- Ellen Antoniewicz: Today we are pleased to introduce
Matthew Prigge as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's
"History Sandwiched In" lecture series.
Matthew Prigge is the author of
Damn the Old Tinderbox! Milwaukee's Palace of the West
and the Fire that Defined an Era ,
and Milwaukee Mayhem: Murder and Mystery
in the Cream City's First Century .
He is a freelance author and historian from Milwaukee
and the host of "What Made Milwaukee Famous,"
a weekly local history segment on WMSE 91.7.
His work has been featured in both local
and national publications, and has won multiple awards,
including the 2013 William Best Hesseltine Award
from the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.
Since 2011, he has led sightseeing historical tours
of Milwaukee's rivers and harbor
for the Milwaukee Boat Line.
In 2013, he created the Mondo Milwaukee Boat Tour,
an evening historical tour
of some of the city's most infamous sights.
He writes a history blog for Milwaukee's Shepherd Express
and has also authored several articles
for the Wisconsin Magazine of History .
Here today to discuss the mysterious
Newhall House hotel fire,
please join me in welcoming Matthew Prigge.
[audience applauding]
- Thank you, everybody.
Check, make sure the sound's good for everyone.
All right, good.
First off, I just wanna kind of survey the room
and see how many people in here have heard
of the Newhall House fire before,
or are marginally aware of it.
Okay, a good number.
Has anybody actually read the book?
Okay, wow, more than last time.
Okay. [all laughing]
Just to get everybody up to speed,
the Newhall House was a hotel that was in Milwaukee,
in downtown Milwaukee on the corner
of what is now Broadway and Michigan.
If you can picture yourself downtown,
there's a Hilton Garden Inn Hotel on that site right now.
It's a couple blocks away from the Pfister Hotel.
And in 1883, it burned down,
killing 75 people and was, up until the 1940s,
the deadliest hotel fire in U.S. history,
and depending on how you define the Newhall House,
still today one of the deadliest unsolved arsons
in U.S. history.
First of all, I'm gonna talk a bit about the hotel itself,
which, for those of you who are
aware of the hotel and the fire,
there's been a lot of mythology that's been built up
over the century-plus writing about this
since the fire occurred.
And I'll address a little bit of that later.
But to just to talk about the hotel itself,
a lot of the things that you hear describing this
as one of the grandest hotels east of New York,
and this huge civic monument,
that kind of sound like pleasantries
that you normally throw in local history
just to describe something that's highly regarded locally.
A lot of that was true for the hotel itself.
It was built in 1857, and was at that time,
here we can see it very near to its opening in 1857,
again, this would be what is now Broadway,
and this is Michigan right there on the corner,
to kind of help you place it in downtown Milwaukee,
if you know the area.
The hotel, actually it was legitimately a hotel
of national note when it opened in 1857.
And it was also, as far as I've been able to tell,
either the tallest or very near to the tallest building
in the U.S. at the time it opened.
This was not really,
it was about 130-some feet tall so not,
the height of buildings wasn't something
that was really broadcast back then.
The title of the tallest building in the U.S. in 1857
was not something people really would've considered
or taken too seriously.
But I do believe it was right among,
either the tallest or pretty near to the tallest.
So how did this very grand hotel,
this very significant national building end up
in Milwaukee of all places?
Well, to discuss that, you gotta talk
about Milwaukee actually in the 1850s,
and that was, you can actually see a poster of,
or a aerial portrayal of Milwaukee,
I think that's 1853 over there on the wall.
And this was a time of great promise in Milwaukee,
as there was in dozens of other cities
in what was then considered the American West.
This was, of course, the very first years
of serious European settlement in these areas,
and a lot of cities kind of fancied themselves
as perhaps being what they called the Queen of the West,
the capital of this new part of the U.S.
And Milwaukee had a surprisingly good claim
on that in the 1850s.
There was a lot of enthusiasm locally
that they could kind of keep up with
and then surpass Chicago, which was one
of these other big centers in the West.
Now, of course, Chicago ended up taking that title
by virtue of its location at the south end of Lake Michigan.
By the time the railroads came into prominence,
mid-1850s and onward, it became the railroad hub
for the West into the East and that kind of ended the debate.
But there was this real sense in,
even after the railroad started to take hold,
that Milwaukee could keep up
if they could just get something,
get an advantage on Chicago.
And a lot of boosters thought that a grand hotel
would be that one thing.
And I talk a bit about this in the book,
just the meaning of having a first-class hotel in a city,
especially in the West, where all these cities
were relatively new.
The very first, going back into the 1830s
and 1840s, hotels in Milwaukee,
and other cities like it across the West
were very, very rudimentary.
Often, people slept in the floor
in the backroom of a tavern,
or there are stories about the most,
the highest capacity hotel in Milwaukee at the time having,
every room being supplied with water,
but only when it rained, and jokes like that.
But to have a place where people,
people with money, people with money to invest
could actually come and do their trading in a city
was important economically and also important for,
this was a civic monument, if you will, when it opened.
And there had been agitation for a long time
for a first-class hotel, and then in 1857,
Daniel Newhall, who was a grain trader,
at one time, one of the highest stakes grain traders
in the country, he spent the money to build this.
And it was perhaps the biggest thing
that had happened in Milwaukee by the time it opened.
There was a grand opening ceremony
where they invited newspaper editors
from all over the Midwest, and this huge feast
for 500 guests or whatever,
and they had bands playing, and it was this huge event.
And the cupola up at the top there,
that was considered to be the highest occupiable point
in the West, and you could go up there
and see from the crests of Lake Michigan
all the way into the fertile plains of western Wisconsin,
and it was opened, was this huge burst of pride
for the city, and almost immediately after opening,
it became a financial drain on all those involved,
because Newhall and well, a lot of his other business,
and in doing this specifically, overextended himself.
The idea that people, there'd be enough traffic
coming into Milwaukee to accommodate a hotel of this size
was just not something that was the reality in 1857.
So that's sort of how I start the book,
talking about the hotel itself
and how it was the symbol of all
of Milwaukee's grandest hopes for itself in the 1850s.
So if you jump to 1883,
it's quite a different story.
The Newhall is 25 years old at this point.
It's never really made money for the people involved.
It actually closes for a while in the 1870s
in the name of fire safety,
but really in lowering fire insurance premiums.
The cupola is removed.
By 1883, it's owned by a conglomerate
of local businessmen who bought it
mostly to try to keep it open.
They didn't want this beautiful building,
this landmark, to be shuttered.
It's no longer the first-class hotel, even in Milwaukee,
it's not even close to being the tallest building,
even in Milwaukee.
Again, if you're familiar with the area,
you can't see it in this photo here,
but across the street, so right here also
on the corner of Michigan and Broadway,
actually, I'll just show you a picture of that.
This is it nearer to the 1880s,
I think 1881 this photo was taken.
Again, you can't see right across the street,
but the Chamber of Commerce building
with the great Grain Exchange room,
one of the landmarks in Milwaukee,
next door to Mitchell Building,
those are across the street,
those actually designed by E. Townsend Mix
who came to Milwaukee to work on the Newhall in 1857.
So it's not even the most elegant building
on its corner any longer.
But there are still, it still does a fair business.
It has, over the past half-decade before this,
kind of stabilized, it's still making,
it's still turning a profit for the operator,
but it's just kind of there now.
So that brings you up to speed a little bit in 1883
in Milwaukee, and I'll just talk about 1883
or this period more nationally.
After the Newhall burns down,
there's a lot of talk about it being a fire trap
and being very dangerous.
And in doing the research on this book,
the whole city was a fire trap in 1883.
The whole country was a--
some place, if you tell your children not to play
near construction sites or on condemned bridges,
the whole nation was like that in 1883.
I'm gonna read a passage from near the end of the book
that just sets the, this is kind of,
I'm looking back now at the year itself,
this happens in January 1883, so obviously,
a lot of this hadn't happened yet
by the time the hotel burned down,
but just at this time, refer to it
as the Gilded Age, usually.
There's this very steady progress,
marching forward financially,
development of technology,
developing technology,
building, building, building,
and a lot of this is done at the cost of safety,
of consumer safety, of just worker safety,
just safety in general.
So I'm gonna read one of two passages I'll read
from the book, and again, looking back at 1883,
the disastrous year of which the Newhall House fire
was just one day.
The Newhall House fire was truly one
of the great disasters of its era,
but the conditions that led to the tragedy
were by no mean exclusive to the corner
of Michigan and Broadway.
Indeed, as 1883 came to a close,
it seemed as though the year had been one particularly prone
to disasters of human accident or negligence,
breathtaking horrors that,
given the era's rapidly moving machinery of progress,
could hardly be the fault of any single person.
A pier collapse at the Patapsco River near Baltimore
had drowned 63 people, mostly women and children
who had rushed forward to greet a returning passenger barge.
A flooded mine in Braidwood, Illinois,
killed 74, only 28 of whom were ever recovered,
even after more than a week
of pumping water from the tunnel.
A train wreck at Carlyon, New York,
in which an express steamer plowed into a boxcar
absentmindedly left on the tracks, killed 21.
A stampede on the Brooklyn Bridge
just six days after it opened killed 12,
after a woman's scream led to a panic
that the bridge was about to collapse,
and 21 people killed when a runaway passenger train
caught fire as it thundered down the tracks
near Tehachapi, California.
Even more gruesome events occurred all over the world,
including industrial explosions in France, 47 dead.
Sicily, 35 dead, and Istanbul, 150 dead.
A circus fire in Poland that killed 268,
the wreck of the steamship Cimbria
that claimed 434 lives when it went down in the North Sea.
The sinking of the S.S. Daphne just after it launched
in Glasgow that killed 124,
and the suffocation of 183 children
at Victoria Hall in Sunderland, England,
as they rushed toward the stage
to claim free candy after a show.
One newspaper declared 1883 as the blackest year
of the 1880s, writing that
"no year of the present century can compare with it."
The Chicago Times is more articulate.
Running down a list of the year's tragedies,
the Times took particular note of the many incidents
that seemed to be a product of the times.
"Like the Great Chicago Fire," the paper wrote,
referencing the 1871 disaster,
"these events teach a lesson of the reign
"of natural law and the inexorable necessity
"that man conform thereto.
"If anything could move the stony heart of nature,
"it would seem to be those poor girls flinging their arms
"through the flames and crying for help at Milwaukee,
"but nature hears no prayer."
The Times went on to question whether humankind,
in all its modern trappings, could hear such a prayer.
"A hole with no exit is a cage in which fright
"does its appalling work precisely as though
"a thousand hearts did not ache.
"Is the saying now so common, that human life
"is the cheapest thing on the market, true?
"It is feared that this saying, at least,
"is not quite a lie, and cannot be regarded as slander
"until parsimony and avarice shall be eliminated
"from the cause or occasions of disaster."
So this kind of sets the stage for,
or I think it does a good job of setting the stage
for what happens here on Michigan and Broadway
in January 1883.
So speaking a bit of fire safety at the time,
if you could claim such a thing existed,
the Newhall House did have fire escapes.
They were ratchet ladders that would have been,
I don't think you can see them in this photo,
but they were right underneath the window eaves there,
they had two of those, so people could,
in the event of a fire, step out of a window,
grab this thing, and it would lower you to the pavement.
There was no marking as to where those were.
Indeed, there were no markings as to where any
of the exits were that could be seen at night
or during the day.
There was no fire alarm system.
On site there were fire hoses.
They were so old that they had actually molded
into the shape that they were in as they hung on the pegs.
The fire hoses were stationed in the basement.
To turn those on, you actually had to be
on the second floor of the building.
So this was a structure that was very vulnerable to fire.
And all those things I mentioned,
there was no requirements that any of this stuff exist,
and as I said earlier, the Newhall House
was probably no more dangerous or safe
than any other building in the city at the time.
In fact, just before the fire,
within two weeks of the fire,
it had actually been examined by an insurance adjuster.
The owners of the hotel were trying
to get their insurance rate lowered,
and somebody came and specifically looked
at the building to see how it would fare in a fire,
and determined that it was a middling risk,
not worthy of a discount in their insurance rates,
but again, no more safe or dangerous
than any other building in the city.
Firefighting at this time was also
kind of in a primitive state.
Milwaukee had, in the few years before the fire,
actually expanded their fire department,
they'd purchased some new equipment,
and one of the things that they had,
of course, the city was growing at this time.
I think the fire department increased,
I wanna say, by 1/3 in size at the same time
the city had doubled in size.
And it wasn't just the expansion of the area
they had to cover, but the taller buildings as well.
Again, by 1883, the Newhall House isn't so notable
for its height.
They did have, the fire department
had an extension ladder.
It had a big, I don't know how to describe it,
but there was two big cranks at the bottom
where you needed, I think, four people
to crank this ladder up so it would extend,
and that'd go up, I believe, to six floors,
which would've reached the top floor of the Newhall House.
And again, this is detailed in the book.
I think fire companies at that time
had five or eight people in each fire company,
and this ladder required 10 people to operate,
so even the company that had the ladder
at its fire house, that would take the ladder to a fire,
didn't have enough people to operate it.
Just before the fire breaks out at the Newhall,
there is another, smaller fire on the west side
of town at a smokehouse.
It was, the butcher lived there,
had a butcher shop, so you can imagine
a little wooden shack in somebody's backyard.
That had caught fire,
and just the response to this routine fire
that was really imperiling nobody's life,
took a few minutes to put out;
at the time that was going on,
1/3 of the city's firefighting forces
were at this place, about ten miles from--
about five miles from where the Newhall House was located.
So this is a time that is just waiting
for a disaster like this to occur.
By the time it happens, it's almost a wonder
it didn't happen sooner.
So to get specifically to that night,
or the morning, rather, of January 10, 1883,
the fire starts; let me bring up a floor plan here
of the Newhall House, again,
if we go back to that corner,
the most prominent corner you see in the photo there,
would be this corner.
Again, we have Broadway and Michigan,
this is an open-air atrium
in the middle of the building.
The first floor of the hotel is actually on the second floor
of the building, you can see that,
the promenade there above the sidewalk.
That's the main floor of the hotel.
Beneath that are offices, stores.
You got one, two, three, four, five floors of the hotel.
Other than the first floor, they all generally look,
laid out about like this, windows along the streets,
those rooms up there on the top are over facing the alley,
and then the rooms in the center looking into the atrium.
The fire starts in the basement,
at the bottom of the elevator shaft.
The elevator was installed in the 1870s;
again, it was one of these improvements
to try to generate some more interest in it.
You can see the elevator right here in the picture.
These are spiral staircases.
So elevators at that time
were what they call open-capped, meaning,
on the roof of the building, there's an open square
above the top of the elevator
with a little roof built over it
to allow the air pressure to change
as you were going up and down.
So what you ended up with was a fire
at the bottom of a wooden elevator shaft,
with an open top.
It was a January evening in Wisconsin,
not remarkably cold, about what you'd expect.
Inside of the hotel is, of course, heated,
warm air naturally rising up the elevator shaft.
When the fire starts, it's actually visible shooting
through the roof before or right around the same time
as being discovered inside.
So you'd be hard pressed to design
a more vulnerable building,
to start a fire in a more vulnerable spot,
in a more vulnerable era than you have here
in Milwaukee in 1883.
The fire's discovered relatively early on.
It's discovered by the porter who,
so there's three people on duty the night of the fire.
There's somebody at the front desk,
there's the porter helping guests to their room,
and then just as the fire's getting going,
the boiler operator arrives.
He's in the basement.
So the porter takes somebody up to the sixth floor.
As he's coming back down, he notices smoke
in the elevator shaft,
so he stops the elevator on the third floor,
runs to the main desk, gets the guy at the front desk.
Their orders, in the event of a fire,
are to try to put the fire out
before they wake anybody up,
before they call the fire department.
This had been the standing order for some time,
and had evidently worked in a number of smaller fires
that had occurred at the hotel over the years.
So they get to the basement.
They see they can't even access the area
where the fire is, 'cause the smoke
is coming in so bad right now.
This is about 3:45 a.m.
The desk porter runs up to the desk,
after trying to get back there,
trying to get the hoses ready,
the desk clerk goes up to the second floor,
shouts down to the guy in the boiler room
that there's a fire.
He tries to get to it as well.
He can't access it.
He's actually trying to unfold the fire hose again,
that's again, molded to the shape
'cause it was hanging on that peg.
He can't get any water on it.
The front desk clerk then goes to the front desk,
calls the fire department.
As this is happening, the porter runs
through the building; if we look right here,
so this is different view.
So here's the hotel, again, Michigan,
Broadway is right there.
This building is, which still stands in Milwaukee,
is right up against the alleyway here.
This is the alley.
At the time, they've expanded into this building.
There's a bridge that crosses the alley,
so there are actually some hotel rooms
in this building as well.
He runs into that building, where the man who,
the proprietor of the hotel is staying,
'cause, again, those standing orders
were that if there's a fire, he should be notified.
So the people who are on duty use this very rigid thinking
in approaching this situation.
There's this theme that plays throughout this whole event
that everyone was very aware that a fire could happen,
and that a fire probably would happen,
but they'd become so commonplace
there was this kind of lackadaisical approach to it.
If fire, I don't know what the modern equivalent
for a fire would be at this time,
but if it's something that happened,
you think of a fire alarm,
those happen far more often than there's an actual fire.
Fires at the buildings like this happened far more often
than there was actual threatening fire.
So people, they acted in this odd way
that made it seem like they didn't really grasp
the threat of what was occurring here.
So the fire department shows up at 4:06.
This is about 11 minutes after the fire has been discovered.
At this time, the proprietor of the hotel
has also been notified, and he actually can't,
at this point, get back into the building,
because the smoke is so thick.
So this is, again, 11 minutes after the fire,
none of the guests have been woken up yet.
In this, none of the guests would be alerted
to the fire, by anybody.
Everyone who was in the hotel that night and woke up
did so because of smelling smoke
or hearing screams, or the transoms
above their room doors exploding from the heat
and wind in the halls.
The fire department spends a few minutes inside
before they realize they can't fight this fire
from the outside.
By this point, it's actually being seen in the windows
up near, on the top floor.
So they would retreat.
They'd fight the fire from the outside.
The boiler operator that I mentioned,
he did some quite heroic work in trying
to get some of the employees who worked at the hotel
out of the fire, but other than that,
again, we're 11 minutes after this fire has been discovered
and for a lot of the people inside,
their fate is already sealed.
The people who would get out,
it was better to be on a lower floor than an upper floor.
At this time, the premiere rooms,
the suites were on lower floors
because it was built before you had elevators,
so if you spent a lot of money on a hotel room,
you didn't wanna walk up stairs.
Pretty much everybody, I think everybody on the first floor
of the hotel, again, the second floor
of the building here as we look at it,
gets out, including General Tom Thumb,
who was, at that time, one of the--
or had been not too long prior to this,
one of the most famous people in the world.
He was the little person who P.T. Barnum had discovered
and made one of the first modern celebrities.
He was touring and staying at the hotel at this time.
There were actually a number of theater companies staying
at the hotel at this time,
a lot of traveling salesmen,
there were a number of people who lived at the hotel.
The timing of this fire actually ended up
being pretty beneficial, just a few weeks after Christmas.
Had it occurred a few weeks before,
the hotel might have been near full.
There was only about 100 guests staying in the hotel
on that night, with another 80 or so employees
and other associated people.
So again, anybody who was in the hotel woke to the fire.
The lucky few went out through their doors,
tried to make their way through the halls.
Again, just within a few minutes
of everything breaking loose, that was very difficult.
Again, the design of the fire delivered smoke
pretty much perfectly to all of these floors,
the elevator being very close, again, to the stairway,
made it very difficult to find your way around.
And the longer it took you to woke up, if you did,
the more likely you were to be pushed back to the windows.
A lot of people went out the windows that night.
By the time the fire department got set up,
they were able to put some ladders up.
Further complicating things,
as if they needed any more trouble,
were these telegraph wires that you can see there.
That's a pole of, I think it's eight tall by six wide,
so this huge bundle of these very heavy telegraph wires
makes it very difficult to get any ladders of any size
up against the building.
What they ended up doing was actually running
a short ladder up to this porch here,
and then using a ladder, or actually the railing
of that porch to get up to the fourth floor,
what would've been the third floor of rooms.
So very slow work.
The people who couldn't get out through the halls,
a lot of them retreated to those windows,
window wells, and would sit there,
waiting for the ladder to reach their room.
Many people jumped, trying to get down to the balcony
or to the sidewalk.
A lot of the people who jumped did not make it.
The fire department also had jumping sheets.
You think in the cartoons,
you hold that thing out and run back and forth
until somebody jumps into the middle of it.
Those require about 30 people to hold
to make that a viable method of escape.
The jumping sheets that were used that night
at the hotel had about 12, 10 to 12 people using them,
I probably don't need to describe what happened.
I do in the book, but I don't need to describe to you
right now what happened to the people
who tried to jump into those.
But the most captivating part of all this,
and really to kind of uplift everything I've told you
to this point, because despite everything I told you,
the people inside the hotel proved surprisingly resilient.
Again, there were about 180 people in the house that night,
only 75, but over 100 were able to make it out,
and the most captivating of the escapes
were the women of the fifth floor.
Again, I think we're actually looking
at the fifth floor here.
So this row of rooms right here,
both all along this hallway and into this hallway,
this was where the women who worked
at the Newhall House lived.
In 1883, if you were not living at home
as someone's daughter or living as someone's wife,
there weren't a lot of options.
If somebody, if a business was gonna employ
an unmarried young adult or adult woman,
it was considered good manners, whatever you have it,
for them to actually, in this situation,
live at the residence.
There was not, although there were a few
who lived in the Newhall House, it was not a time
when single women generally lived on their own.
So the women who lived here,
they ranged in age from late teens into the 40s,
although, being mostly unmarried women,
the newspapers, in the aftermath of this,
every time referred to them as girls,
no matter how old they were.
There were about 50 living in this hall at the time,
and they were some of the last of the people
who lived here to wake up.
This is where, again, that boiler operator
was trying to get when he first found out about the fire.
He went to this hallway and tried to,
spent maybe just a few seconds up there again
trying to rouse everybody, to get them out.
That really didn't work.
It wasn't until the smoke started rolling in
that these women started waking up.
And they lived in this part of the hotel for a reason.
These would've been the least desirable rooms in the place.
It was certainly designed,
almost certainly a purposeful design
when they built the house, 'cause you're overlooking
the alleyway, those windows up there,
would have, again, looked out into just
that narrow, 20-something foot alley.
So when they woke,
and by this time, with the fire originating here,
pretty much all exits were cut off, blocked by smoke.
There was a stairway down here that led
to the alley, and some were able to make it down there,
but by the-- and we're talking maybe a half an hour
into this event, this whole thing happens very quickly.
Everyone who hadn't gotten out through the stairs,
some were able to make it out through the hallways.
They were trapped in that hallway of rooms
or they had already died.
And these two rooms right here,
122 and 124, that's where a lot of the women ended,
congregated during this.
They found their way there.
The windows had been broken out,
so they were able to get some fresh air,
but they were essentially trapped
in that part of the building,
and read one more passage from there.
This describes, and a lot of this
is the words from the survivors,
what it was like in those two rooms during the,
really the tail end of any rescue efforts
that occurred that night.
Back in room 124, the women clenched their hands,
folded in prayer and rigid with worry.
Mary Gavin was at the window,
crying to the alley below for help, and at this point,
in that alley, there are people
who have realized that there are still living people
up in that room, and they're trying
to figure out a plan to get them out of that room.
She had seen many of the women fall,
some of them diving out as if bent on suicide,
others going over slowly, and then clinging
to the stone ledge of the window
until their strength was exhausted
and then dropping limply.
Gavin could only wait in her tiny place of refuge,
far from the flames, but further still from safety.
The rest of the women in the room muttered prayers
or sobbed softly.
Gertrude O'Neill cradled her daughter,
each dressed only in tattered underclothes.
Dora Cole, a kitchen worker, hacked a ragged cough,
her lungs strained from smoke inhalation.
Maggie Queenan sat stoically,
waiting for whatever would come next.
Mary McCauley, just 19 years old,
suddenly jumped to her feet.
It had all suddenly become too much for her:
the smell of the smoke, the dull rumble
of the approaching flames,
crunch after sickening crunch in the alley.
McCauley broke for the window, but Gavin blocked her way.
Later, Gavin said that she understood
why the women jumped as they had.
The situation was overwhelming.
Death seemed imminent, horrifically painful,
and torturously slow.
Her preference, too, was to meet death
on the bricks rather to allow the flames to have their way.
This feeling, she admitted, was no different
from what the women who had leapt must have felt.
It was only that Gavin had maintained her resolve
to wait it out.
"I made up my mind that I wasn't going to be burned.
"I made up my mind that I would stand
"as long as there were bricks to it," she later said.
"If it hadn't for that, I would have jumped."
In total, there were 12 women who jumped into the alley
from this stretch of rooms.
And something that I actually hadn't,
I didn't come upon as I was writing this,
but at another event I was doing for this;
actually, this was an event for a different book
I was involved with, but I ended up seated
next to a young woman whose great-great-grand aunt,
some kind of connection like that,
was one of the domestics in the hotel that night
and had escaped.
And the, according to the family legend,
or oh, no, I'm sorry.
She hadn't escaped, she jumped and died.
But according to family legend,
that the reason she had done that
was because, and a lot of the women who lived here
were Irish Catholics from the Third Ward neighborhood,
which was pretty near to this.
Being Catholic, the fear of their parents
not being able to find their body after the fire,
to not be buried in consecrated ground,
was enough that they wanted to make sure
that there was something left behind afterwards.
So again, you have 12 of these women
who jumped into the alley.
And then the great, heroic act of the fire occurs.
From just across the alley, again,
if you look right here, it's not this building,
but further up the block there is another building
that gets about that close to the Newhall.
Right across the way from room 124.
And a firefighter by the name of Hermann Strauss,
with another man who just happened to be working
in the area, they take a ladder up to the roof
of that building and lay it from ledge to ledge,
and they have just enough room
that that ladder fits, to fall right on the window ledge
of room 124, and I believe it was eight women
in room 124, and then two more in next door, 122,
are able to escape over the ladder.
All but the last one go over on their own.
Newspaper accounts actually have two of them walking,
they say they walked upright across the ladder,
which is about 80 feet over the alley,
which makes me nervous just thinking about.
And then the final woman, Strauss crossed over,
went into the room and actually picked her up
and put her on his back
and took her over to safety.
So this occurs about 4:45 a.m.
So again, this is an hour
after this fire has been discovered.
Everybody's who out of the building,
everybody who's gonna get out the building is out.
The fire burns for about another hour,
and then with a spectacular collapse,
this is seen the next day.
Again, two hours removed from just another mundane evening
in downtown Milwaukee, to the wreck
of what was once the city's great hope.
And in the ruins there, so again,
to pull it back to this, no, this image.
Those two telegraph poles
are what you'd see right there,
and then again, this is the building next door
where the other hotel rooms, again, it still stands.
So this is the scene the next morning.
There are 47 bodies in the ruins there,
waiting to be discovered.
And that's, I guess, where I'll leave it for right now.
The book does, that's basically talked
about the first two parts of the book.
The third part is one of the,
one of the things that kind of separates this
from the common mythology, again,
for anybody who's read about the Newhall,
not in this book, that might be new information.
It gets to the aftermath of the fire,
how the local media covered this event,
how the Milwaukee Journal kind of took over
the narrative for the history of the fire,
and sort of rewrote what I feel would've actually happened,
and gets also to what happened, again,
locally in the aftermath of this,
or nationally, in the name of fire safety,
not to spoil the ending, but not much at all.
There were great fires and great disasters like this
that occurred over the next couple decades.
Really, it wasn't until the Triangle Shirtwaist fire,
which I think is 1902?
1911, or the Iroquois Theatre fire, 1902, I wanna say.
That was in Chicago where 600 and some people died,
but really not until the Triangle fire
that actual reform takes hold.
And I also talk about the supposed arson,
the legal trial, the man they put on trial
for setting this fire, and again,
not to spoil things, but they put the hotel bar's operator
on fire for setting this, and at the time he's arrested,
there's fear that he will be lynched
because everybody thinks that he did this.
And he's actually held in a secure location for a while,
and by the time he's acquitted,
he walks out of the courthouse to handshakes
and applause because everyone's so convinced
that he had nothing to do with this.
So that's where I'll leave it for this afternoon.
I'll do questions in a bit.
I'll wrap this up a little for TV,
so thanks for coming out everybody,
thanks for having me, and again,
the book is Damn the Old Tinderbox! ,
available everywhere.
[audience applauding]
Thank you.