While the New York State Tenement House Act (1867) required tenement homes to have fire escapes, tragedies continued to happen. In the newspaper article below, from 1903, this tenement house fire happened on Nov. 1st, while people were celebrating Halloween. Twenty-five people were killed in this tragic fire at a home called “The House of All Nations.” The article is gruesome in its details, like nothing modern newspapers would print.
A TENEMENT HOUSE HORROR
Twenty-Five Persons Dead
Suffocated in Their Attempts to Reach the Fire Escapes
New York, Nov. 2.—Twenty-one men, three women, and a 10-months old baby were burned to death or suffocated in a fire that started early yesterday morning in “The House of All Nations,” a five-story tenement house at 216 Eleventh avenue, which the police and coroner believe to be of incendiary origin. Some of the peculiar features of the disaster in addition to the startling loss of life, are that the fire was practically extinguished in twenty minutes, the police could learn of but one person injured other than those who lost their lives, and that the property loss was only $7,000.
The dead are mostly Italians of the poorer class.
The only person injured, so far as can be learned, is Mary Jane Quinn, who was burned about the face and hands and severely bruised by leaping from a second story window fire escape.
Several apartments in the tenement held Halloween parties and the guests added materially to the number of persons in the house and made the crush and jam to escape more than it ordinarily would have been. Although plentifully provided with fire escapes, the front and rear escape was cut off for a few minutes after the fire started by the bodies of the dead becoming wedged in the openings leading to the ladders. The fire had been burning for some minutes before it was discovered. It had started in the basement, and, rushing upward, had attacked the stairway leading to the apartments. In a short space of time the flames had so enveloped the stairway that egress from the building by it was impossible. The house from the third to the fifth floor was entirely destroyed.
At the windows, front and rear, bodies of men and women were jammed, showing that a desperate struggle to get out resulted in the complete choking of the exits to the fire escapes, and had been the cause of a number of the inmates being suffocated. Lying in a bed alongside a window at the rear of the fourth floor, the firemen found the bodies of five men. Each had clutched the one next to him in an endeavor to push him away in order to get to the fire escape outside. The features of the men were distorted, some with rage and two in agony. In two instances the men had gripped each other so hard that blood had run down over their hands.
On the fourth floor was found the body of Maculeta Vingiguerro and the body of her baby. The mother had crawled to the front window and had succeeded in grasping the sill when she was suffocated. In her arms lay the body of her child.
When the firemen reached the scene there was a mass of flames bursting through the middle of the roof, while the air was filled with heartrending screams of the women and curses of the men. Many daring rescues were made by the firemen, who at times had to use violence in their attempts to disentangle the mass of writhing human beings struggling in vain efforts to reach safety from the crowded fire escapes. One fireman climbed to the fourth floor, where a window was filled with a mass of people jammed in and fighting to get out. He struck the heads of all the men he could see with his fist and they fell back. He then handed down to the firemen on the ladder below him three women and a baby. Another fireman performed a similar feature and rescued to girls from the fourth floor. Life nets played a prominent part in the work of rescue. The firemen dropped men and women, dead and live, from one floor to another and finally the men standing on the ladders on the first floor let them fall into the nets held by policemen and firemen in the street. [Source]
