Hearts Afire

by J. D Rawden

  In the evening the work was continued by the aid of calcium lights. It was thought best to discontinue the removal of the bodies from the rear through Theater alley to Myrtle avenue. Sixty-seven in all had been taken out that way. The main entrance, with the ghastly burdens still regularly coming out of it, was thrown into bold relief. The burner and lantern had been knocked off the street lamp over the way, and a great flame of gas blazed and flared into the air, lighting up the scorched and splintered doorway and the upturned faces of the throng. A calcium light on the sidewalk near the door illumined the corridor to the point where the floor had broken, and there another was fixed whose rays shone directly into the deep pit in which the earlier search had discovered the horrible mass of charred human bodies.

  This pit was the cellar of the main corridor, and its ruins were separated from the debris in the auditorium by the strong foundation wall that had borne the gallery columns. It was not until nine o’clock that this cellar, about twelve feet wide, and running through to the foundation wall on the alley side, was cleared. Over one hundred and fifty bodies had been removed from it.

  Toward the rear fewer were found, and those were evidently not from the gallery, as fragments of kid gloves could be seen on the fingers of the blackened hands, some of which still clutched opera glasses. These bodies were more thoroughly calcined than those first found, and not unfrequently the firemen were able to put two or three into one box.

  After dark the orders against admitting outsiders to the ruins were more strictly enforced. Among those admitted was the foreman of the Grand Jury, W.W. Shumway. A calcium light from the alley wall shone over the ruins of the auditorium, and here the firemen began work shortly after nine o’clock. In addition to the lime light, oil lamps with reflectors and lanterns were used.

  In this fitful glare the firemen, their faces pallid from fatigue and hunger, toiled on without a word. The first body found in the auditorium was on the Theater alley side. Its position indicates that the victim had reached a window when he was struck down.

  Some friends of Mr. Murdoch were very anxious that an early effort should be made to recover his body. His mother was expected to arrive in the city during the evening, he having sent for her a few days before. About nine o’clock a stream of water was put upon the ruins in the northeast corner to cool the immense pile of bricks under which the body was thought to lie.

  The firemen were greatly impeded by the clouds of steam. They made their way from the southern end toward the stage. The broken wall lay in great lumps of brick and mortar. About halfway toward the stage shapeless human flesh was found crushed between two huge masses which had protected it from the flames that had consumed all the rest of the body. It was long before the bricks could be sufficiently cooled to admit the removal of this fragment. It was feared all the bodies in this part of the ruins had been similarly or more thoroughly consumed, owing to the intense heat from the inflammable stage fixtures.

  The interior of the Adams Street Market presented at night a weirdly horrible sight. Disuse had made the place grimy. The gas fixtures had been removed, and candle light had to be used. The bodies were in rows that reached the entire length of the long apartment. On the breast of each was a lighted candle held in a small block of wood. Candles were also stuck on the hooks that had once been used to hang meat on, and lanterns helped to illuminate the spacious place; but the combined light was not sufficient to rid the corners of dark shadows. The bodies were in strained shapes, as though death had stopped them in a writhing struggle. Their arms were raised to their faces in most instances, the gesture suggesting suffocation or warding off heat. The charring made them appalling to look at. At an old counter officers added to lists the names of the few who were from time to time identified.

  Articles taken from the bodies were in a basket, enveloped and numbered, and corresponding numbers were written on slips of paper and pinned to the rags that still clung to the corpses. Men and women passed from body to body, seeking friends or relatives, examining the bits of clothing, holding the candles close to the blackened faces, and looking for scars or other marks that might make recognition possible. They were wonderfully composed in manner, the only outbreaks of feeling being when a search was successful, and that was very rare. They were in the main of the poor class, such as occupy the galleries of theaters. They were persistent in their sad task, going along the rows of ill-shaped remains without missing a thing that promised identification. In several instances importunate appeals were made for permission to remove recognized remains, but the coroners decided not to grant that privilege until the next day.

  On the next morning (December 7th) the confusion was less at the scene of the awful catastrophe, but the solemn gloom was deeper than before, the excitement was nearly as great, and the under-currents of sympathy more intense. There was a gloom in Brooklyn which could be felt even in the streets. There was but one topic of conversation. Men, women, and children thought and talked of little else than the Brooklyn Theater and the burned dead beneath its ruins. On the sidewalks, in the street cars, on the ferry-boats, there was one and the same subject of interest. In the neighborhood of the theater itself the excitement was at its height. But there was little to be seen that could either stimulate or gratify curiosity. Two or three undertaker’s wagons with the ugly coffins from the dead-house, were in attendance, but the uninterrupted procession of corpses, which was so horrible a feature of the scene on Wednesday, ended late at night, and on this morning there was nothing to see save the smoldering ruins of the theater. There was only the great void where the theater had stood, a mere rim of crumbling walls, scarcely breast high, enclosing immense heaps of brick and rubbish, from which columns of steam arose in the air.

  A surging mass of people occupied the sidewalk in front of the dead-house, and stretched into the middle of the street, and men and boys clambered upon fences and wagons in the neighborhood, and gazed intently at the blank walls of the building. Policemen guarded the main entrance and the iron gateway before it. No permits for admission were demanded of those persons who could satisfy the officers that they had lost friends or relatives by the fire. They were allowed to enter from time to time, passing in the front door and through the room on the right-hand, which contained about thirty bodies, lying on the floor, none of them identified; so, through a smaller room at the further end of the building, back to the left-hand room, in which some of the corpses were lying upon marble slabs and tables in the center. Upon such bits of clothing as remained upon the bodies, numbers, written hastily with lead-pencils on bits of paper, had been pinned; and where a body had been recognized, the name and address were added to the number. Then, upon receipt of the coroner’s permission, the corpse was placed in a plain deal coffin and sent to the address given by the persons who had claimed it.

  On Friday morning (December 8th) the work of removing and examining the ruins was suspended, it being deemed unsafe to proceed any further while the walls remained in such an unsafe position. The dangerous parts of the walls were, however, braced, and the firemen resumed their labors in the afternoon.

  During Friday night and early Saturday morning a large number of small pieces of bodies, and several heads, were discovered, and the trunk of a body which was identified as that of Mr. Murdoch. The remains were taken in charge by an undertaker.

  Many of the bodies were so mangled and charred that it was impossible to identify them, and it was determined by the Board of Aldermen to bury these at the public expense. The scenes at the Morgue and the old market on Saturday morning were, if possible, more heartrending and horrible than anything that had occurred in those places since the burning of the theater. The undertakers wagons rattled up to the door of the old market by dozens, and the coffins of stained and polished wood, studded with silver nails, were ranged in rows on the market floor, beside the black, gnarled things that had been human bodies. Outside a motley crowd of men, women, and boys pressed close to the doors and tried to get past the polic
e lines in order to witness the work of putting the stiffened and distorted bodies into the narrow coffins. Wandering among the ghastly rows was the usual throng of sight-seers and mourners searching for friends.

  Soon after one o’clock the last coffin was taken from the old market, and the driver who carried it hurried away after the others. The crowd around the door took a last glance at the blackened floors inside, as though the horrible place had fascinated them, and then chased the wagons and carriages that were going to join the procession.

  The funeral services were held in the Church of “The Little Church Around the Corner.” The services were very impressive, and the attendance was very large. Dr. Houghton conducted. The remains of Mr. Burroughs were placed in the receiving vault of the Second Street Cemetery, and those of Mr. Murdoch were taken to Philadelphia, and buried on Monday in Woodland Cemetery, the funeral services being conducted in St. Peter’s P.E. Church.

  Stuart Campbell Hand, a young reporter on the staff of the Commercial Advertiser of New York, is among the victims of the calamity. He is known to have visited the theater on the night of the fire, and has not been seen since. He was only eighteen years old.

  William L. Donnelly, another young reporter, left his home on the evening of the fire to visit the theater, and was never seen alive again. He had just returned to New York from a journalistic trip to the West. Among the charred remains his stepfather felt assured he had discovered poor Donnelly’s body, identifying it by several articles of clothing; but as these articles were partly divided between two crisped trunks his mother declined to acquiesce in the identification, for fear of receiving the wrong body.

  Mrs. Caroline Berri and her mother, Mrs. Martin, were undoubtedly trampled upon by the panic-stricken audience, and then fell victims to the flames. Mrs. Berri was the wife of Officer Richard Berri, of District-Attorney Britton’s office. He accompanied her and Mrs. Martin to the theater; but when the cry of fire rang through the house, and the audience became uncontrollable, he was standing in the vestibule. He tried to push into the theater to rescue his relatives, but was carried by the rushing crowd out into the street. His wife and her mother undoubtedly perished together.

  Officer Patrick McKean, of the Central Office Squad, who was detailed to preserve order in the gallery of the theater, is among the dead. He was a good officer, and had been made a member of the Central Squad for his exemplary conduct. He was seen working bravely in the vestibule of the theatre, trying to get the panic-stricken people to move out in an orderly manner. Just before the fatal blast of smoke and gas filled the entire building it was noticed that he was exhausted by his hard labors; that he had lost his hat, and that his coat was torn from him by the surging crowd. It is supposed that he was precipitated, when the flooring gave way, into the horrible pit from which so many dead were taken on Wednesday. Officer McKean was a young man—about thirty years of age, and the support of a widowed mother.

  John McGinniss, an old employee of the Brooklyn Eagle, was among the killed, with two lady friends whom he had escorted to the theater. He was about thirty-five years old, and was well known in Brooklyn. It is likely that he bravely remained with his lady friends until the last. He was an old fireman of the former volunteer department, accustomed to battling with flames, cool-headed, and rapid in decision, and if he had been alone would undoubtedly have found means of escape.

  The body of Nicholas F. Kelly, aged twenty-two, was taken out of the theater early Wednesday morning. As it was being placed in an undertaker’s wagon a young man standing by glanced at the corpse, and after saying, “My God, that’s Father Kelly’s brother,” fainted away. The body was afterward identified by Father Kelly himself, who is the pastor of the Church of the Visitation, and one of the best-loved and most eloquent priests in Brooklyn.

  Coroner's Report

  The King's County coroner, Henry C. Simms, convened a jury on the disaster which heard testimony through December and January 1877. When it was published at the end of January 1877, it was especially harsh on the theatrical managers, Sheridan Shook and A. M. Palmer. The jury held Shook and Palmer responsible for failing to take adequate precautions against fire, failing to train stage hands in either fire prevention or the management of incipient fires, failing to establish clear chains of command in the theatre's management, permitting the stage to become cluttered with properties and failing to maintain in good working order firefighting equipment and emergency exits that had originally been installed. The jury found lesser fault with the design of the building, observing that the five-year-old structure had better exits than many other public buildings in the city. Fault was found with the stairways leading to the family circle and the auditorium, which lacked a firewall between the audience and the stage. In delivering the verdict, the jury reported that death occurred mainly through suffocation in the dense smoke that prevailed in the gallery.

  Fire Marshall's Report

  Police Fire Marshall Patrick Keady interviewed sixty two people directly connected with the fire in the week following the blaze and delivered his report on December 18, 1876. He had been forcibly struck by the lack of use of water in any form of conveyance, though a two and a half inch pipe serviced the hydrant near the stage.

  He was also forcibly struck by a certain laxness in the management of theatre by Shook and Palmer, especially in comparison to Sara Conway's management prior to her death. Many witnesses reported that Conway had insisted on filled water buckets to be positioned in various places back stage or in the rigging loft and kept the fire hose maintained. In contrast, Mike Sweeny could recall using the hose only once, and was not certain of its condition on the day of the fire; many of his colleagues thought the hose leaked and was up in the painter's gallery in the roof above the stage.

  Postscript

  In 1879, Haverly's Theatre was erected on the same site but was razed eleven years later to make way for new offices of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. After the Eagle closed, in the mid-20th century, the entire block was subsumed by the urban renewal project which gave rise to Cadman Plaza. The approximate location of the theater is north of the New York Supreme Court Building in a tree-covered area.