engineer, estimated the wind deflected the wheel to one side by only an inch and a half.
The riders watched as the wind gripped the adjacent captive balloon and tore it from the men holding it down and briefly yanked Manager Morgan into the sky. The wind pummeled the balloon as if it were an inverted punching bag, then tore it to pieces and cast shreds of its nine thousand yards of silk as far as half a mile away.
Morgan took the disaster calmly. “I got some pleasure out of watching the storm come up,” he said, “and it was a sight of a lifetime to see the balloon go to pieces, even if it was a costly bit of sightseeing for the people who own stock in the company.”
Whether the storm had anything to do with the events of the next day, Monday, July 10, can’t be known, but the timing was suspicious.
On Monday, shortly after one o’clock, as Burnham supervised repairs and crews removed storm debris from the grounds, smoke began to rise from the cupola of the Cold Storage tower, where the fire of June 17 also had taken light.
The tower was made of wood and housed a large iron smokestack, which vented three boilers located in the main building below. Paradoxically, heat was required to produce cold. The stack rose to a point thirty inches short of the top of the tower, where an additional iron assembly, called a thimble, was to have been placed to extend the stack so that it cleared the top completely. The thimble was a crucial part of architect Frank Burnham’s design, meant to shield the surrounding wooden walls from the superheated gases exiting the stack. For some reason, however, the contractor had not installed it. The building was like a house whose chimney ended not above the roof but inside the attic.
The first alarm reached the fire department at 1:32 P.M. Engines thundered to the building. Twenty firemen led by Captain James Fitzpatrick entered the main structure and climbed to its roof. From there they made their way to the tower and climbed stairs another seventy feet to the tower’s exterior balcony. Using ropes they hauled up a line of hose and a twenty-five-foot ladder. They secured the hose firmly to the tower.
Fitzpatrick and his men didn’t realize it, but the fire at the top of the tower had set a lethal trap. Fragments of burning debris had fallen into the space between the iron stack and the inner walls of the tower, made of smooth white pine. These flaming brands ignited a fire that, in those narrow confines, soon depleted the available air and extinguished its own flames, leaving in their place a superheated plasma that needed only a fresh supply of oxygen to become explosive.
As the firemen on the tower balcony concentrated on the fire above them, a small plume of white smoke appeared at their feet.
The Fire Department rang a second alarm at 1:41 P.M. and activated the big siren at the exposition’s Machinery Building. Thousands of visitors now moved toward the smoke and packed the lawns and paths surrounding the building. Some brought lunch. Burnham came, as did Davis. The Columbian Guard arrived in force to clear the way for additional engines and ladder wagons. Riders on the Ferris Wheel got the clearest, most horrific view of what happened next.
“Never,” the Fire Department reported, “was so terrible a tragedy witnessed by such a sea of agonized faces.”
Suddenly flames erupted from the tower at a point about fifty feet
Fireman John Davis was standing on the balcony with Captain Fitzpatrick and the other men. “I saw there was only one chance, and I made up my mind to take it,” Davis said. “I made a leap for the hose and had the good luck to catch it. The rest of the boys seemed transfixed with horror and unable to move.”
Davis and one other man rode the hose to the ground. The firemen still on the balcony knew their situation was deadly and began to tell each other good-bye. Witnesses watched them hug and shake hands. Captain Fitzpatrick grabbed a rope and swung down through the fire to the main roof below, where he lay with a fractured leg and internal injuries, half his huge mustache burned away. Other men jumped to their deaths, in some cases penetrating the main roof.
Fire Marshal Murphy and two other firemen on the ground climbed a ladder to retrieve Fitzpatrick. They lowered him by rope to colleagues waiting below. He was alive but fading.
In all, the blaze killed twelve firemen and three workers. Fitzpatrick died at nine o’clock that night.
The next day attendance exceeded 100,000. The still-smoking rubble of the Cold Storage Building had proved irresistible.
The coroner immediately convened an inquest, during which a jury heard testimony from Daniel Burnham; Frank Burnham; officials of Hercules Iron Works; and various firemen. Daniel Burnham testified he had not known of the previous fire or the omitted thimble and claimed that since the building was a private concession he had no authority over its construction beyond approving its design. On Tuesday, July 18, the jury charged him, Fire Marshal Murphy, and two Hercules officers with criminal negligence and referred the charges to a grand jury.
Burnham was stunned but kept his silence. “The attempt to hold you in any degree responsible or censurable for the loss of life is an outrage,” wrote Dion Geraldine, his construction superintendent at the fair. “The men who gave this verdict must have been very stupid, or sadly misinformed.”
Under customary procedures, Burnham and the others would have been placed under arrest pending bail, but in this instance even the coroner’s office seemed taken aback. The sheriff made no move to arrest the director of works. Burnham posted bond the next morning.
With the stink of charred wood still heavy in the air, Burnham closed the roof walks of the Transportation and Manufactures and Liberal Arts buildings and the balconies and upper galleries of the Administration Building, fearing that a fire in the buildings or among their exhibits could start a panic and cause a tragedy of even greater magnitude. Hundreds of people had crowded the roof walk of the Manufactures Building each day, but their only way down was by elevator. Burnham imagined terrified men, women, and children trying to slide down the glass flanks of the roof and breaking through, then falling two hundred feet to the exhibit floor.
As if things could not get any blacker, on the same day that the coroner’s jury ordered Burnham’s arrest, July 18, the directors of the exposition bowed to bank pressure and voted to establish a Retrenchment Committee with nearly unrestricted powers to cut costs throughout the fair, and appointed three cold-eyed men to staff it. A subsequent resolution approved by the Exposition Company’s directors stated that as of August 1, “no expenditures whatever connected with the construction, maintenance or conduct of the Exposition shall be incurred unless authorized by said committee.” It was clear from the start that the committee’s primary target was Burnham’s Department of Works.
Equally clear, at least to Burnham, was that the last thing the fair needed right now, as he and Millet continued their fight to boost the rate of paid admissions—a campaign with its own necessary costs—was a troika of penny-pinchers sitting in judgment on every new expense. Millet had some extraordinary ideas for events in August, including an elaborate Midway ball during which fair officials, including Burnham, would dance with Dahoman women and Algerian belly dancers. That the committee would view the expense of this ball and other Millet events as frivolous seemed certain. Yet Burnham knew that such expenditures, as well as continued spending on police, garbage removal, and maintenance of roads and lawns, was vital.
He feared that the Retrenchment Committee would cripple the fair for once and for all.
Love
THE REMAINS OF THE Cold Storage fire were still visible as a party of schoolteachers arrived from St. Louis, accompanied by a young reporter. The twenty-four teachers had won a contest held by the
