward them to report the fire. When they arrived, they found heavy black smoke pouring out of the building and patrons and employees scrambling out into the street. In short order, the fire chief on site ordered a third alarm to be issued, skipping the second alarm as he realized the scale of the disaster. A fourth alarm was issued at 10:24 p.m. and the fifth alarm went out at 11:02 p.m. By this time, the fire was largely extinguished and the departments responding to the fourth and fifth alarms were called for the rescue and recovery efforts.

While the fire department was assembling outside, the fire continued to rage through the club. 

As the fire arrived at the main floor in search of fresh oxygen and fuel, several hundred unsuspecting revelers were just beyond the foyer, not knowing that many of them would be dead within minutes, and the rest would be frantically searching for any way out of the blaze. Just as the fire entered the main public room, the lights went out, tumbling everyone into near total darkness, except for the firelight.

The dining area, dance floor, bandstand, and the Caricature Bar were all in the main public room. Customers complained that the tables and chairs had been packed in so tightly that they had to twist and turn and walk sideways just to get through the room to the dance floor. Tables were added along the side walls as well, some blocking emergency exits. 

Some heard the screams first, commenting that there must be a fight. Then they smelled the smoke. Then they saw the flames blast through the doorways and charge across the room. The fire was feeding off the fabric on the ceilings and walls. With the flames came extreme heat that seared flesh and lungs as people tried to breathe. The fire gave off carbon monoxide and toxins as the air filled with thick, acrid smoke, making it even harder to breath. The flames moved through the room so rapidly that many were overcome with heat or smoke before they even had a chance to leave their chairs. Some bodies were found burned beyond recognition while others were found next to their tables without any signs of injury. 

Movie star Buck Jones was one such victim. A popular story about Jones circulated after the fire. As the story went, he had escaped the fire but ran back into the building several times, carrying out injured victims until he collapsed on the sidewalk and was rushed to the hospital, where he died a short time later. In reality, Buck Jones was at the club that night having dinner, even though he would have preferred to be resting in his hotel room, nursing a bad head cold. Instead, he found himself sitting at a table on the terrace when the fire advanced across the room. He was rapidly overcome by the heat and smoke and fell to the floor next to his table. Firefighters found him where he had fallen, barely alive. The only accurate part of the story was that he was taken to the hospital where he died. 

It is well known to firefighters that unless directed otherwise, a panicked crowd will attempt to leave a building the same way they came in. The Cocoanut Grove had only two public entrances -- the revolving door in the main foyer on Piedmont Street and the exit leading from the New Broadway Lounge opening onto Broadway Street. This exit entailed a single, inward-swinging door that led into a small vestibule then to double doors opening onto the street. Most of the patrons had entered the club through the Piedmont entrance with only a single revolving door. These two exits were nearly a full city block apart.

Men and women who were able to run did so. They were desperate to find a way out -- any way out. And some of them did get out. All but twenty of the club’s employees survived the fire, largely because they knew where the hidden exits were and where windows would open. Some of the patrons were able to follow employees to safety. The rest were on their own -- lost in the dark.

As the Piedmont foyer continued to fill with people, bodies continued to pile up against the revolving door. Eventually, under the extreme pressure, the door mechanism gave way and collapsed outward. Nathan Greer saw the collapse and jumped forward onto the sidewalk. Sadly, a ferocious wall of fire followed him through the opening as a blast of fresh air rushed in from outside, burning up most of the people in or around the opening. 

A set of emergency doors was located along the Shawmut Street wall behind the terrace. These double doors were covered with wooden slatted doors and were blocked off with tables that were added to accommodate the large crowd. Even so, several people were able to find the doors. Each door was only twenty inches wide and the door on the right was bolted near the top of the frame, where no one could find the bolt in the dark. Joyce Spector witnessed the chaos in the dining room. “The men were the worst. Honest. There were men pushing and shoving to get out.” She was knocked down and started crawling across the floor, lungs burning, eyes stinging, until she felt fresh air on her face. She had found the Shawmut Street exit. As she struggled to get out someone outside pulled her through the door and “threw me across the sidewalk, and grabbed for more people inside. It seemed like an hour I lay there. I couldn’t tell. More people were pulled out and tossed down beside me.” Joyce survived her ordeal but her fiancé, Justin Morgan, did not. 

Charles and Peggy Disbrow found themselves descending the service stairway to the kitchen where they joined a group of people already there. After searching the kitchen in the dark, they found a small window above a counter that had been boarded up. Knocking the boards away, they saw that a pipe was blocking the opening, except for about eighteen inches. Still, most were able to climb through and into a blind alley behind an apartment building. Margaret Foley, sitting in her living room, was unaware of what was going on only a few feet from her home when a woman burst through her back door, ran through her apartment and out the front door. Stunned, Margaret watched as another person, then another, repeated the performance. She later estimated that at least fifty people had escaped through her home. 
Don Jeffers, also having made his way to the kitchen, dropped to the floor as the room filled with smoke. Crawling around trying to find a way out, he heard a voice in the darkness. Following the voice, he joined four other people hiding in the walk-in refrigerator. They waited there until the fire department entered the kitchen and escorted them out. 

Two more exits were located on the main floor but both proved useless. One was a service door located to the left of the stage platform. This door also opened inward but it, too, was locked. The other door was in the New Broadway Lounge, locked and well hidden behind a coat check room. 

The 250 or so customers enjoying themselves in the New Broadway Lounge remained blissfully unaware of the carnage that was taking place on the other side of the adjoining wall for several minutes. 

Meanwhile, the fire in the dining room was getting hotter. When it reached the velour-lined passageway into the Broadway Lounge, extreme heat built up a massive amount of pressure that blasted the flames and hot gasses down the short passage and into the lounge like a torch. That room did not contain the large amounts of flammable decorations that the other rooms had, but the pressure, hot gasses, and scorching temperatures created an environment that caused the fire to burn more completely than in any other area of the club. Twenty-five bodies, burned to blackened cinders, were found where they fell. Dozens of bodies were piled against the only unlocked exit in the room.

Next to the Broadway Street entrance, two large windows had been replaced by glass block. One man was able to break a small hole through the glass block and attempted to crawl out but became stuck. Firefighters found the man reaching partially through the hole but were unable to get him out. They doused him with water but in the end they had to watch helplessly as the man burned to death. 

A long wall on the Piedmont Street side of the building contained four large plate glass windows. These windows, if broken out would have provided an excellent escape route for those trapped in the dining room area. Unfortunately, they had been covered with wood panels and no one knew they were there. Experts estimate that if these windows had not been covered, hundreds could have been saved. 

Firefighters needed to get hoses into the building quickly to save anyone trapped by the fire. Early on, wherever they tried to break through, they were driven back by the extreme heat and thick black smoke. When they were finally able to enter, they went through the area where the revolving door had collapsed. They had to climb over a six-foot-high stack of bodies to get to the dining room area. By the time they were able to enter the foyer, the fire had nearly burned itself out.

Less than half an hour after it started, the fire was largely extinguished, inside and out. Rescuers now needed to clear the entrances. They pulled body after body from the stack blocking the doorway, piling them on the sidewalk in the cold November night. Police officer Elmer Brooks remembered rescuers lifting bodies and having arms and legs come off in their hands. 

Clearing the entrances had been a terrible job in itself, but nothing could have prepared them for the gruesome task that lay ahead. As they moved through the building, they found bodies everywhere. Some were piled up against locked doors, while others were by themselves. Some were horribly burned, while other were unmarked by flames. Some were found where they had been sitting when the fire started while others were in found in the far reaches of the club. Firefighter Winn Robbins saw a dead woman, propped up in one of the Grove’s phone booths, still holding a telephone receiver in her hand.

Firefighters, police officers and volunteer military men began removing the bodies, piling them on the sidewalks. Some of the victims were still alive but there wasn’t time to separate the living from the dead (except for badly charred bodies) so they were all loaded into ambulances and trucks and taken to area hospitals. Medical professionals triaged the victims as they arrived, sorting out the dead and determining the level of medical care required by the living. 

Everyone who died at the Cocoanut Grove, died as a result of the fire, but there were several causes of death. The most straightforward were those who were physically burned. Some died from smoke inhalation or carbon monoxide poisoning and still others died from internal burns - burned lungs and nasal passages from breathing the superheated air. Several bodies showed signs of being crushed by a mass of people pushing in on them, or at the bottom of a pile as people collapsed upon them. Even more disturbing was the number of people who had fallen and were trampled to death by the stampeding crowd. 

As they went about their work inside with stunned calm, outside it was rapidly becoming chaotic. The temperature was falling and the water on the cobblestones was making the roads icy. Fire hoses froze to the ground as smoldering bodies, living and dead, were doused with frigid water. Family members, friends and bystanders were pressing in on the building, forcing officials to form a human chain to stop people from entering the building to search for loved ones or to satisfy their curiosity. Unfortunately, some of the bodies piled on the sidewalk suffered the further indignity of being stripped of their money and jewelry as they lay dead or dying by ghouls in the crowds. 

Over the next few hours, nearly 450 fire victims were transported to hospitals. Massachusetts General Hospital received 114 of which 75 were already dead or died soon after. Of the 300 bodies to arrive at Boston City Hospital, 168 were dead on arrival and 36 more died within hours. Some were sent directly to temporary morgues but were found to be alive and transferred to hospitals; a few of those eventually made it home.

For several days, newspapers were filled with stories of those who lived and those who died. Eleanor Chiampa, only fifteen years old, was very excited to be there that evening. This was her first visit to the famous Cocoanut Grove and to top it off, she was sitting on the same terrace as movie star Buck Jones! Her big brother, home on leave from the war, had taken her to the Grove along with his wife and another couple. The two men were the only people from their party to survive. Eleanor lived for a few days in the Mass General Hospital before she became the youngest victim of the fire.

Married earlier that evening, John O’Neil and his bride, Claudia Nadeau O’Neil, had originally planned to celebrate their wedding at the Latin Quarter, another fashionable Boston nightclub. However, at the last minute, they decided to move the celebration to the Cocoanut Grove. Their marriage had lasted only a few hours as neither of them left the Grove alive. Their bodies were found in the dining room, next to those of their best man and maid of honor. 

Harold Thomas was in the main dining room and Thomas Sheehan, Jr. was in the New Broadway Lounge when the fire started. As people dashed madly about, each of them was knocked to the floor and were unable to get up as others fell on top of them. This likely saved their lives. They were shielded from the flames and heat by the layers of bodies above, and from the bottom of the piles, they were able to breathe the cleaner air near the floor. Both men walked away from the fire that night with only a few burns. 
Pvt. Harry T. Fitzgerald of the Army Air Corps, was home on leave from Florida. He had not been home for several months and his three older brothers were anxious to welcome him home and show him a good time. James, John and Wilfred Fitzgerald treated Harry to a night at the Cocoanut Grove. None of the four brothers or their dates survived the night. Their mother, a widow of twenty years, lost her entire family to the fire.

A few found interesting ways to save themselves. One young soldier reportedly urinated into a handful of napkins and placed them over his mouth and nose. Another young man found a container of ice cream to bury his burning face in as he searched for an exit. Both men survived the fire without injury to their lungs or throats. 

A party of ten, members of a family of funeral directors from a nearby town, were enjoying a night out, dining and dancing at the Grove. One of the couples decided not to stay for the second floor show, opting to see a program at a theatre just a few blocks away. When they returned, nearly their entire family had been wiped out. 

Two young couples were at the Grove to celebrate their wedding anniversaries. Helping them celebrate were 11 of their friends and family, including five brothers and sisters and their spouses. One member of their party had risen to walk to the Caricature Bar when he noticed the fire moving rapidly across the ceiling. He shouted for his group to follow him out of the room, but none of them did. He was the only one from the group of fifteen to survive. The others were found later, still at their table.

Coast Guardsman Clifford Johnson, who was at the Grove that night on a blind date, got out safely but went back into the inferno four times looking for his date. He wasn’t aware that she had already gotten out safely. He aided others in their escape until he finally collapsed onto the pavement with third degree burns over fifty percent of his body. No one had ever survived such severe burn injuries but Clifford became a medical miracle. Twenty-one months later, he was discharged from the hospital. In an ironic twist of fate, fourteen years later, back in his home state of Missouri, Clifford was killed when the car he was driving left the road, rolled over and burst into flames.

Francis and Grace Gatturna were waiting for the floorshow to begin when they smelled smoke. Francis grabbed Grace by the hand and attempted to pull her from the room. As they tried to make their way out, they became separated. Francis made it to safety but Grace did not. After Francis was dismissed from the hospital, he became very depressed, telling family members that he should have either saved his wife, or died with her. His family became worried and checked him back into the hospital. He seemed to be improving with the help of therapy when on January 9, 1943, he jumped through a closed hospital window to his death.

The last Cocoanut Grove victim died in the hospital on May 5, 1943.

By the time it was over, the fire had involved 187 firefighters, 26 engine companies, 5 ladder companies, 3 rescue companies, 1 water tower and countless volunteers. The property losses were in the hundreds of thousands. The cost in human suffering was immeasurable.

Just twelve hours after the fire was extinguished, Arthur Reilly, Boston’s Fire Commissioner, convened a series of public hearings to determine the cause of the fire and find who was to blame. More than 100 witnesses gave testimony, including several public officials and over 90 survivors. The results of the inquest revealed that club owner Barney Welansky manipulated local politicians to his advantage and cut corners, putting his customers at risk, to save a buck or make a buck. 

At the same time, the politicians and public officials were busy playing pass the buck. Everyone had a good story that seemed to be designed to leave the teller free of any blame or questionable activities. 
Lieutenant Frank Linney, an inspector for the fire department had inspected the Cocoanut Grove just eight days before the fire. His report gave new meaning to “cursory inspection.” The entire report took only one page. Linney passed every topic and made only two specific notations -- No flammable decorations and a sufficient number of exits. The testimony of the 93 survivors corrected Linney’s erroneous observations.

Perhaps the most bizarre testimony was in the form of an opinion offered by James Mooney, commissioner of the Boston Building Department. “I don’t believe a panicked crowd would get out even if there were no exterior walls. They would get entangled among themselves and not get out anyway.” Mooney’s department had allowed the New Broadway Lounge to open without the fusible fire door, no new fire exit, no final inspection and the only emergency exit blocked by a coat check room.

The only person who came forward and told the truth as he knew it, regardless of the implications, was 16-year-old Stanley Tomaszewski. He testified to exactly what happened just before the fire started. Tomaszewski had been vilified in the newspapers but he stood tall and told the truth about lighting the match near the paper cocoanut tree in the ill-fated Melody Lounge. He insisted that he had carefully blown out the match and stepped on it. In the end, he admitted that he believed that this was probably how the fire started. 

Fire Commissioner Reilly did everything he could to ease the strain on Tomaszewski and ease his fright. He praised him and described him as an honorable young man. The Boston Globe advanced the idea that the blame should not be placed on the shoulders of this fine young man, but rather on the heads of the corrupt officials. Even with high praise and reassurances supporting the shy young man, his life was threatened. For the next several months he was kept under protective guard in a Boston hotel. 

On New Year’s Eve, a Suffolk County Grand Jury handed down 10 indictments, carrying charges from neglect of duty to twenty counts of manslaughter. Barnett “Barney” Welansky and his brother, Jimmy, received the harshest charges. Indictments were distributed to such officials as Frank Linney and James Mooney. Also charged were interior designer Reuben Bodenhorn, and the construction contractor and construction foreman. Stanley Tomaszewski was officially exonerated of all blame.

Barney Welansky alone was found guilty on 19 counts of manslaughter and was sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison. Nearly three years into his sentence, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. Governor Tobin, mayor of Boston at the time of the fire, quietly pardoned Welansky. When he walked out of prison, Barney was a sick, bitter man. While speaking with reporters, he told them “If you were wrongfully convicted, framed, you’d feel you had a perfect right to be free. I only wish I had been at the fire and died with those others.” Welansky got his wish and died just nine weeks after being released from prison. 

Stanley Tomaszewski died in 1994 at the age of 68. He had gone to college, married, and raised three children and led a responsible life as a federal auditor. No matter what he did or how he lived, he was never able to escape the shadow of the tragedy. He had escaped the fire without injury but was terribly scarred just the same. For decades, he had been called “every bad name in the book” and had received threats and phone calls in the night. Shortly before he died, he said he had suffered enough and wished to finally be left alone.

The burned shell of the infamous Cocoanut Grove was finally demolished in September of 1945.

Today, the streets that used to box the Cocoanut Grove nightclub have been reconfigured to allow for the construction of the Boston Radisson Hotel and Theater Complex. The Grove’s original footprint has been swallowed up by the much larger hotel along with a tiny parking lot. The only physical reminder of what happened on the site is a small bronze plaque with the Cocoanut Grove’s floor plan. The plaque was prepared as a memorial by the Bay Village Neighborhood Association and embedded in the brick sidewalk next to the parking lot in 1993.

Though all other physical reminders of the Cocoanut Grove are now gone, there are other reminders that still linger. Hopefully, most of those who lost their lives have moved on in peace. So many lives were snuffed out before they could know what was happening; bodies were found still sitting where they had been sitting or collapsed where they had been standing when the smoke and fumes found them. It is considered by many that these unfortunate victims are still wandering the site, trying to find their way to safety, or maybe discover a friend or loved one. Several employees of the Boston Radisson Hotel might agree that they are. On a few occasions, people have witnessed strange appearances throughout the hotel. Disheveled and confused men or women, seeming to appear out of nowhere, wander past and disappear just as mysteriously. There have been other experiences reported in the hotel bar and in the kitchen, odd noises, flashes, and loud popping sounds, without any discernible cause.

The Stuart Street Playhouse, the Radisson’s theatre, is another location where fire victims make their presence known. On occasion, the quiet, shadowy form of a man can be seen passing a doorway or walking down an empty hall. When approached by employees, he fades away to nothing. Other phenomena include water -- unexplained flooding in different areas within the building and a singular water faucet in a restroom on the second floor that reportedly turns itself on, even when no one is in the room. On one occasion, employees entered the auditorium and found a seat completely soaked, with no explanation. Others have described hearing their names called while working in the theatre at night, with no one else around.

It seems that not all of those who stayed behind after the fire remained at the Cocoanut Grove. Another Boston location believed to be haunted by victims of the fire is Jacques Cabaret, just a few blocks away from where the tragedy occurred. Not everyone at Jacques is willing to discuss the ghostly happenings there, but one former bartender said that, “spooky stuff happened there all the time.” The most significant experience he had while working at the bar happened late one night when he was cleaning up after closing. He had left the bar area for a moment and when he returned, he saw bodies lying in long rows all across the floor. He turned to switch on the overhead lights and when he turned back, everything had returned to normal. 

The night of the fire, as bodies were pulled from the building, some were taken directly to hospitals while others were taken to a temporary morgue or to one of the designated mortuaries. Many who were believed to be still alive and taken to hospitals were already dead, and conversely, some of those taken to the morgue or mortuaries were still alive. A film distribution garage located near the Cocoanut Grove was set up as a temporary morgue on the night of the fire. The bodies were laid out side by side in rows on the tile floor to await identification and transportation. That garage is now known as Jacques Cabaret. 

There is a record of every person who was killed or injured in the Cocoanut Grove fire, but there will never be a complete list of everyone who was inside when it started. Some of the people who escaped the building unharmed, or with only minor injuries, left the scene and went home. In this case, lists didn’t matter. What bound these people together for the rest of their lives was the common experience. They went from joy and celebration to horror in a matter of seconds. Most of those who saved themselves lost someone dear. They had to contend with their own horrifying experience while simultaneously grieving their loss. They wondered at the randomness of who was taken and who was spared. And none of them ever forgot...

HEMINGWAY'S HURRICANE

The Florida Keys Hurricane of 1935

In the early days of September 1935, author Ernest Hemingway, who lived in Key West at the time, was making his way through the aftermath of the most devastating hurricane to ever impact the Florida Keys. Florida residents had lived through violent hurricanes before, but they had been nothing like this one. The storm, a Category 4 nightmare, packing winds of 140 to 150 miles per hour with gusts up to two hundred, struck the Keys, with terrifying force. Originating in the southeastern Bahamas, it gained velocity as it moved toward the Keys. It destroyed everything in its path, including buildings, vegetation, and much of Henry Flagler’s famed Florida East Coast Railroad, which connected most of the Keys to the Florida mainland. The storm surge measured as high as fifteen to twenty feet, swamping the islands with elevations of a foot or less.

Hemingway in Key West, 1935

According to the American Red Cross, at least 423 of them lost their lives in the storm. Officials believed that many more people disappeared, likely blown into the sea and drowned. Hundreds of the known casualties were veterans of World War I and other campaigns. Most of them were employed by the New Deal’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration as workers on U.S. Highway 1, which would later link the Florida mainland with Key West. The workers were newly arrived in the Keys and lived in bunkhouses and army tents. The veterans, along with vacationers and the locals, were unaware of the strength of the storm as it approached the islands. The torrential rains and driving winds prevented the local residents from being rescued.

Called by some historians “the storm of the century,” the 1935 Florida hurricane left a permanent mark on the Florida Keys and changed the fabric of the region forever. It not only destroyed Flagler’s railroad, which was the only way to get to Key West except by boat, it also created an eerie legend of a phantom train that still steams its way toward paradise.

The storm began to brew in the Caribbean on September 1. As it approached Andros Island in the Bahamas, less than one hundred miles from the American mainland, it was packing winds of about 75 miles per hour. Bulletins that were issued by the weather service suggested that by the following morning, the storm was likely to hit Havana, 100 miles south of Key West, and pass westward into the Gulf of Mexico. But, of course, nature is always unpredictable and no one had any idea that the relatively benign storm would, less than forty hours later, veer northward toward the Keys and become a Category 5 monster, devouring everything in its path.

Even if anyone had known where the hurricane was going next, little could be done about it. Even with the small population of the Keys, it would have taken at least 24 hours to evacuate the islands in those days. In 1935, weather experts had access to charts that detailed the workings of previous hurricanes, and where they were likely to appear, but they couldn’t say when the next one might appear – or where it might go when it did.

Much of what was known about hurricanes in those days came from the research of Father Benito Vines, a nineteenth century Jesuit priest who was one of the first meteorologists to specialize in hurricane forecasting. Father Vines had established a weather observatory in Havana and while he had little access to instruments, his predictions became so accurate that the locals came to believe that he had supernatural powers. As to what to do about a hurricane that was bearing down on you, though, Father Vines was as perplexed as everyone else. He suggested an appeal to a higher authority – in other words, pray.

Devastation in the Keys after the 1935 Hurricane

And when the people of Key West learned that a huge hurricane was coming in their direction, that’s exactly what they did. Believe it or not, it seemed to work. The island’s most famous resident, Ernest Hemingway, wrote, “… a little after two o’clock [the storm] backs into the west and by the law of circular storms you know the storm has passed over the Keys above us. Now the boat is sheltered by the sea wall and the breakwater and at five o’clock, the glass having been steady for an hour, you get back to the house. As you make your way in without a light you find a tree is down across the walk and a strange empty look in the front yard shows the big, old sapodilla tree is down too. You turn in. That’s what happens when one misses you.”

Whether by divine intervention or plain luck, Key West escaped the worst of it. But for the 1,000 or so residents and workers caught in the Middle Keys, their prayers apparently never made it through. The storm, this time swelled into a massive hurricane, slammed into the Middle and Upper Keys. Islamorada, Craig Key, Long Key, and Upper Matecumbe and Lower Matecumbe Keys suffered the worst. The locals who lived on these islands were hammered by the high winds and rain and lost everything as the seas washed over the low elevations and destroyed their homes. There was simply no escape from the storm.

The outlook was just as dire for the men working on the Overseas Highway. The “vets” as the highways workers had come to be called by the locals, were mostly World War I veterans who had marched on Washington a few years before, demanding payment of bonus money that had been promised by Congress but never delivered. Although President Hoover had dispersed the veterans with armed troops and tear gas, Franklin Roosevelt arranged employment for the men building the new highway across the Keys. He had done this with the best of intentions, never dreaming that he had sent most of them to their doom.

Veterans working on the new Florida highway were among the victims of the storm.

The biggest problem was that the workers were not being supervised by project engineers who knew anything about the Keys, but rather by officials from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, bureaucrats who had little knowledge of that they were getting themselves into. The three work camps that were established for the men at various points along the route were not the kind of sturdy, reinforced barracks that had been built by the Florida East Coast Railroad when the line was constructed years before. The highway workers had tents and flimsy temporary buildings that could be easily taken down and moved as the roadway progressed toward Key West. Certainly anyone with experience in the Keys would have been aware of the danger a hurricane posed, but there was no one with the necessary knowledge in charge and no contingency plan in place.

As the storm descended on the Keys, the tropic paradise became like a little piece of Hell. “You could see nothing. The winds are howling. And the rains are pounding. It was chaos,” a survivor named Bernard Russell later remembered. “It felt like eternity. It could have been thirty minutes. It could have been two hours. Time was nothing then.”

With evacuation by sea from the Keys impossible because of the storm, a last-ditch effort was made to try and save as many as the highways workers and residents as possible. A rescue train was sent from Homestead by the Florida East Coast Railway, the main transportation route linking the Keys to mainland Florida. With J.J. Haycraft in the engine of Old 447, he set off in the evening of September 1 to save as many people as he could. When he steamed away from the station and into the heart of the hurricane that night, he earned his rightful place in the colorful history of the Florida Keys.

The Florida East Coast Railway was developed by Henry Morrison Flagler, an American tycoon, real estate developer and John D. Rockefeller’s partner in Standard Oil. After taking his ailing wife to Florida for the climate in 1878, Flagler fell in love with the region. He began building hotels and a railroad at a time when Florida was a sparsely settled, tropical backwater. The new rail line ran down the east coast of the state, linking St. Augustine with Daytona and West Palm Beach. In 1894, Flagler constructed the Royal Poinciana Hotel and The Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, and Whitehall, his private, sixty-thousand-square-foot winter home. The development of these structures, along with the railroad line that reached them, established Palm Beach as a winter resort for the wealthy members of America's Gilded Age.

Henry Flagler

Palm Beach was meant to be the final point on the Flagler railroad, but during the winter of 1894-1895, central Florida was plagued with several hard freezes, during which the Miami area was unaffected. This caused Flagler to re-think his original plan to not continue the railroad south of Palm Beach. He continued to build, turning Miami into a boomtown and developing the Florida coast.

Flagler was widely praised for all of his projects, except for one. In 1905, he began what everyone considered his folly, a project doomed to fail: the extension of his railway to Key West. The Overseas Railway would become Flagler’s greatest challenge but he did not approach it lightly. Extending the railroad to Key West, 128 miles from the end of the Florida peninsula, was a solid business decision. He made his announcement about the railroad soon after the United States announced the construction of the Panama Canal. Key West, as America’s closest deep-water port to the canal, could not only take advantage of Cuban and Latin American trade, but the opening of the canal would allow significant trade possibilities with the West.

The construction of the railroad required many engineering innovations, as well as vast amounts of money and labor. At one time during the construction, 4,000 men were employed to lay the rails, pour the concrete and create the overpasses that took the railroad over vast expanses of water. During the seven years of construction, three hurricanes threatened to halt the project. Despite the many hardships, the final section of the Florida East Coast Railway was completed in 1912. On January 22, a proud Henry Flagler rode the first train into Key West, marking the completion of the railroad’s connection to Key West and the linkage by railway of the entire east coast of Florida.

The Stock Market Crash of 1929 and subsequent Great Depression were particularly hard on the Florida East Coast Railway, but it would be the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 that destroyed the Key West Extension. Unable to afford to rebuild the ruined sections, the roadbed and surviving bridges were sold to the state of Florida, which built the Overseas Highway to Key West, using much of the remaining railway infrastructure. Today, U.S. Highway 1, following Flagler’s dream, continues to provide the link between mainland Florida and Key West, America’s southernmost point. 

During Labor Day weekend of 1935, the Florida East Coast Railway was the only connection between the Keys and the mainland and there was little choice but to send a rescue train to bring back as many people as possible from the Upper Keys. It was nearing 8:00 p.m. when Old 447 approached the Islamorada station on Upper Matecumbe Key. There had been no power to the station lights or the approach signals for hours and with wind-whipped sheets of rain pelting the engine and waves sweeping over the seven-foot right-of-way, engineer J.J. Haycraft was traveling blind.

He was slow to stop when he approached the station. A group of refugees had gathered under the overhang of a cluster of buildings along the track but Haycraft feared that the station house, post office and warehouse were liable to come crashing down in the high wind. Despite the cries of those who feared he was leaving them behind, he ran the engine nearly a quarter mile past the station, finally coming to a stop at a point where the landmass of the island was the widest. He later told reporters that he believed if he had stopped at any other point, the train would have ended up at the bottom of the ocean.

Rain-soaked figures chased after him, dimly lit in the engine’s headlamp, fighting against the ferocious winds to get onto the train. Haycraft, with the train in reverse, watched as men, women and children struggled past his cab to the passenger cars, where his crew frantically pulled them aboard. For a few moments, Haycraft must have felt a glimmer of hope, that all of his efforts had been worthwhile, but then he felt a terrible rumbling under his feet and spotted a gigantic “wall of water” bearing down on the train.

As the hellish winds howled and the tidal surge rushed toward the train, Haycraft threw open the throttle in a desperate attempt to save those who were already on board. But the engine lurched forward only a few feet before it came to a sudden halt. The train’s conductor, J.F. Gamble, flung himself into the cab and blurted out the horrifying news --- one of the hundred-ton boxcars at the rear of the train had been knocked over by the wind and the waves, automatically locking the brakes on the entire train. There was no way to move as the huge wave advanced on them. Haycraft believed they were as good as dead.

The train, headed by Engine Old 447, was swept completely off the tracks.

As the water wall slammed down on the train, Haycraft felt a great lurch as the remainder of the eleven cars attached behind the engine toppled over. The linked cars went over sideways. The windows of the passenger cars shattered inward and the interiors were instantly filled with water. The scores of men, women and children inside, who thought they were safe, now found themselves trapped in what must have seemed like watery coffins. In the surging darkness, desperate parents groped for the children that had been torn from their arms. Panicked people flailed blindly against the water and a few did manage to escape from the cars through the broken windows. Ironically, most of them were swept out into the storm-tossed sea to die.

Engine 447, an old workhorse that had been built for duty and not for grace, was simply too heavy for the tidal surge to overturn. Haycraft and the crew in the cab, including conductor Gamble and fireman Will Walker, emerged alive from the battering of the giant waves. But for forty miles flanking that single, sixty-foot stretch of tracks where Engine 447 sat, the bed of the railroad had been completely obliterated. It was gone – as was everything else that had been in the path of the storm, including the station, the solidly built homes of the locals, and the nearby Long Key Fishing Camp. The islands had simply been wiped clean. Engine 447 was eventually returned to Homestead by way of a sea barge.

The Keys were a scene of total devastation. Survivors on the fringes of the storm told chilling tales of men disemboweled by sheets of metal roofing that had been torn loose in the wind, of skulls crushed by fifteen-pound rocks that were hurled through the air like pebbles. The darkness was often illuminated by flashes of “ground lightning,” a phenomenon generated by the wind lifting millions of bits of sand into the air, where they clashed and created eerie static charges.

Witnesses reported seeing an entire roof lift off a house on Windley Key. Moments later, the walls of the house collapsed, disappearing when hit by a tidal surge. Sofas, chairs, tables and household goods of all kinds churned away in the raging water, followed by a piano. This was strange enough but then the onlookers realized there was a desperate woman clinging to the piano. She was draped over it, clinging tightly to it as she rushed past at incredible speed. She was hurled two hundred yards inland before the wave crashed down against the railroad embankment. The massive piano fell onto the woman and crushed her underneath it.

The first doctor to arrive in the Matecumbes after the storm was G.C. Franklin of Coconut Grove. He discovered the bodies of 39 men in the first pile of debris that he encountered. Corpses were scattered everywhere, many of them swelling and decomposing in the heat.

A mind-boggling account of the hurricane’s aftermath described a victim who was found on the day after the storm. He was impaled by a two-by-four that had passed completely through him, just beneath his ribs and somehow missing his kidneys and surrounding organs. The man was still alive and appeared calm as a doctor prepared to remove the piece of wood. The doctor offered the man a shot of morphine to dull the pain but the man refused. He was sure the operation was going to kill him and he said that he would rather have two beers instead. He was given the beers and he ordered the doctor to pull out the board. The doctor yanked the timber out of the man’s body – and he died.

Victims of the hurricane at Lower Matecumbe Key

Ernest Hemingway, trapped in Key West by residual winds until the second morning after the storm, joined one of the first rescue parties to reach the Middle Keys. He later wrote a stunning article on what he found in New Masses magazine. Hemingway wrote, “When we reached Lower Matecumbe, there were bodies floating in the ferry slip. The brush was all brown as if autumn had come, but that was because all of the leaves had blown away. There was two feet of sand over the island where the sea had carried it and all the heavy bridge-building machines were on their sides. The island looked like the abandoned bed of a river where the sea had swept it.”

Soon, the rescue party found greater horrors: “The railroad embankment was gone and the men who cowered behind it were all gone with it. You could find them face down and face up in the mangroves… Then further on you found them high in the trees where the water had swept them.”

“On the other hand,” Hemingway also wrote, “there are no buzzards. Absolutely no buzzards. How’s that? Would you believe it? The wind killed all the buzzards and all the big winged birds like pelicans too. You could find them in the grass that’s washed along the fill.”

In a letter to his friend and editor, Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway presented the most disturbing things the rescue party found, in terms that would have made it impossible for any publication of the time to print: “Max, you can’t imagine it, two women, naked, tossed up into the trees by the water, swollen and stinking, their breasts as big as balloons, flies between their legs. Then, by figuring, you located where it is and recognize them as two very nice girls who ran a sandwich place and filling-station three miles from the ferry. We located sixty-nine bodies where no one had been able to get in. Indian Key swept absolutely clean, not a blade of grass, and high over the center of it were scattered live conchs that came in with the sea, crawfish, and dead morays. The whole bottom of the sea blew over it… we made five trips with provisions for survivors to different places and nothing but dead men to eat the grub…”

The official Red Cross death toll from the hurricane was four hundred and eight but most agreed that the official count was too low. The Islamorada coroner put the figure at 423 but the final tally will never be known. With an uncertain Keys census and scores of people being washed out to sea and vanishing without a trace, we’ll never know just how many residents and workers lost their lives in the storm. Some twenty years later, an Islamorada developer was digging out a rock pit when he unearthed three automobiles with out-of-state license plates dated 1935 – with the skeletons of their owners still inside. And to this day, those poking about on one of the hundreds of small, uninhabited islands in the region will still uncover remains suspected to be victims of “Hemingway’s Hurricane.”

Strange, haunting stories later began to be told about Islamorada and spectral memories of the 1935 Hurricane. One of the most frightening accounts involved sightings of a group of people that have been spotted wandering through the swamps and woods at night. Many locals believed these people were actually the spirits of those who perished in the storm.

For three weeks after the hurricane, the decomposing bodies of hundreds of victims were pulled from the swamps and creeks. Although the search was thorough, many bodies were never found, perhaps trapped under the roots of cypress trees or simply washed out to sea. To this day, government land workers and environmentalists will still find an occasional skeleton lodged in the swamp beds, a grim reminder of the storm. Eerily, though, there have been a number of reports of large groups of people trudging through the swamp at night. They are hunched over and slow, as if beaten down or injured. They always seem to disappear into a thicket – or simply vanish. The figures are always seen staggering to the north, as if trying to escape from the storm-wrecked Keys, and are perhaps re-living their final hours on earth.

And they are not only the ghosts of those who died in the Labor Day Hurricane. They also seem to seem to serve as a foretelling of future horror. Legend has it that they were seen several times just before Hurricane Andrew hit Homestead, Florida in 1992.  

And these shambling spirits are not the only phantoms that remain from the hurricane. According to numerous accounts, witnesses have also spotted a ghost train lumbering along railroad tracks that no longer exist. Most believe this is a ghostly re-enactment of the Engine 447 rescue train as it tried in vain to save the residents of Islamorada on the night of the hurricane.

The Key West Extension of the Florida East Coast Railway was never rebuilt after the storm but in the early 1940s, weird events began to be experienced along the old line. The sound of a steam engine and a train whistle could sometimes be heard later at night and occasionally, a headlight could be seen silently rolling by in the early hours of the morning. An old man once told of fishing near a railroad bridge and hearing a train whistle that was so loud that he had to hold his ears. He heard the rumble of the engine and actually felt the vibration of a train as it passed over the bridge – but there was nothing there. No train had passed over the bridge in years.