More than 50 guests were seated in the dining room of Chicago’s Lakota Hotel when the floor suddenly erupted beneath them. A deafening crash came from the engine room below, followed by heavy pieces of iron tearing upward through the room and sending tables and chairs flying.
The hotel’s massive flywheel had broken apart at high speed. One fragment weighing more than 100 pounds blasted through a basement window, crossed into a neighboring saloon, and destroyed an automatic piano. Another buried itself in the stone foundation beneath the sidewalk.
Then the entire ten-story hotel went dark. Terrified guests poured into the corridors and rushed down the stairways, uncertain whether the building was collapsing around them. Remarkably, despite the violence of the accident, no one was injured.
Panic In a Hotel
CHICAGO, Illinois. — Guests of the Lakota Hotel, located at Michigan Avenue and 30th Street, were thrown into a panic and fled from the hotel dining room last night when a flywheel in the engine room shot from its position and crashed into a thousand pieces, many of which tore through the floor of the dining room, immediately above.
One of the pieces, weighing more than 100 pounds, flew out of the basement window, crashed through the saloon window of J.A. Johnson, and wrecked an automatic piano.
More than 50 guests were seated in the dining room of the hotel when they were startled by a crash from the engine room and saw a portion of the floor shoot upwards. Chairs and tables were overturned by the heavy iron hurled through the air.
The diners fled in haste. Although none was injured, many had narrow escapes.
The breaking of the flywheel plunged the ten story building into darkness and in an instant the corridors were filled with terror struck men and women, who climbed down the stairways and made anxious inquiries at the office. They were assured that there was no danger and many of them returned to their rooms. The dining room, however, was out of commission for the night.
Several of the guests who believed danger still threatened, refused to ascend the stairs and left for other quarters.
The break is thought to have been caused by the splitting of one of the belts on the dynamo. Like a flash, the engine wheels, with nothing to retard the speed, whirled around with startling rapidity, and a second later the flywheel shot out of position.
One of the huge pieces of the wheel crashed along the basement floor and imbedded itself in the stone foundation under the sidewalk.
Source: The Topeka State Journal. Topeka, Kansas. September 9, 1907.
