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On December 30, 1903, a group of teenage girls from the Buena Park and Sheridan Park
areas of Chicago, age twelve to fourteen, gathered at the city's
newest playhouse, the sumptuous Iroquois Theater on Randolph St.
They'd be returning to school after the weekend but a theater
excursion was a perfect way to stretch out the holiday and show
off blouses, combs and other fashion accessories they'd received
for Christmas. By all accounts, the Mr. Bluebeard
production was spectacular, filled with exotic costumes, a huge
cast, comics and dancers. As they took their seats in the
parquet, the girls would have looked around with curiosity and
excitement, perhaps noticing acquaintances, comparing hairstyles
and clothing, whispering and giggling.
Soon into the second act, in the middle of a dreamy moonlight number with sixteen
dancers performing, a stage curtain caught fire. Almost
instantly it spread to other curtains and scenery and within
minutes the stage was ablaze. The fire would spread to the
auditorium, killing nearly six hundred people, but most of the
deaths came from the balconies. The few fatalities on the
first floor came from injuries received when people from upper
floors jumped or fell upon them.
People seated on the first floor had no way of knowing what
was to come, however, and were as frightened as those in the
balconies. As burning
shards of drapery fabric began falling into the orchestra pit
and parquet, the exits quickly filled with crowds of people
waiting to escape into the lobby or out fire escape exits into
Couch Place alley behind the theater.
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Four of a party of six girls seated in the first-floor
parquet, escaped from the Iroquois
Theater through a fire escape exit out into Couch
Place alley behind the theater. Unlike
some other large parties of teenagers at the
Iroquois, these girls did not come from affluent
families and there were no fatalities in their party
thus their escape received
a single newspaper paragraph. The other two
girls in the party are unknown.
The known members of the group are:
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Twelve-year-old Hannah Gregg of 1028 or 1038 Sheridan Rd.*
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Fourteen-year-old Florence Lang and her sister,
thirteen-year-old May Lang, of Buena Park>
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Thirteen-year old Beatrice E. Moore, also of Buena Park.
Beatrice Moore (1890-1973)
Beatrice was the daughter of George P. and Anna
Riley Moore. She and her siblings were born in
Iowa and Nebraska. In 1911 she married Clark M. Hapeman,
with whom she had one child, a daughter. He worked as a traveling
salesman for Goodyear Tires. Though Beatrice
would later describe herself as a widow, she and
Clark legally separated in 1915 and he remarried. Beatrice
worked as a seamstress. In the 1930s she moved
in with her mother at a home in Bass Lake, Knox,
Indiana and in 1936 married William G Nicklas. At
the end of her life she moved to Gainesville, Florida
to be near her daughter.
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Florence Lang (1886-1974) and May "Bessie" Lang (1890-)
The Lang girls were the daughters of
dressmaker Rose and George Lang. Florence
became a nurse and May a cashier before their
marriages. It is thought that in 1910 Florence
married Dr. Clark R. Rominger, with whom she had
three children. The family settled in Iowa and
Florence returned to nursing after her children were
grown.
Hannah Gregg
Hannah may have been Mabelle Lucille
Greig, the adopted daughter of accountant Alexander
Greig and Hannah Moore Rattray Greig, who sometimes
went by her middle name, Lucille. Mabelle in
1912 married her music teacher, Chevalier G. La
Verde, reportedly an Italian noble, then in 1920
Fred R. Huber. Support for that identification
is limited to her mother being named Hannah, a
possible name confusion when speaking to the
newspaper reporter, the middle name Moore, possibly
suggesting a familial relationship to another girl
in the group, Beatrice Moore, that she had a serious
interest in music that might have played a role in
her being at the theater. In opposition is
that Mabelle was five years older than Hannah was
reported to have been, the Greig family did not live
on Sheridan Road 1902-1904 and a genealogy
researcher who has done much work on the Greig
family tree has not connected Mabelle to the
Iroquois Theater.
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Discrepancies and addendum
Hortense and Irene
Lange, unrelated, survived by escaping from the
balcony on a plank stretched across Couch Place
alley and
Herbert and Agnes Lange were fatalities in
another large party of teens at the Iroquois.
* Both street numbers were
reported and there were apartment houses at both
numbers in 1903, the one at 1028
Sheridan named The Exmoor. According to
Chicago city directories, a person with the last name
of Gregg did not live at either address in 1902-1904
but directories in those years oftentimes listed the
name of only the head of household for a given
address.
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