ChicagoRound: 1903 Iroquois Theatre fire

Chicago emerged from its devastating Great Fire on October 10, 1871, after a two-day conflagration that destroyed 17,500 buildings over four square miles, left 90,000 of the city’s 300,000 inhabitants homeless and killed an impossible-to-quantify-accurately 200–300 people.

And the city immediately began rebuilding.

Thirty-two years and two months later, after rising both literally and proverbially from its ashes to reclaim its place as one of America’s most populous and vital cities, Chicago was devastated by another fire … this time in the month-old, state-of-the-art, “fireproof” Iroquois Theatre.

When it opened on November 23, 1903, the Iroquois Theatre was hailed as an architectural masterpiece and a jewel in the crown of Chicago’s theater scene. Designed in the highly ornate French baroque style, it featured grand staircases, gilded ornamentation, lush velvet curtains and a 6,300-square-foot domed auditorium with a dropped stage to improve the sightlines from every seat in the house. And though it was billed confidently as “absolutely fireproof,” the Iroquois contained almost no fire-safety features. No fire alarm. No backstage telephone. No labeled fire exits (most exits were hidden behind velvet curtains by theater managers who didn't want them to look ugly). Even its supposedly fireproof asbestos curtain was made of a highly flammable wood pulp. (Fewer than ten years later, the “unsinkable” Titanic would succumb to a similarly overconfident hubris.)

The theater’s opening production was a touring musical pastiche called Mr. Bluebeard, which featured a 400-person cast and starred popular Vaudeville comedian Eddie Foy. It had enjoyed critical and popular success for over a month when its December 30 audience filed in on a freezing Wednesday afternoon during the break between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Since the theater’s opening had been delayed repeatedly, its owners were desperate to make up for lost revenue, so they habitually oversold the house, seating extra patrons up and down the aisles in the orchestra and balconies.

The fire started at the top of Act II when an overhead stage light shorted and sent sparks leaping to a nearby curtain. As the fire spread through the flylines and burning bits of scenery rained down on the stage, the actors continued soldiering through their performance, confident in their understanding that the theater was fireproof. A handful of people in the audience got nervous enough to leave, but many chose to stay in their seats (or aisles) until it became obvious the fire was not going to be contained.

And then panic set in.

The ensuing stampede up overcrowded aisles through an unfamiliar theater with hidden exits left trampled bodies everywhere. And since most of the Iroquois exit doors opened inward, the bodies piled up in front of the doors, leaving no hope of escape.

The actors, too, created their own stampede to find exits. And when they finally pried open the giant freight door on the north end of the stage, the arctic winter blast that blew into the building combined with the fiery gases above the stage to create a superheated fireball that exploded into the auditorium and incinerated everything in its path, including hundreds of people still in their seats.

Many of the people who did manage to get out of the building found themselves trapped high in the air on unfinished fire escapes. As these fire escapes got more and more crowded, people begin to fall (or jump) to their deaths in the alley below. By the time the fire was over, bodies were piled 10 deep in what is still called to this day Death Alley.

Though it was contained to one building and it burned less than an hour, the fire killed over 600 people (twice the number killed in the two-day Great Fire of 1871), shut down theaters around the world out of fire-safety concerns (leaving thousands of actors and theater employees unemployed), generated worldwide outpourings of sympathy, exposed yet another Chicago corruption scandal in the years of ensuing lawsuits, and ultimately brought about great changes in the way we respond to massive disasters and catalogue and identify disaster victims. It even inspired an Indianapolis hardware salesman named Carl Prinzler, who randomly had to miss the deadly performance, to invent what he called the Self Releasing Fire Exit Bolt once he learned that a disproportionate number of victims had died in desperate piles in front of the inward-opening exit doors with confusing European-style bascule locks. Known today as the “panic bar,” his invention—along with outward-opening exit doors—are perhaps the biggest public-safety legacy of the Iroquois disaster.

Today, the stunning Asian-baroque James M. Nederlander Theatre (built in 1926 as the Oriental Theatre until its name was changed in 2019) sits pretty much on the exact footprint of the Iroquois Theatre. A thriving part of the Broadway in Chicago theater collective, it features touring productions that play year-round to thousands upon thousands of theater patrons who largely have no idea that they’re sitting on a historic graveyard of sorts. To my knowledge there isn’t even a memorial on the property commemorating the fire.

There is a memorial about three blocks away, in Chicago’s classical-revival City Hall building. Designed by Chicago sculptor Laredo Taft, the bas-relief plaque currently sits above a glass column that houses a revolving door, so it’s both hard to see up close and hard to photograph, especially with an iPhone.

Thankfully, it’s accompanied by an eye-level plaque that explains it context and memorializes the 600 lives lost on December 30, 1903, in one of the worst theater disasters in history.

Timber!

Eight years ago today—two years after leaving the hospital and just hours after taking the very first dose of yet another new bipolar med added to my ever-evolving cocktail—I stood up from a chair, walked a couple steps, blacked completely the hell out, fell Timber! onto the tile floor (which I cracked with my face because GO BIG OR GO HOME), shredded myself eyebrow-to-chin on my shattered glasses, bit most of the way through my lip, loosened some teeth, got a concussion, and woke up in my sister's car holding a huge bloody rag to my face too confused to remember that Christmas had happened (or, for just a few glorious moments, that I was even bipolar) as she rushed me to the ER, where I looked so brutally horrifying that the nurses assumed I was the victim of a violent assault and three police officers were dispatched my room to question me well before the doctor showed up to assess the damage, declare me not dead and give me double-digit stitches.

I came home covered in swelling and bruises and scabs and stitches and glue—after telling the ER doctor in my foggy haze that my modeling days were over and I didn't care if he left scars all over my face but I vaguely remember him informing me that he still had a professional obligation to do his best—and filled eyeballs-to-spine with a deep, not-for-amateurs headache that brought crippling new levels to my understanding of pain ... and yet I still found a way to take time out of my busy schedule for a quick selfie to document the occasion for future biographers. (You're welcome, posterity!)

This Timber! event was directly linked to my new drug (called Fetzima, who sounds like a possibly immodest resident of the Anatevka demimonde in Fiddler on the Roof) that, as with all psychotropics, came with an alarming list of ramp-up side effects ... including abrupt blackouts. But I knew from a decade-plus of trial-and-error experience that I needed to tough out the first three or four weeks until the side effects subsided and the drug's level (or not level) of efficacy manifested (or didn't manifest) itself.

And despite its hyperdramatic entrance into the madcap musical of my life, Fetzima more-or-less quickly proved itself to be perhaps the drug that effectively balances my serotonin and norepinephrine and keeps me (more or less) stable and engaged and functional and capable and able to go to work and do shows and take care of my parents and run races and do handyman projects (quite well, if I can toot my own horn, which I shamelessly will) and practice the piano and buy shoes and buy more shoes and here I am eight years later, scar-free (thanks, conscientiously ethical ER doctor!) (though it took a good six months for the scars to heal and the scar tissue where I bit through my lip to subside to the point that I could drink out of a straw again) and concussion-free (pro tip: you DO. NOT. EVER. want a concussion), and clearly in possession of an added year's mouth wrinkles and silver foxiness.

[Super-fun side note: Aetna, in its infinite wisdom, abruptly stopped covering my Fetzima for two years and summarily rejected all three of my doctor’s allotted appeals. Because apparently risking sending me to the psych ward for another week was far more cost-effective than covering a proven psychotropic. So my doctor hoarded samples for me in the hope that Aetna would finally get its head out of its fetz (which it finally did last year) and/or Fetzima’s patent would expire, it went generic and it stopped costing $700/month out of pocket (which has yet to happen).]

Anyway, if you're inclined, raise a glass and yell Timber! in my scab-free, concussion-free, fog-free, not-functional-free honor today. I'm gonna go out and keep living. Timber!

Emma and the Aase

If you were making a move about sensible, salt-of-the-earth people and called Central Casting and said “Send me an old, stoic, self-sufficient Norwegian bachelor woman who can repair a roof and bake paper-thin sugar cookies all in one day … oh, and also who can terrify her sister’s young grandchildren at night because she looks like a floating Victorian ghost when she leaves her hair down,” you’d promptly have the white-haired, durably assembled Emma Christina Nystrom show up at your door in her homemade plaid cotton house dress.

Emma was my mother’s aunt, but she was always Aunt Emma to everyone from every generation in our family. She was part of a long line of my Norwegian forebears who practically built the entirety of Northeast Iowa, particularly Decorah and the sleepy bedroom-and-once-booming-train-hub community of Calmar just south of it.

My sister and I were kind of scared of Emma when we were kids. She wasn’t terribly demonstrable or huggy, she never told fart jokes, and she was completely deaf, which made it extremely difficult for us as kids to warm up to her.

A true child of the Depression, Emma never wasted a thing. She ate entire apples—even the cores, which kind of grossed us out. She turned her old dresses into quilts and eventually the quilt scraps became painting rags that she washed and reused until they crumbled into nothing.

 
She even darned her stockings and later her pantyhose, which made her look like she had alarmingly dark varicose veins running up and down her legs.

When her parents and grandparents (who only spoke Norwegian) got to the point that they needed constant care, Emma dropped out of business school to care for them and her younger siblings. And she never went back. She also never married, so she lived in Calmar her entire life caring for everyone and eventually for the house that her father had built and various generations of her family had lived in for almost a century.

Now, we Norwegians are of sturdy stock. Emma outlived her siblings and pretty much all her friends, and by the early ‘90s when she had to leave the family home and move into the nearby Aase Haugen Home For Sturdy Norwegians Who Are Finally Starting To Need Constant Care But Who Don’t Want To Burden Their Families, she was also in her 90s.

 
We drove up to Decorah to visit her in The Aase (as the locals and residents called it) as often as we could over the next few years. But her spirits were failing as fast as her body. She complained that all her friends and her entire family but us had died. She complained about the people assigned to her table at dinner time. She complained that she was just tired and was ready to go.

I was recently out of college and finally living in my first house about a mile from my parents. And in 1995 on Christmas Eve Day as we were busy cooking our traditional Norwegian Christmas meal at their house, we got a call from The Aase: Aunt Emma was failing fast and they didn’t expect her to last the night.

So Mom and I got in a car, left all the cooking and baking and table-setting and guest-entertaining to my dad and sister, and made the two-hour drive up to see her as snow gently covered all the Iowa farms and towns in sparkly white.

When we got there, Aunt Emma was in and out of consciousness and looking like she was indeed at death’s door. So we held her hands and adjusted her blankets to make her comfortable and sang Christmas carols with her.

 
At one point, we were finishing what we thought was the final verse of “Silent Night,” but Emma clearly knew the song better than we did because in her fog she barrelled into a final verse we only barely recognized. We did our best to sing along though. But only so she wouldn’t judge us in the afterlife.

As it got late, I realized we had no Christmas Eve dinner for the three of us to enjoy. The Aase’s kitchen had closed, so I jumped in the car and started driving around Decorah (in the prehistoric days before GPS phones and even Mapquest) to find something for us to eat.

You’d think a grocery store in a very Norwegian town would have Norwegian favorites in stock on Christmas Eve, but you’d be wrong. So I had to improvise: pre-packaged cups of Christmas-red Jell-O, Kaiser rolls (because Germany is in Europe so it’s practically the same as Norway) and cold cuts. It wasn’t much, but it would definitely become a memory.

But when I got back and we ate our bountiful feast, Emma started to rally. She was lucid and talking, and she and even the night nurse told us we might as well go home.

So Mom and I got back in the car and drove home through the snow-covered fields and little Iowa towns late on that Christmas Eve. We sang along with a “Messiah“ broadcast we found on the radio and talked about Emma and the end of an era she represented when she eventually dies, and we had a rather lovely time together.

But when we got home, everything was chaos … from a proper-Christmas-decorating perspective, and my sister begged us to never leave her alone with Dad on Christmas Eve again because he set the table like a toddler and made the Christmas trees on the Spode china crooked. CROOKED!

 
The next morning—Christmas Day—as we were finally enjoying our now-leftovers Christmas Eve dinner—ON CORRECTLY ORIENTED PLATES—we got another call from The Aase: Emma had died peacefully in her sleep that morning. And ever since then, her death has always added a poignant side note to our Christmas celebrations. But if you want to be remembered long after you’re gone—especially in a social-media post that gets re-posted every year in perpetuity—I recommend dying on a major family holiday.

Deaths are always sad, but Emma had certainly had a good, long run and we were all ready to let her go. And she was clearly ready to let go herself.

I don’t remember how we learned this next little tidbit because we certainly didn’t have the news on during Christmas, but we eventually found out about someone else who had died that same Christmas Day: Dean Martin. Boozy, handsome, king-of-cool Dean Martin had died on the same Christmas Day as prim, proper, sturdy, Depression-sensible Emma Christina Nystrom.

And as we pondered this odd little coincidence and mourned each person in our separate but very different ways, we all found ourselves asking the same obvious question:

What do you suppose Aunt Emma and Dean Martin are talking about as they wait in line together at the Pearly Gates?