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The Iroquois Theatre was L-shaped with the Delaware building on the west,
Thompsons Restaurant on the east, Couch Place alley on the north and Randolph street on the south.
Sixty-one feet faced on Randolph and it was ninety-one feet deep. The ceiling
height in the entrance area was fifty-three feet. Couch place was
eighteen feet wide and surfaced in cobblestone.
A ten-story hotel or office building was
on the drawing boards for the sliver of land on Dearborn, behind the theater stage. Instead, it became the site of the Oliver Typewriter Building.
In the map (see link above) note the distance of morgues from the theater and one another. I imagine families traveling in horse-drawn carriages up to midnight
the night of the fire, and for several days after, in freezing cold temperatures — minus four to fifteen degrees — to
morgue after morgue, viewing hundreds of corpses in search
of loved ones. The day after the Iroquois fire temps climbed to thirty-two degrees.
At the 1915 Eastland capsizing disaster, resulting in a third more fatalities than from the Iroquois Theater,
an armory was set up as a primary morgue. Fewer morgues than in 1903, more advanced telephone systems and more first-day daylight hours, helped
Chicago deal with the larger number of victims. Cold was a contingency in the Iroquois disaster; at the Eastland shipwreck, summer temperatures on July 24, 1915
dropped ten degrees from the day before, to seventy-three degrees. It kept dropping for the next two days, to sixty-nine.
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