Building fires, and specifically theater fires, have always been a serious risk to urban spaces. On June 29, 1613, for example, the firing of an onstage cannon during a performance of Henry V set fire to the roof of the Globe Theatre, burning it to the ground. The Gilded Age’s rampantly poor building maintenance and serious overcrowding made structures particularly susceptible to fire and dangerous, however. William Paul Gerhard, an engineer with the British Fire Prevention Committee, stated in a report that by May 1897 there had been 1,115 recorded theater fires in Europe and America (since records had been kept); there were 460 theater fires across America and Europe just from 1800 to 1877. Gerhard claimed that the average life of a theater in the United States was only about thirteen years due to fire.
American journalists repeatedly demanded that immediate architectural reform was necessary. Structures did not have enough exits or extinguishing materials, and maintenance of those that existed was often neglected. “In yesterday’s Times,” one reporter noted in 1872, “we recorded no less than twelve fires which took place in twenty-four hours and three of them were very destructive.” The most precarious of all edifices were theaters, which packed in crowds night after night and were illuminated by many small flames or, eventually, vast amounts of newly developed electrical equipment.
The Chicago Times ran an enormous front-page story about a local theater fire in February 1875, with shocking subheads like BURNED ALIVE and HUNDREDS OF CHARRED AND DISTORTED CORPSES. It included horrifying details about patrons’ struggles to escape and their gruesome deaths. The article turned out to be completely made up, but it wasn’t a hoax. It was a cautionary tale, printed by the newspaper in hopes of raising awareness about poor fire-safety measures in public buildings, particularly entertainment venues—a lesson no one seemed ready to learn yet.
On December 5 of the following year the Brooklyn Theater went up in flames. One of the gaslights above the stage set the drop curtain of the stage on fire. Although the actors saw the blaze, they continued the performance of the melodrama The Two Orphans until someone in the auditorium cried out, “Fire!” The performers gathered by the footlights, imploring the crowd not to panic. Then someone opened the stage doors to allow an exit. A draft blew in and flames billowed. Screaming people struggled to exit, falling over the balcony, sliding down the stairs, piling on top of one another. At least 278 people perished. The fire marshal ordered a random sample of autopsies, all of which revealed death by suffocation. The head usher, Thomas Rochford, said that he’d previously seen the room empty in seven minutes easily. The building’s architect, G.L. Morse, insisted that people should have been able to evacuate in three.