Read an Excerpt
Tinder Box
The Iroquois Theatre Disaster 1903
By Anthony P. Hatch Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 2003 Anthony P. Hatch
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-89733-802-8
CHAPTER 1
OPENING NIGHT
"[A] glorious place of amusement.."
— Amy Leslie, Arts Critic, CHICAGO DAILY TRIBUNE
The Iroquois Theatre glowed like a luminous jewel between the darkened commercial buildings on Chicago's busy Randolph Street. Charles Collins, a new general assignment reporter who had just turned twenty, had never seen anything like it. The theatre's grand opening was being called "the event of Chicago's century," and purely by chance the Record-Herald, the city's leading morning paper, had assigned Collins to cover it.
It was the evening of Monday, November 23, 1903, when the century seemed as young and optimistic as the tall, slim, neatly dressed reporter. "It was a fairly lush time," wrote one columnist years later. "We had come trumpeting out of the Spanish American War with the buck-toothed image of Teddy Roosevelt and we hadn't yet gone down the drain in the financial panic of 1907."
After many postponements, the Iroquois was ready: a glittery million-dollar showplace that proud city boosters declared was without doubt the best theatre in the Midwest and that would rival, if not exceed, anything seen along New York's Great White Way or in prominent European capitals. Chicago, America's second city now that it had surpassed Philadelphia in population, was described as "on the make for the almighty dollar." Chicagoans would not settle for being second best in anything.
Interest and excitement about the opening had gathered momentum during the fall, with newspaper ads proclaiming, "No resident of Chicago imbued with the proper amount of local pride can afford to miss the dedicatory performance of the best theatre on Earth. Chicago Always Leads. Biggest, Brightest and Best in every other way, it now has the theatre to correspond."
Bundled against the biting cold, Charles Collins watched helmeted police officers in heavy woolen blue coats direct traffic as expensive — $1,200 — horse-drawn Studebaker Broughams and Oldsmobile Landaus, private omnibuses or "opera buses," hansom cabs, rockaways and even an occasional chauffeur-driven automobile pulled to the curb to discharge the city's Brahmins. Along with other shivering journalists, Collins eyed the crowd of elegant men and women emerging from the vehicles in top hats, tuxedos, furs, muffs and the latest Paris fashions, who quickly crossed the pavement under a striped awning to walk through highly polished glass-and-mahogany doors into one of the most imposing playhouses ever built in America. The audience had come out on this cold November night not only to see and be seen in the newest showplace in the nation but to be entertained by a spectacle from London's Drury Lane Theatre, featuring a favorite son of Chicago, Eddie Foy, one of the leading comedians of the time, who headed a cast of hundreds.
John G. Shedd — who in three years would head the Marshall Field department store and would later endow the city's excellent aquarium — strode in, accompanied by his wife and daughter. Entering too was one of the city's biggest advertisers, Alexander Revell, the marketing genius who attracted hoards of customers to his furniture mart each day because of the fully furnished cottage he had set up on its fifth floor. Already occupying an upper box were the Plamondon brothers, George and Charles, owners of a large machinery plant. Charles, the firm's president and an official of the Chicago Board of Education, maintained a residence overlooking Lake Michigan and a country home in Wheaton called Green Gables. R. Hall McCormick of the McCormick Reaper family was there, along with Mr. and Mrs. Edward Leicht, who had given a dinner party before leaving for the theatre. Mrs. Leicht wore a pink etamine gown, a white satin-and-lace coat and a frilled hat of pink chiffon.
Days earlier, many of these Chicago moguls had participated in a highly publicized auction where box seats for the opening night had gone for as much as $225 — nearly ten times Charles Collins's salary of twenty-five dollars a week. Tonight Collins was working as an unpaid theatre critic, substituting for the Record-Herald's noted drama critic James O'Donnell Bennett, who was attending the premiere of Ulysses, which Bennett considered more worthwhile than Mr. Bluebeard, even though that British import was billed as a musical comedy "extravaganza."
Collins was well qualified to function as a critic: he had graduated from the University of Chicago the previous June with a degree in philosophy. His classmates described him as a "strong, silent man, difficult to approach socially," with a "slightly sardonic, wry sense of humor." From the time he entered the university, he knew he would become a journalist, and immediately after graduation he had joined the Record-Herald, one of the two newspapers he had served as a campus correspondent, regularly phoning in sports scores and other items. He represented a new trend: "for the first time in history, college graduates [were working] on newspapers ... bringing a new literary flair to a world once considered beneath the dignity of the educated elite."
His deeper love, however, was for the theatre and virtually all forms of popular entertainment, and he harbored a secret desire to become a full-time theatre critic. "Charlie knows his theatre," said a friend. "He inwardly revels at the Stratford-on-Avon Shakespearians, the D'Oyly Carte Gilbert and Sullivanians. ... barring revivals, he never sees a play twice." The opportunity to cover the opening performance in the Iroquois was a plum assignment.
Collins, like most reporters, spent much of the day on his feet. There was no overtime pay, and it was quite common to get one day off every two weeks. Rumor had it that one fortunate newsman had scraped together enough money for a down payment on a "wheel," as bicycles were called, to get from one assignment to another, but Collins's modest salary did not permit that luxury. As a new hand at the paper, he was probably sent to cover minor events, like "neighborhood pet shows, high school debating society finals, or conventions of the National Association of Paper Clip Manufacturers." On occasion, he might land a more important assignment.
* * *
To Chicago city officials, burdened with continuing revelations of corruption, accusations of immorality and what must have seemed like endless labor strikes, the debut of the lavish theatre not only offered a brief respite from their mundane problems but was also a symbol of hope for the new millennium. The opulent playhouse was located in the heart of the city's great commercial Loop, so named for the two-track Union Elevated trains, 1,600 of them a day, which twisted and ground above the downtown district like some giant species of screeching snake. By day, the area was choked with horse-drawn vehicular traffic, sidewalks crowded with visitors to the new "high rise" office buildings and to Marshall Field's, Mandel Brothers, Carson, Pirie, Scott and other fabulous retail emporia, and filled with the never-ending political hustle at the ugly, ponderous, block-long City Hall and County Building. At night, the area was so thick with theatres, hotels, restaurants and wine rooms — as cabarets were then called — that it was becoming known as the "Rialto of the Midwest."
Collins, along with the rest of the local press corps, was overwhelmed by the physical splendor of the theatre. The Record-Herald's arch rival, the Chicago Tribune, would lose itself in superlatives, describing it as "a virtual temple of beauty — a place where the noblest and highest in dramatic art could find a worthy home." Tribune typesetters had already blocked out the next day's theatre page headline:
BEAUTY OF IROQUOIS ONE OF THE SPLENDID THEATRES OF THE WORLD OPENS WITH "MR. BLUEBEARD" EDDIE FOY IS WELCOMED
Under that headline, Amy Leslie, the Tribune's respected arts critic, wrote breathlessly, "No theatre anywhere is handsomer than the Iroquois, a noble monument to dramatic art. Except L'Opera in Paris no theatre I ever saw is so resplendently spirited in its architecture ... it is perhaps as glorious a place of amusement as Chicago shall care to demand."
And the wonder of it all, as the Chicago Journal correctly noted, was that "the marvels ... had been wrought in the short space of six months." On opening night a group of friends entering the building exclaimed to one of the theatre's owners, "You must have had Aladdin's lamp to accomplish all this!"
CHAPTER 2
ABSOLUTELY FIREPROOF
"If this thing starts going they will lynch you."
— Captain Patrick Jennings, Engine Company 13
The theatre's debut had generated national interest for months. On its front page the previous May, the New York Times had reported, "Buildings in Dearborn and Randolph Streets, occupying the proposed site of the Iroquois Theatre are being razed for the new playhouse, which it is expected will be completed by October 12 when 'Mr. Bluebeard' will be given its Chicago opening."
When the cornerstone was laid on July 28, the San Francisco Chronicle carried a drawing of the Iroquois' main entrance below the headline, "Chicago to Have a Palatial Theatre." Its owners were officially listed as Will J. Davis and Harry Powers of Chicago and their partners, Klaw and Erlanger of New York and Nixon and Zimmerman of Philadelphia. "It will be a Syndicate House," noted the Chronicle, referring to the New York-based Theatrical Trust, which then controlled most of America's major theatres.
Only steps away from where the broad cobblestone arteries of Dearborn and Randolph streets intersected, and the new electric trolleys topped with pentagrams clutched a web of sparking overhead wires, the Iroquois formed a great L extending from Randolph to a narrow alley and, in the rear, west to Dearborn. The stage occupied the toe of the L. The building's dimensions were impressive: its frontage covered sixty-one feet along Randolph, and extended ninety-one feet north to a lot fronting 110 feet on Dearborn. The main entrance on Randolph opened into a huge vestibule, foyer, grand promenade and staircase, all of it at a sharp right angle to the auditorium and stage. Parallel to the six-story edifice and across a narrow eighteen-foot cobblestone alley, were Northwestern University's schools of law, dentistry, pharmacology and chemistry, in a building that had been the Tremont House hotel. On the alley side of the theatre were the scenery doors and fire escapes, and at the back of the theatre was a small stage door adjoining an empty lot.
Sandwiched between the dark stone Delaware office building on the corner and John Thompson's street-level restaurant, the Iroquois protruded boldly into Randolph Street — a baroque palace in a block of nondescript four-story structures: stores, offices, a small hotel and a bowling alley. Built of steel, brick and concrete, materials considered impervious to fire, the theatre and its furnishings represented an investment of $1.1 million, an astronomical sum at a time when twelve dollars a week was considered a reasonable salary and a Chicago workingman's family existed on an average yearly income of $827.
It seemed to Collins that no expense had been spared in building and outfitting the Iroquois. Its impressive French-style facade was polished granite and Bedford stone; huge twin Corinthian columns, each weighing thirty-two tons, bracketed an entrance with ten glass doors. Atop the columns were pilasters ornamented with the epic figures of Comedy and Tragedy, and the whole edifice was crowned with a broken pediment and a large carved stone bust of the theatre's namesake Indian, an idea said to have originated with the theatre's co-owner and manager, Will Davis, who owned a large collection of Americana.
The interior was not only elegant but the epitome of modern technology. Two thousand Edison Mazda bulbs blazed above and around the grand entry foyer and around a 6,300-foot auditorium where seats were arranged so that everyone in the audience, whether in boxes, balcony or gallery, had an unbroken view of a stage sixty feet wide by 110 feet deep. The stage floor had been designed to be much lower than standard to permit people in the front rows a view from the footlights to the rear wall. The auditorium was second in size only to that of the cavernous Chicago Municipal Auditorium.
The ceiling towered fifty-three feet over the entrance hall, supported by ten columns of pavanazzo marble bracketing a grand promenade, its design a blend of elements adapted from both the U.S. Library of Congress and L'Opera Comique in Paris. Ornate chandeliers and illuminated globes in the Beaux Arts style lighted graceful arched staircases bordered with filigree wrought-iron balustrades ascending to the box seats and upper tiers.
Apart from walls of gleaming mirrors, the rich Indian red of the painted wall panels and the dull gold of the arched ceiling, what space remained had been covered with seemingly endless yards of red and green plush velvet drapery. The seats in the auditorium were also covered with plush velvet and stuffed with hemp, as were the settees arranged around the promenade and the landings. Virtually nothing had been overlooked.
High above the auditorium, the theatre's ornate dome was circled by a frieze illustrating the history of the Chicago stage, from the relatively primitive Rice Theatre to the ultra-modern Iroquois.
Backstage, out of the audience's sight, the opulence ended, but there were still many points of interest that stagehands were eager to point out. There were no fewer than thirty-eight brick-walled dressing rooms rising from the basement on different tiers, and capable of housing as many as four hundred performers — a practical accommodation at a time when big musical productions often had casts of three hundred or more, including very young children.
A large electric elevator could whisk the actors silently and speedily from their dressing rooms to the stage and the stagehands to the very top of the scenery loft. Eleven miles of two-inch greased Manila rope were needed to support the Iroquois' main drop curtains and the approximately 280 heavily painted Bluebeard scenery flats suspended from wooden battens high above the stage. Virtually all interior and stage lighting was controlled from a large central switchboard just offstage, its electric cables sheathed in heavy metal conduits.
On opening night, the theatre's wunderkind architect, handsome twenty-nine-year-old Benjamin H. Marshall, scion of one of Chicago's oldest families, sat with his parents and friends in a two-hundred-dollar box seat, listening to Will Davis deliver a rousing second-act curtain speech interrupted by cheers and bursts of applause. Davis, gesturing toward the embarrassed young architect, assured the audience that it was no Aladdin's lamp that had caused the building to be completed in five months, but Ben Marshall, the George Fuller Construction Company and other enterprising Chicago firms and workers. With barely concealed contempt for the Eastern theatre establishment, Davis said that the Iroquois was the creation of Western talent, abilities and enthusiasm, that Western appreciation and encouragement were all that were desired, and "they were good enough for any man."
For the opening night audience, Davis and his partner Powers had produced a thirty-page souvenir brochure with a red, gold-embossed cover, containing pictures of Benjamin Marshall, Davis, Powers and their partners, along with sketches of the theatre's entrance, lobby, promenade, magnificent twin staircases, and many other lesser features including the smoking room, a clubby cave in the basement where men could retire between the acts to enjoy cigars and cigarettes while the ladies gossiped in the powder rooms.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tinder Box by Anthony P. Hatch. Copyright © 2003 Anthony P. Hatch. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
