Joe Bruno's Mobsters - Six Volume Set (45 page)

The orchestra, for some reason, broke out into a cheerful song, but it did nothing to quell anyone's fears.

By this time, the people in the theater had realized a fire was occurring, and screams of terror began to reverberate against the theater's walls. Farren and Murdock stopped play acting and stood on one side of the stage, imploring the people to leave quickly and quietly. Claxton and Studley did the same on the other side of the stage.

Claxton yelled to the crowd, who were now on
their feet in an extremely agitated state, “You can all go out if you can only keep quiet. We are between you and the flames! Keep cool and walk out quietly!”

But the frenzied crowd had a mind of its own. People ran out into the aisles and panic ensued.

Studley yelled to the crowd, “If I have the presence of mind to stand here between you and the fire, which is right behind me, you ought to have the presence of mind to go out quietly!”

Claxton later told the police, “We were now almost surrounded by flames; it was madness to delay longer. I took Mr. Murdoch by the arm and said 'Come, let us go.' He pulled away from me in a dazed sort of way and rushed into his dressing room, where the fire was even then raging. To leap from the stage into the orchestra
, in the hope of getting out through the front of the house, would only add one more person to the frantic struggling mass of human beings, who were trampling each other to death like wild beasts.”

Burning timber began raining onto the stage
, and the actors were forced to run into the wings. Claxton suddenly remembered there was a small hallway which led from her dressing room, through the basement and into the box office. Claxton ran backstage, met Harrison, and both ladies fled though this passage in their dressing room to the box office outside. On the other hand, Murdock and Burroughs ran back to their dressing rooms to get warmer clothing to fend off the frigid December air outside the theater.

Neither man made it out of the theater alive.

By this time a fire alarm had been sent out from the First Precinct police station, which was next door to the theater. Also, a telegram was sent to Mayor Schroeder, informing him of the dire situation.

Some of the theater's crew ran
to the Johnson Street exits, and they made it safely outside. But the fire soon spread and cut off access to those exits. All of the remaining exits were either in the front of the theater, at the main entrance on Washington Street, or through the emergency doors on Flood's Alley.

While the crowd
was set in panic mode, head usher Thomas Rochford rushed to the rear of the theater, and he opened the special exit doors on Flood’s Alley . Because of Rochford's action, the people on the ground floor were able to exit the theater in less than three minutes. So in effect, the people in the least crowded part of the theater had the fastest escape routes.

However, the open doors on Flood
’s Alley caused a brisk airflow to blast into the theater, which increased the intensity of the fire.

The people on the second floor had two stairways from which they could escape. The main
7-foot-wide stairway, the stairway in which they had entered the building , led to the vestibule near the Washington Street exit. The other exit was a narrower stairway that led to Flood's Alley.

Most decided to rush for the main stairway, because it was the one they were most familiar with. This caused a logjam of the greatest proportions, since instead of an orderly exit, the people worked themselves into a frenzy. People started getting tangled with each other. Some people jammed into doorways
, and others fell forward down the stairs onto the people below them, causing the flow of people out of the building to stop completely.

Sergeant John Cain
, from the First Precinct next door, fought his way into the theater and with the help of janitor Van Sicken, he began to untangle the fallen people so that the crowd behind them could get down the stairs to safety. By all accounts, almost all the people from the second floor dress circle seats were able to exit the theater alive. But the people jammed into the gallery on the third floor were doomed from the start, and they knew it.

People started jumpin
g from the family circle seats into the auditorium below. Some were injured so badly from the jump they were not able to exit the theater. Other people lowered themselves from a small third-floor window to Flood's Alley below. One man forced himself through a ventilator shaft which deposited him onto the roof of the police station next door.

But most of the people in the gallery had no way to save themselves. After a few people were able to stumble down the stairway from which they had entered the building to the safety outside, the supports for the gallery collapsed, thrusting hundreds of people three floors down onto the bottom level.

Charles Straub had been sitting in the gallery near the stairway. He was sitting with his friend Joseph Kremer.

Straub said afterwards, “We could hardly run down the stairs; we were crowded down.”

Even though hundreds of people had tripped and fell on top of him, Straub was somehow able to make it down the stairs and out of the theater. He estimated about 25 people from the gallery had made it out before him and about 12 people after him. The rest were trapped inside.

H
e never saw his friend Kremer again.

Charles Vine had been sitting in the gallery, but far away from the only stairway. He thought about jumping from one of the windows facing Flood's Alley, but it was a 60-foot drop
, and he would certainly perish from that jump. So Vine hurried to the front of the gallery, and he decided to jump from there to the dress circle below. Vine cut himself badly on a chair and was knocked out for a moment. But Vine quickly regained consciousness, and he was able to force his way down the second floor stairs to the exit door below.

Fire Marshall
Keady said later that he thought Vine had been “the last person to leave the gallery alive.”

Fifteen minutes after the fire had begun, the entire interior of the theater was in flames. At 11:45 p.m., the east wall of the theater fell with a loud grumbling, burying more than 300 men, women, and children under tons of bricks and burning debris.

Thomas Nevins, the Chief Engineer of the Brooklyn Fire Department, had arrived at the theater around 11:26 p. m. He immediately saw there was no way to save the theater and that his job was now to confine the fire to that single structure. When the additional fire-fighting equipment arrived just before midnight, Nevins used that equipment to keep adjoining buildings free of sparks and burning debris.

By midnight, around 5,000 spectators had assembled in
the streets outside the theater. Some were looking for signs of loved ones who had gone to the theater, but had not yet returned home.

At 1 a.m., the Flood's Alley wall collapsed, and by 3 a.m. the fire had started to burn itself out. At that point, Chief Nevins considered the fire under control. The early newspapers that morning reported the fire, but said that only a handful of people had been killed.

At the break of dawn, Chief Nevins led a contingent of fire personnel into the building. Chief Nevins discovered almost the entire theater had collapsed into the cellar. As the firemen made their way through the ruins, they made a terrible discovery. What appeared to be plain rubbish, was in fact, a mangled mess of charred human bodies. Some of the bodies were intact, and some had missing limbs. All were burned beyond recognition. It was later determined that almost all the dead had been sitting in the third floor gallery when the fire started.

Removal of the bodies took three days. It was a long and tedious project because,
in their charred condition, the bodies would immediately fall apart when they were moved.

Forensic science being in its infant stages at the time, an exact body count was impossible. Initial reports in the newspapers said there were anywhere from 275 to 400 fatalities in the Brooklyn Theater Fire. A coroner's report later said there were 283 fatalities, but that was only an educated guess. One hundre
d and three unidentified bodies and parts of bodies were buried in a common grave at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

The death count in the Brooklyn Theater Fire of 1876 was
exceeded only by the Iroquois Theater fire which occurred on December 30, 1903, in Chicago, Ill, where at least 605 people died, and the Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire in Boston, on November 28, 1942, which killed 492 people.

The Brooklyn Theater Fire of 1876 did spur New York City to institute safeguards that reduced the possibility of a similar fire ever happening again. Changes in the building code barred the presence of paints, woods, and construction material in the stage area. The code also mandated the use of a solid brick proscenium wall, “extending from the cellar to the roof, to minimize the risk of a stage fire spreading into the auditorium.”

Other changes to the code decreed that “proscenium arches were to be equipped with non-flammable fire curtains.” Other openings in the proscenium wall required self-closing, fire-resistant doors. And heat-activated sprinkling systems were required for the fly space above the stage.

Starting in the early 1900
s, a half hour before the scheduled performance each theater was to have a “Theater Detail Officer” on duty. Before the play started, the Theater Detail Officer's job was to “test the fire alarms, inspect firewall doors, and the fire curtain.” During the performance, the theater Detail Officer would “roam the theater, making sure that aisles, hallways, and fire exits were clear and accessible to all patrons.”

There were contradicting accounts about what happened to Kate Claxton after she escaped from the Brooklyn Theater Fire. One newspaper said she was seen sitting safely in the First Precinct police station one hour after the fire. Another report said that three hours after the fire had started, a New York City newspaper reporter found Claxton wandering in a daze at Manhattan's City Hall. Her hands and face were bloated with burn blisters, and she could not remember taking the ferry from Brooklyn to Manhattan.

Scant months later, after Claxton had recovered from her injuries, she traveled to St. Louis to appear in another play. As soon as she arrived in St. Louis, she checked into the Southern Hotel. In hours, that hotel went up in flames. But Claxton and her brother, whom she was traveling with, made a miraculous escape seconds before the hotel collapsed.

This effectively ended Kate Claxton's theatrical career. Fearing she was some kind of a jinx, other actors refused to appear on stage with her. And
theatergoers, fearing another fire, boycotted her performances altogether.

Nine years after the Brooklyn Theater Fire, Kate Claxton shared her thoughts with the
New York Times
.

She said, “We thought we were acting for the best in continuing the play as we did, with the hope that the fire would be put out without difficulty, or that the audience would leave gradually or quietly. But the result proved that it was not the right course. The curtain should have been kept down until the flames had been extinguished, or if it had been found impossible to cope with them, the audience should have been calmly informed that indisposition on the part of some member of the company, or some unfortunate occurrence behind the scenery compelled a suspension of the performance, and they should have been requested to disperse as quietly as they could. Raising the curtain created a draft which fanned the flames into fury.”

Hindsight is 20/20, but Kate Claxton's later observations were absolutely correct. The Brooklyn Theater Fire of 1876 could have produced minimal damage, if only the theater personnel had not bumbled, but had acted in a coherent, methodical, and calm manner.

Sadly, this never happened.

C
astellano, Paul

He was one of
the most disliked mob bosses ever, with a superiority complex second to none. However, if Paul Castellano had been street-smart like most Mafia bosses, he might not have been executed so easily and so publicly.

Paul Castellano was born Constantino Paul Castellano on June 26, 1915, in Brooklyn, New York. Castellano did not like his given first name, so he insisted that everyone call him Paul instead. Castellano's parents were born in Sicily, and his father was a butcher, with a little illegal numbers business on the side. Castellano's father was also an early member of the Mangano Crime Family, which was created by Salvatore Maranzano after the killing of Joe “The Boss” Masseria, which ended the Castellammarese War.

Castellano dropped out of the school after the eighth grade, and he went to work in both of his father's businesses. In 1934, when Castellano was only 19-years-old, Castellano and two of his buddies committed an armed robbery of a local business. However, things went awry, and when the police arrived at the scene, his two friends had escaped. Big Paul, as he was called (Castellano was six-foot-three and in his prime weighed over 275 pounds), was caught by the police. But he refused to rat on his colleagues, and as a result, he was hit with a three-month bit in the slammer. When he returned to the mean streets of Brooklyn, Castellano's reputation had been enhanced by his refusal to cooperate with the police.

In 1937, at the age of 22, Castellano married his childhood sweetheart Nina Manno, who was the sister-in-law of Carlo Gambino. They eventually had three sons: Paul, Philip, Joseph, and a daughter Connie.