Keyword search
(Iroquois-specific results
will appear at bottom of
search list):
Note: If this tab has been open in your browser for hours
or days, a new search may bring an access error or unproductive results. When that happens, position the cursor in the
"Enhanced by Google" search box above, then refresh your screen
(F5 on PC, Cmd-R on Apple, 3-button symbol at top right of screen on Android or iphone) and
re-enter your search words.
A friendship between two German ex-pats resulted in one of the two best information
sources about architectural details at the Iroquois Theater.
They were Walther Wever, German consul in Chicago, and architect
Louis Guenzel, an 1892 immigrant. They shared a mutual
enthusiasm for cultivating an appreciation amongst Chicagoans
for all things German. On December 30, 1903, the pair passed the
Iroquois theater on foot on their way home from lunch, walking
on the opposite side of Randolph St., at the very moment
terrified theater-goers were pouring from the theater. Their
view of the theater entrance was blocked by street traffic, and
temperatures were near zero, so they walked on, unaware of the
fire until later when newsboys began shouting, "Extra! Extra!"
Curious
Upon learning of the Iroquois fire, consul Wever
phoned to commission an architectural
investigation for the German government. Reportedly
Wever felt certain Germany would want to know how
the fire started. Wever's reasoning was not
reported. Many nations sent telegrams of
condolence to Chicago
mayor Harrison,
but I've found no evidence of countries other than
Germany sending in private investigators. It appears
Wever initiated the commission on his own authority,
confident his government would agree with his
decision.
Other than their friendship, I've found nothing to
explain Wever's choice of Guenzel to conduct the
investigation. No evidence of Guenzel having fire or
theater construction expertise. Given a time machine
and a phone bug, it wouldn't surprise me to learn Guenzel didn't receive a dime or that the
investigation was his idea rather than Wever's as
reported. As a theater buff, reportedly with an
affinity for marketing, Guenzer had the opportunity
to study the worst theater fire in America's
history, including whatever was done wrong by a
competitor architect. He would not have been the
only person to use the fire as an opportunity.
Whatever his motivation, he didn't scrimp on effort.
Guenzel's investigation
Someone, possibly
Chicago mayor Carter Harrison, who granted access to another
investigator,
gave Guenzel full access to the Iroquois structure
nineteen hours after the fire, lasting for the next
several weeks. Unable to obtain blueprints (reason
unknown but possibly because he couldn't issue a
subpoena), he measured, drew, and photographed,
outlining detail probably collected nowhere else,
including an inventory of
all the doors at the Iroquois.
Since only a few photos appear in his report, I
suspect others have been lost, probably forever.
Guenzel was one of seven investigative entities to
tour the Iroquois, including Chicago municipal
authorities and fire insurance expert
John R. Freeman. The most useful information about the structure and
conditions at the Iroquois comes from Guenzel's and
Freeman's reports on their investigations.
Guenzel provided a German version for Wever in 1904 and forty-one
years later released an English version, naming it
Retrospects, but the
English version was produced in 1904 because he gave a
requested copy to one of the Iroquois
owners,
Will J. Davis or
Harry Powers, neither of
whom are apt to have been able to read German. Guenzel said the
owner returned it without comment. My
guess is that it was Harry Powers. Davis was
too deep in the they-killed-themselves-by
panicking-and-I-did-nothing-wrong-it-was-a-perfect-theater
bunker to have been curious about what Guenzel
found.
Walther Wever
Previously an attaché of the German
Embassies in Paris, Bucharest, and
Bulgaria, then consul in Rio de Janeiro,
Wever was appointed to the Chicago post
in July 1900, replacing Dr. Lettenbaur.
In 1907 Wever was promoted to Consul
General, one of only two German consuls
at that rank in the U.S. Reportedly, the
new title was a reward for his efforts
to encourage the study of the German
language and theater at the University
of Chicago and Northwestern. Wever's
wife and three children joined him in
the United States. He and Louis Guenzel
were members in 1907 of a club of
Chicagoans educated in Germany.
A distant cousin became chief of Germany's air force.
Louis Frederick Albert Gottlieb Guenzel▼1 (1860–1956 biographical info)
A native of Koslin, Prussia (then part of Germany;
since WWII part of Poland), Guenzel immigrated to
America in 1892 and went to work as a draftsman for
the Adler and
Sullivan architectural
firm. In 1894 he left A&S to partner first with
Harley Seymour Hibbard (1868–1957), in 1898 with
Arthur Hercz (1867–1941), and from 1912 to 1915
with
William E. Drummond,
formerly a draftsman for Frank Lloyd Wright. By 1912
Guenzel had married, perhaps putting him on a
more even keel with Drummond's reputation than he
could have managed prior to his marriage.
Reportedly, Guenzel focused on business and
marketing, freeing Drummond to concentrate on
design. You'll have to look elsewhere to determine
if Guenzel developed a distinctive style of his own.
One online source described his style as having
varied from Victorian to Art Nouveau, Prairie School
to Art Deco.
Among buildings credited specifically to Guenzel
(versus to the firm of Guenzel & Drummond):
Red Star Inn on Clark St. in Chicago, originally
named Zum Roten Stern ( Under the Red Star ), was
razed in 1970 when the site became part of
present-day's Carl Sandburg Village Complex.
Eitel / Maryland Hotel at 900 N. Rush St. at the
corner of Rush and Delaware, built in 1926, seventeen
stories, still standing, the address now 40
Delaware, converted to apartments and condos. Every
room had a bath and artificial ventilation. Guenzel pointed out to the newspaper that his design
incorporated roof-level penthouses in the
construction, eschewing the then more common Chicago
approach of building shacks on the roof.
The sixteen-story apartment building at 1100 N. La
Salle St., corner of Lasalle and W. Maple, was built
in 1930. In the 1970s, it was known as the Maple
Apartments Building. It is still standing, part of
contemporary Chicago's Gold Coast.
Apartment building 502 E. Chestnut into which he and
his bride moved in Feb 1909 when the structure was
newly completed. Louis and Alice were the eleventh
newlywed couple to move into the building. 4-story
brick.
His obituary credited Guenzel with the 1905 White
City College Inn, in White City Park, on Chicago's
south side, near the site of the 1893 Columbian
Exposition. The restaurant sat 2,500. The Guenzel &
Drummond firm was the architect of record.
Personality
In the biography accompanying his Iroquois report,
it is reported that Louis had a fiery personality.
That could mean he had a bad temper, was animated,
both, or something altogether different. He was
passionate about his hobbie,▼2 and beliefs,
especially about his German homeland, and as a
senior citizen, spoke out when something struck him
as wrong. At age eighty-five, still angry that no
guilty verdicts were returned for the Iroquois
Theater fire tragedy, he released the English
version of his Retrospects Iroquois report. At age
ninety, he penned a letter to the newspaper
describing an incident in which fire trucks were
unable to get close to the scene of an afternoon
fire because their access was blocked by cars left
in the street by thoughtless restaurant patrons.
That same year he self-published a 23-page booklet,
Medical Ethics and their Effect upon the Public.
I've not yet found a copy online, but it seems
probable the treatise did not praise the medical
profession.
Guenzel's Family
Louis was the son of German natives John and
Caroline Conradt Guenzel. It is possible that when
he came to America at age twenty-two in 1892,
leaving his parents behind in Germany, he did not
see them again before their deaths in 1894 and 1899.
By 1908, age forty-eight, successful enough to
afford a townhouse in the city and country home in
Glenco, Louis became engaged to marry. The year
before, he had designed a $75,000 home (just under
$2 million today) for wealthy lumberman and box
maker Herman Paepcke. Paepcke and Guenzel shared a
love for their German homeland (both were directors
of Guenzel's Germanistic Society), and Herman was
probably pleased to see his daughter Alice wooed by
a successful professional who also spoke German,
reportedly the language of Paepcke's household.
Louis and Alice Paepcke married in 1909, and their
son, Paul Walter Guenzel, was born in 1910.▼3
On September 28 1918, a Chicago sporting newspaper
named Collyer's Eye▼4 ran an article authored by J. Ashley Stevens
(likely pseudonym ▼5) asserting that in 1904 Germany had
obtained information from autopsies of Iroquois Theater victims
to learn how to make poison gas used in World War I.
I include the news story here for the sake of thoroughness and to make it easier to find should additional info turn up later.
The story in Collyer's Eye is the sole reference I found to the purported foreign intrigue. Seems like such a provocative
story would have had more legs than a centipede but perhaps newspaper editors in 1918 found it as peculiar as do I to find a sports
newspaper exposing an incidence of Chicago spies helping a future enemy.
The story went that immediately after the Iroquois fire, German
spy Captain
Karl Boy-ed sent Dr. Walther Wever, the German consul, architect Louis Guenzel, and an
unnamed chemist to Chicago to conduct a secret investigation
into the cause of instant death at the Iroquois Theater. In
April 1917, around the time the U.S. entered the war, when Frank
P. Illsley (1878–1964), formerly a car dealer and then an employee of the Chicago First
National Bank, was traveling in
Berlin, he spoke with a Swiss Federal Railway system official. Reportedly the official told Illsley
that Germany had thoroughly investigated the Iroquois Theater
fire with an eye to finding a poison gas to kill masses. I found
nothing to support or dismiss that Illsley traveled to Berlin or hob-knobbed with officials, domestically or abroad.
The most obvious flaw in the spy story is that Guenzel and Wever passed by the Iroquois Theater DURING the fire thus cannot have been sent by Germany to study fire victims.
One physician who
declined to be identified, who had been involved in the Iroquois
Theater disaster, swore on his life that no such autopsies were
done on Iroquois Theater victims. A Dr. John A. Christianson would at an unrelated
trial in 1922 claim to have performed about four hundred autopsies on Iroquois
victims but his testimony was dismissed because his expertise had not been
establish. (In 1907 he'd asserted that baldness was a sign of "insipient
insanity.") A respected doctor
and medical educator who in 1903 had been one of the staff
Chicago coroner's physicians, Dr. Otto W. Lewke (1866–1943),
said he had conducted autopsies on Iroquois victims and found
liquefied lungs such as were found in WWI victims exposed to poison gas.
All three men may have spoken truthfully to the best of their knowledge. Immediately after the
fire, faced with nearly six hundred bodies, bodies were released to relatives with
only cursory examination and Coroner Traeger ruled that asphyxiation was the universal cause of death. That was appropriate because there was no way to
know the precise cause of death simply by viewing a corpse. Did the person die at 3:50 pm when the fireball
reached the balconies? Or did the person die on the stairwell outside the auditorium at the bottom of a pile of other
people? Was the victim trampled before or after death? Even the
rudimentary forensic processes of 1903 could not be employed within at the death
scene; there were too many bodies.
Put yourself into the scene for a moment:
There are still isolated pockets of fire and smoldering materials in the auditorium that fire fighters need to put out so the
fire doesn't spread, so first responders can work safely. The most flammable objects inside the theater at that point are
the clothing and hair of victims. Bodies are piled everywhere, on the floors, slumped in seats, draped over railings,
filling doorways, outside in the alley, on the sidewalks in front of the theater. The auditorium is silent but for your fellow first responders, and an occasional moan or murmur from the piles
of bodies, telling you that there are people still alive at the bottom of the piles of
bodies. The voices are weak and you have to work quickly to remove the bodies
on top in hopes of saving the life of someone on the bottom. The only way to find the living is to remove the dead one body at a
time. There isn't space on the small floor area inside the balconies to lay out hundreds of bodies for examination.
(See topmost photo.)
Removing the bodies from the theater is no small task. Some have been cooked by the
high temperature of the fireball and when the bodies are handled, limbs and skin detach the way a chicken comes apart after hours in a slow
cooker. Yes, that's horrible but first responders at the scene spoke of the detachments
and curling skin.
Your lanterns cast barely enough light to keep from tripping on the dead.
Temperatures outside are below
zero and dropping; the structure's heat plant is inoperable. Hundreds of victim's family members are swarming in the streets surrounding
the theater, demanding entrance to find their loved ones. Moving bodies out of that hell hole is job
#1. Identification and establishing cause-of-death will have to come later.
As a physician for the coroner's office, Dr. Lewke, would have been assigned
to autopsy the new victims who died several weeks after the fire, by which time so-called "liquid lungs," pulmonary edema, would have
become advanced.
In summary, the Eye story wandered outside the sports lane occupied by their subscribers to present an
implausible story that attracted little attention. Dr. Haber, inventor of Germany's poison gas in WWI, did not need reports about fire
victims in Chicago to develop Haber's rule.
Discrepancies and addendum
1 Sometimes misspelled as Genzel or Guensel.
2. Louis Guenzel sang tenor in various amateur church
and club choral groups in Chicago in the 1890s,
founding Chicago's short-lived Richard Wagner Club
(Sep-Dec 1893). The ambition of its one hundred
members was to cultivate an increased appreciation
for opera, particularly compositions by Richard
Wagner, via lectures and musical performances. The
group had high hopes for its future, going so far as
to incorporate. After its first concert in early
December 1893, however, a Chicago Tribune reviewer
remarked that in a quartet performance of Braham's
Gypsy Songs, club founder Guenzel's skill lagged
behind his energy. Ouch. The reviewer dubbed the
concert a fiasco worthy of a hail of lemons from
an audience less polite than those in America.
Guenzel's vocal enthusiasm thoroughly doused, the
Wager Club disappeared, and he later turned to his
heritage, founding the Germanistic Society of
Chicago. He retained his passion for opera
nonetheless and with his wife patronized Chicago
concerts for decades.
3. Paul's grandfather Herman's lumber company,
Chicago Mill and Lumber was hard hit by the
Depression but Herman's son, Louis Guenzel's
brother-in-law,
Walter Paepcke (founder
of the Aspen Institute think tank), used his
father's decimated lumber business as a base on
which to form a conglomerate of companies that grew
into the Container Corp. of America — in the 1940s
America's largest producer of paperboard containers,
it's remaining pieces today part of
WestRock. Paul worked for the company throughout his life,
eventually becoming treasurer and vice president of
the firm.
4. A weekly sports journal published in Chicago from 1915 to 1929, not to be confused with Colliers.
5. I checked newspapers, city directories and genealogy records without success. I wonder if J. Ashley Stevens could have been a pseudonym
of newspaper drama critic Ashton Stevens. He was working in Chicago at the time and the Ashley - Ashton name similarity give pause. If so,
perhaps the story was dismissed by Chicago newspaper editors who knew the identity of the reporter. Steven's reputation as a journalist was not in
1918 what it later became and he was, in any case, a drama critic, not an international or war correspondent.
Emma Geik died two days
before her wedding
John R. Freeman Theater
fire investigator
Chicago Building
Commissioner George D. Williams
Other discussions you might find interesting
irqconstruction
Story 2881
A note about sourcing. When this
project began, I failed to anticipate the day might come when a
more scholarly approach would be called for. When my
mistake was recognized I faced a decision: go back and spend years creating source lists for every page, or go
forward and try to cover more of the people and circumstances
involved in the disaster. Were I twenty years younger, I'd
have gone back, but in recognition that this project will end when I do, I chose to go forward.
These pages will provide enough information, it is hoped, to
provide subsequent researchers with additional information.
I would like to
hear from you if you have additional info about an Iroquois victim, or find an error,
and you're invited to visit the
comments page to share stories and observations about the Iroquois Theater fire.
