When Captain John Kahl and the firefighters of Engine Company No. 15 broke into the six-story Hurst Building, they saw smoke coming from the wood-frame elevator shaft. Captain Kahl also noticed a layer of smoke spreading across the ceiling, which indicated a possible “flashover.” This happens when intense heat causes flammable material to produce gas that explodes into a ball of flame. The firefighters quickly left, and minutes later a ground-shaking explosion, perhaps caused by drums of gasoline stored in the building’s basement, shattered windows and scattered burning debris. The captain immediately turned in second and third alarms.
One problem for early-twentieth-century firefighters was the thicket of electric and telegraph wires strung above the narrow downtown streets. The wires made it hard to maneuver tall ladders. And debris falling from burning buildings snapped wires, which could electrocute firefighters on the ground. An hour after the fire began, a downed electric wire sent Fire Chief George Horton to the hospital.
The scene near the Hurst Building just a few minutes after the fire began. [LOC, USZ62-45622]
The district fire chief, August Emrich, and Baltimore’s 36-year-old mayor, Robert McLane, took command. “We’re in God’s Hands,” Chief Emrich said. “The winds are too much for us and there is not enough water in Baltimore to keep those flames from spreading.”
Downtown Baltimore engulfed in flames and smoke. [LOC, USZ62-45624]
The fire quickly engulfed seven blocks of warehouses and offices. As often happens in big fires, the intense heat created a firestorm. “Throughout the terrible contest which firemen and fire waged for supremacy,” wrote a New York Times reporter, “humanity was handicapped by a gale which carried burning brands far over the heads of the workers and beyond the reach of the hundreds of streams of water poured into the raging furnaces.”
The flames, the Times reported, “sent their fierce tongues 200 feet into the air, which filled the heavens first with a pall of black funereal smoke, and then with livid sheets of spark and lurid cinders.… Buildings sprang into living flame before fire touched them, and brick and stone and mortar crumbled like chalk. The atmosphere quivered, and in it, surrounded by fire, the firemen fought doggedly.”
The BCFD tried to stay in front of the fire, but the wind kept changing directions, sending firefighters scrambling from one side of downtown to another as they fought to keep the flames from invading surrounding residential neighborhoods.
Business owners and their employees hastily tried to save their important records by loading them into wagons and pushcarts. But workers in the Equitable Building didn’t see the need to remove records or themselves from their offices. They said their building was fireproof. Fortunately, officials persuaded them to leave before the heat shattered the windows and the Equitable’s interior burned like kindling.
The inferno attracted hundreds of spectators, who were described by a newspaper account: “Great multitudes of people line the streets, awestruck with the dazzling but grewsome panorama which is being enacted before their eyes.” To control the crowds, the governor called out one thousand Maryland National Guardsmen. But bystanders were orderly and hundreds helped firefighters by forming bucket brigades and by extinguishing firebrands.
Within an hour after the fire began, firefighters from Harrisburg, Wilmington, and other neighboring cities began to arrive. Firefighters from Washington, D.C.—about forty miles south of Baltimore—traveled by train and arrived first. One fireman recalled that as they pulled into Baltimore, “we knew then that we were heading for something big. I think we all got a little scared.”
The out-of-town firefighters had a hard time getting their equipment through streets crowded by onlookers and debris. Then they discovered their hoses didn’t fit Baltimore’s fire hydrants. They had to use strips of canvas to bind hose and hydrant couplings, which worked, but resulted in less water pressure.
Despite the equipment problems, bitter cold, and strong winds, “the great army of firefighters performed many daring feats in their desperate attempt to stay the flames,” the Times reported. “Many times they were driven out of close and hot places just as walls came toppling down.” But daring feats weren’t enough. By nightfall, seven hours after it started, the fire had razed 30 acres.
A damaged fire ladder wagon. [LOC, DIG-npcc-18724]
Mayor McLane decided to try the age-old technique of creating firebreaks. Explosive specialists put hundreds of sticks of dynamite inside the Schwab Bros. Building, the John Duer and Son Building, and the Armstrong Shoe Company. But the blasts didn’t topple the structures. They only made the fire worse by breaking windows in nearby buildings and scattering flaming debris.
The Times described the burning city as though it were a Fourth of July fireworks spectacle:
During all of these hours the pyrotechnic display has been magnificent and imposing beyond the power of [a] painter to depict … vast columns of seething flame are shooting skyward at varying points of the compass, and the firmament is one vast prismatic ocean of golden and silver hued sparks.
Late that night, the 30-mile-per-hour winds shifted and pushed the fire to the southeast. This shift spared City Hall and the courthouse, along with the important legal records they held, but it doomed part of the harbor’s two miles of wharves and warehouses. About two hundred oyster boats under sail, a reporter wrote, resembled “a flock of great white fowl as they swept down the harbor in a closely packed bunch” to escape the flames. After anchoring their boats safely in the outer harbor, the oystermen returned to help firefighters.
Three big Norwegian steamers loaded with tropical fruit weren’t as nimble. The fast-paced fire reached the wharf while the ships were still docked there. In the nick of time, two tugboats, the Oriole and the Meta, raced across the harbor, hitched their hawsers, which are thick ropes, to the steamers, and pulled them to safety.
The fire also trapped a fruit company president and his employees, who were removing business records from their warehouse. The men ran to the end of the wharf, thinking their only hope was to swim across the harbor. But the Oriole once again came to the rescue.
For a while, the flames threatened Federal Hill, a neighborhood south of the inner harbor. But Philadelphia and Baltimore firefighters held them back until the wind shifted again, pushing the fire toward the lumberyards and the Russian and Polish immigrant neighborhoods of East Baltimore.
On Monday morning, an army of 1,200 firefighters and 37 steam-powered fire engines battled the fire along Jones Falls, a 75-foot-wide foul-smelling stream dividing downtown from East Baltimore. “Again and again the terrible heat was driven from the burning district across Jones Falls and ignited buildings and lumber piles,” a newspaper reported. “Furious hand-to-hand fights occurred, which, fortunately for the residents of East Baltimore, were won by the firemen.… Had the fire gained a foothold in the east side lumber yards … nothing could have stopped the onslaught, and the departments would have been powerless to prevent damage as great as, if not greater than, that of the Chicago fire.”
By 5:00 P.M. on Monday, after thirty hours, the fight was over except for “overhauling” the debris to make sure no embers or hot spots could flare up again. The Times described the aftermath: “Where at Saturday’s close of business stood stately office structures, substantial buildings of business, and docks teeming with the shipping trade of the world there are now piles of broken brick and stone and tottering walls.”
After the fire, Baltimore residents toured the destruction. [LOC, USZ62-112694]
The fire sent some two hundred firefighters to the hospital suffering from burns, scalding, lacerations, and smoke inhalation. A fireman and two guardsmen caught pneumonia and died. The fire claimed another victim three months later. Under strain from the work of rebuilding the city, Baltimore’s young mayor killed himself.
A panorama of Baltimore’s downtown after the fire. [LOC, USZ62-120267]
The Great Baltimore Fire destroyed 86 city blocks and 1,526 buildings. It le
ft 35,000 people jobless. The architects and engineers who had designed the Equitable Building and the other supposedly fireproof buildings studied the charred skeletons. One expert insisted, “to say that the structure actually burned is, of course, foolish and manifestly incorrect because they are still standing.” Nonetheless, the planners returned to their drawing boards to try to design a truly fireproof building.
The Baltimore fire underscored the need to standardize firefighting equipment, especially hose couplings. According to one estimate, at the time there were over six hundred different sizes of fire-hose couplings used throughout the country. The National Fire Protection Association encouraged cities to adopt a standard-size hydrant coupling. But few cities wanted the expense of replacing their systems. One hundred years after the Baltimore fire, only 18 of the 48 largest U.S. cities had installed hydrants meeting NFPA standards.
5
FIRE ON THE WATER
NEW YORK, 1904
“There was never a happier party than we were when we boarded the boat Wednesday morning,” said Anna Weber, recalling her family laughing and talking the morning of June 15, before an excursion on the General Slocum.
Anna and her husband, two children, and six other relatives, all dressed in their best Sunday clothing, were joining thirteen hundred people for the St. Mark’s Lutheran Church’s seventeenth annual Sunday school excursion to Long Island. Many of these people attended St. Mark’s and lived nearby in a small, close-knit German immigrant neighborhood on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
The General Slocum, a popular excursion boat owned by the Knickerbocker Steamship Company, was a white pine and oak vessel three stories tall and 250 feet long. It had three decks—the lower main deck, the middle promenade deck, and the open-air hurricane deck, a nautical term for a steamboat’s breezy top deck. In the middle of the ship, a pair of tall pale yellow smokestacks pointed skyward. And on each side, paddle wheels 35 feet in diameter pushed the ship through the water at a top speed of about 15 knots, or about 17 miles per hour.
The General Slocum was a popular New York excursion ship. [Mariners’ Museum]
After the Slocum pulled away from the Third Street dock, it steamed up the wide East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn. At the stern, or back, of the promenade deck, a seven-piece band led by George J. Maurer played popular German and American songs such as “Vienna Swallows” and “Swanee River.” The passengers, a third of whom were age twenty or younger, danced, explored the ship, or leaned on the wooden railing, waving at people onshore.
New York City schoolchildren similar to those who perished on the Slocum. [LOC, LC-DIG-ggbain-02319]
Since the Slocum was launched 13 years earlier, William Van Schaick had been its captain. In the pilothouse on the promenade deck, Captain Van Schaick watched his two pilots steer the vessel toward Hell Gate, where the river channel narrowed and the currents were treacherous. As the Slocum steamed ahead at top speed, a boy appeared in the pilothouse doorway and interrupted the captain’s concentration.
The 12-year-old passenger, Frank Perditsky, told the captain there was a fire on the lower deck. “Get the hell out of here and mind your own business!” Captain Van Schaick yelled, thinking this was a prank. The captain then turned his attention back to the river.
Meanwhile, a deckhand named John Coakley tried to appear calm as he searched for Ed Flanagan, the Slocum’s first mate and the second in command. A few minutes earlier, Coakley had been drinking a beer in the saloon, when another boy told him about the smoke. Coakley traced it to a storage room in the bow, or front, of the ship. When he opened the storage room’s door, a fire smoldering in hay from a packing crate leaped to life. Coakley, leaving the door open, hurried to find the first mate.
After just a couple of minutes, Flanagan, Coakley, and several other crewmen returned. By then, nourished by oxygen flowing through the open door, the flames had spread to the stairs. The men grabbed a hose connected to a standpipe, but for some reason, no water came out. This was their only attempt to put out the fire. The Slocum’s 22-man crew had never held fire drills or been trained for emergencies.
Passengers soon noticed something was wrong. “I saw smoke coming up a narrow gangway leading from the lower main deck,” said the Reverend George C. F. Haas, St. Mark’s pastor. He was with his wife, 13-year-old daughter, sister, sister-in-law, and 3-year-old nephew. “I thought at first that the smoke might be blowing that way from the galley, where I know they were preparing to cook the clam chowder, but the smoke speedily increased in volume and I soon realized that it was something more serious.”
This steamship beneath the Brooklyn Bridge on the East River appears to be the General Slocum. [LOC, USZ62-59950]
Other passengers were having too much fun to notice. Dozens of children and their mothers had gathered for ice cream on the lower main deck, just below the pilothouse. Suddenly, “there was a roar as though a cannon had been shot off,” recalled Clara Steur, one of the passengers, “and the entire bow of the boat was one sheet of flames.”
Then “the flames burst out right near us,” said 14-year-old John Tischner, who was eating ice cream with a friend. “Everybody seemed to be yelling ‘Fire!’ and I saw a lot of women with their hair and dresses burning jump into the river.”
Ten minutes after discovering the blaze, First Mate Flanagan reported it to the captain. Van Schaick later explained that he started down the stairs, but “the fire drove me back. It was sweeping up from below like a tornado.”
Nicholas Balser, who was with his wife, children, and several other relatives, said he “thought that the boat would put into shore at once, but it seemed fully five minutes or more before she swung inshore. By this time, the scene was terrifying.”
Captain Van Schaick didn’t turn the Slocum toward shore, he later said, for fear of spreading the fire to the oil tanks and warehouses along the river. The captain decided to beach the ship a mile upriver, on North Brother Island. It was deserted except for Riverside Hospital, an isolated facility for people with typhoid, tuberculosis, and other infectious or contagious diseases. He estimated it would take three minutes to reach the island.
As the Slocum raced upriver, the headwind fanned the flames toward the stern. The steamship, like many wooden vessels, had been painted with linseed oil and turpentine to keep the wood from drying out, but these combustible liquids also made the wood burn faster.
“Sheets of flame followed the roiling clouds of smoke, and the fearful rush began to the sides of the boat,” said Joseph Halphusen, St. Mark’s sexton. “Women and children were thrown down and trampled on. The crew offered the passengers little help. It seemed to me that the crew of the boat lost their heads—they were undisciplined, and did not do what sane men would have done to stay the panic and restore order.”
The engineers kept shoveling coal into the ship’s steam boiler, while the captain and pilots stayed in the pilothouse. Everyone else was on their own.
Passengers who grabbed the ship’s five hundred Never-Sink life preservers soon discovered they were useless. John Kircher, who was not on the boat, related his wife’s account of what happened to their youngest daughter, Elsie. “Thinking the little girl would be perfectly safe with the preserver on, she lifted her to the rail and dropped her over the side. She waited for Elsie to come up, but the child never appeared. She had sunk as though a stone were tied to her.” The life preservers were old and rotten.
An artist’s depiction of the ship in flames. [Mariners’ Museum]
Several people tried to launch the ship’s six life rafts, each of which would hold twenty passengers. “Unclasping my knife,” Nicholas Balser said, “I slashed at the fastenings of the life rafts nearby. But they were secured by wire instead of rope.” The rafts had been wired tightly to the deck so they wouldn’t rattle during rough water or storms.
Few passengers could swim, but they leaped overboard anyway. “My wife and I stood together by the rail until we saw that the upper deck was about to fal
l upon us,” said the Reverend Haas. “We saw nothing of our little girl, who had been playing with other children. My sister stood near us. None of us could swim, but when we realized that it meant certain death to remain longer on the steamer we all jumped overboard together.”
The scene in the water, John Tischner remembered, was deadly, too. “Twenty would jump at once, and right on top of them twenty more would jump. Then there would be a skirmish of grabbing at heads and arms, and the fellows that could swim would be pulled down and had to fight their way up.”
The newspapers were filled with stories about the General Slocum tragedy. [The World, June 15, 1904]
The charred remains of the General Slocum. [LOC, USZ62-138405]
Ten-year-old Walter Mueller barely avoided drowning. “After papa tied the life preserver around me I jumped into the water. The life preserver was of no use for it broke right off me, and I thought I was going to drown. I grabbed a man’s neck and went under the water. When I came up again, I seized a woman by the hair and she scratched my face.” Walter let go, and as he was sinking, a man in a boat grabbed him.
Tugs, ferries, fireboats, and police boats chased the Slocum and pulled people from the river. Mothers and fathers flung their daughters and sons into the water, hoping they would be rescued or at least be spared from burning to death. One tugboat captain braved the flames long enough for parents to drop their children onto the tug’s deck. But to avoid catching fire, the tugboat had to pull away. The tug’s captain said he would never forget the pleas and screams of the people he left behind.
Just before the Slocum reached North Brother Island, the bulkheads—a ship’s walls—supporting the upper deck collapsed, spilling passengers into the flames below. The pilots tried to swing the boat around so its stern would be near shore. But the ship suddenly ran aground on submerged rocks. The bow, completely in flames, was just 20 feet from land, but the stern, where the surviving passengers were, was in deep water 270 feet from shore.
Fighting Fire! Page 3