"Lest We Forget": Chicago's Awful Theater Horror — John Shaqi
"Lest We Forget": Chicago's Awful Theater HorrorEverett, Marshall
History
"Lest We Forget": Chicago's Awful Theater Horror
Everett, Marshall
Iroquois Theater, Chicago -- Fire, 1903; Theaters -- Fires and fire prevention
He started so he missed his footing and would have fallen had not a
policeman steadied him.
"She's alive, she's alive!" shouted the fireman. "Git out of the way,
there, out of the way, men," and he went dashing headlong out into the
open air and through the crowd to a drug store.
One child after another was taken from the heap and passed out to be
carried downstairs. Some were little boys in new suits, sadly torn, and
with their poor little faces wreathed in agony. On their foreheads was the
seal of death.
A big fireman came crawling from the heavy smoke of the inner balcony. He
carried a girl of 10 years in his arms. Her long, flaxen hair half covered
the pure white face.
A gray haired man with a gash on his head apparently had fallen down the
stairs. A woman's face bore the mark of a boot heel. A woman with a little
boy clasped tight in her arms was wedged into a corner. Her clothes were
almost torn from her, and her face was bruised. The child was unmarked, as
she had thrown her own body over his to protect him.
Out of the mass of bodies when the police began their work protruded one
slender little white hand, clinching a pair of pearl opera glasses, which
the little owner had tried to save, in spite of the fact that her own life
was being crushed out of her. Watches, pocketbooks and chatelaine bags
were scattered all through the pile. One man was detailed to make a bag
out of a rubber coat and take care of the property that was handed to him.
While the police were working so desperately at the fatal angle, another
detail of police and firemen were working on the third floor. At the main
entrance of the gallery lay another heap of bodies, and there was still
another at the angle of the head of the stairs leading to the floor below.
Here the sight was even worse than the terrible scene presented at the
landing of the first balcony.
The bodies on the landing were not burned. A jam had come there, and many
had been stamped under foot and either killed outright or left to
suffocate. Many of the bodies were almost stripped of clothing and bore
the marks of remorseless heels.
After these had been carried out, the firemen returned again and again
from the pitchy blackness of the smoke-filled galleries, dragging bodies,
burned sometimes beyond recognition.
NONE LEFT ALIVE IN GALLERY.
While now and then some one had been found alive in the other fatal angle,
no one was rescued by searchers in the top gallery. The bodies had to be
laid along the hall until the merchants in State street began sending
over blankets. Men from the streets came rushing up the stairs, bending
under the weight of the blankets they carried on their shoulders. Soon
they went back to the street again, this time carrying their blankets
weighed down with a charred body.
DEAD AND DYING CARRIED INTO NEARBY RESTAURANT BY SCORES.
The scenes in John R. Thompson's restaurant in Randolph street, adjoining
the theater, were ghastly beyond words.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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