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Firefighters at the Iroquois Theater tried using nets
below the fire escapes in Couch place but there was so
much dark smoke in the failing light that
jumpers couldn't see the net and the firemen
couldn't see the jumpers. Fire fighters would
also have been tripping over bodies of already
fallen victims.
The illustration below is from an interesting book on fire
fighting in the early 1900s,
Fighting a Fire by Thomas T. Hill.
Couch Place was only eighteen feet wide and flanked by six-story buildings
on the north and south sides. The smoke would have stuck around,
waiting for east-west wind gusts to happen along. Sunset was at 4:30 and
would have soon dropped behind buildings that faced Dearborn street.
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Browder Life Net (illustrated above)
Thomas F. Browder patented the Browder Life Net in 1887. I've been unable to
find statistics one way or the other but it sounds as though almost as many
people died from jumping into one of these as survived. In the years prior to
100-ft. aerial ladders, however, for people trapped in burning buildings,
a life net gave better odds than fire or concrete.
Unfortunately, fire nets were only marginally safe with
two- to six-story buildings and even at that height range
people sometimes landed on and injured firefighters,
or hit something else on the way down, such as light
fixtures, fire escapes or awnings. And some did
foolish things — like throwing possessions into the
net, then jumping on top of them. Or jumping in
groups, falling on one another and creating such a
heavy load that rescuers lost hold of the net. By the
1970s life nets were on their way out and today are
mostly the stuff of museums.
Probably taken the morning after the fire, on December 31, 1903, this
shot taken from the east end of Couch Place toward the west end that let out
onto Dearborn St., gives a better idea of how confined the alley was. At sunset
and with dark smoke pouring from windows and doors it would have been dark
indeed. The dark silhouetted object in the distance between the buildings
is a fire pumper sucking water from the basement at the Iroquois.
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