|
The afternoon of December 30, 1903
John Charles Galvin (1861–1906), a Chicago painting contractor, happened to be at the box office in the
vestibule at the Iroquois Theater when America's worst theater fire broke out.
Breaking glass and blockages
As he purchased tickets for the evening performance of
Mr. Bluebeard
John looked to his right through a bank of glass-paned doors
(positioned
between the vestibule and lobby, consisting of three sets of tri-panel doors nos. 10-16) at an expansive white
marble lobby flanked by impressive stairways.
Suddenly people burst through the
auditorium doors and swarmed toward the vestibule. Under normal conditions the
single unlocked door provided adequate egress but it was insufficient to
accommodate a sudden mass of seven hundred
terrified people.▼1
When John saw people running toward the vestibule, banging on the glass-paned doors,
he tried to open more doors but failed because the lock mechanisms were on the lobby
side of the door and he could not reach them. As was the case at several
doorways during the disaster, the audience pressing up against the door prevented
rescuers from unfastening and folding bi-fold doors. Crowd members at the
front of the mass recognized the problem but did not have megaphones in which to
shout to those at the rear, "Back up so the door can be opened!" Other volunteers soon joined him and
doors were broken open to permit faster evacuation.
The vestibule rescuers most important contribution was that once the doors were
open, they helped people regain their footing after tripping, disentangling webbed
piles of squirming humans, legs, arms, and ankle-length garments to keep the crowd
flowing through the doors.▼2 Within moments the main floor and lobby were emptied.
When the
hyperbolic headlines in his hometown newspaper
are disregarded, John told
his story forthrightly and with humility
As John looked into the empty lobby and walked away from the Iroquois, he might
have imagined sharing the story at New Years gatherings. In a letter to his
brother, later published in the
Chicago American and
Buffalo Evening Times
newspapers, and in the
Marshall Everett disaster book, he described having reassured the anxious people outside the theater
that they should look for their loved ones there in the milling crowd on the street,
telling them that the theater was empty and all were safe. He obviously did
not know how many had been in the auditorium and that only forty percent had passed
through the vestibule.
Painters as supermen
When John turned the corner from Randolph Street onto State St. and looked down Couch
Place alley, he was shocked to discover
another group of Chicago painters struggling
to save the lives of dozens more people while hundreds lay dead on the alley
floor and inside the theater. A backdraft had hurled a blast of flame into the
auditorium and up into the balconies. Occupants died at 3:50 pm, their
time pieces instantly
stopped when melted by the temperature of the fire blast from the backdraft.
Vestibule rescuers effort made a difference
Despite a somewhat anticlimactic finish, John's vestibule adventure was not
insignificant. After the backdraft blast, smoke billowed out of the auditorium,
suffocating
people in the
utility stairwell
and on interior stairways leading from the balcony and gallery. But for
the efforts of John and his fellow vestibule
rescuers, the lobby might have still been filled with main floor
occupants and the death toll could have been far higher.
|
