Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We've gotten a lot of requests over the years to do an episode about the Coconut Grove nightclub fire, and I have really really put off doing it because of all the different types of disasters there are to research. For me, the fires are the worst ones there. They're bad. Yeah, they're bad. We can talk about reasons why on Friday and the behind the scenes. But the Coconut Grove fire came up not long ago on our episode on Charles Ponzi because his wife Rose worked there. She went to work there after he had been deported back to Italy, but she was not at work that night, so I thought about moving it onto the list. Then after it had come up, and as I was looking at it, I realized this year is the fires eightieth anniversary. It happened on November. This is still the deadliest nightclub fire in history, and in terms of single building fires, it is the second deadliest in United States history. The deadliest was the Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago that happened on December nineteen oh three, and we covered that fire on this show on December eight. As we will discuss, though, there are a lot of lessons from the Iroquois Theater fire that had not been heated at Coconut Grove almost forty years later. Coconut Grove, often known just as the Grove, was at seventeen Piedmont Street in Boston, Massachusetts, with an entrance set behind a trio of archways. It's theme may have been inspired by the Coconut Grove nightclub at the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. Boston's Coconut Grove had opened in in what had previously been a garage and warehouse. Over time, it had been built on and expanded and remodeled and by The club had this kind of odd, almost zigzag shape. The ground floor contained the caricature bar as well as a full service restaurant. The restaurant had a central dance floor with tables and chairs on three sides of it and an orchestra stage on the fourth. This area had a retractable roof that could be opened in good weather, which I think sounds very nice. This was November, though, so it was closed the night of the fire. The ground floor also had a newly opened lounge called the Broadway Lounge also just called the New Lounge, that also had a bar in it. There were also coat check rooms, restrooms, dressing rooms for the entertainer, is, a telephone room, and a service bar. So there was a lot of stuff packed into this relatively small kind of zigzag shaped space. The basement of the grove had only one public space, the Melody Lounge. The rest of the basement house the furnace room, the kitchens, with walking, cold storage and other storage spaces on both floors. The club was decorated with lighted artificial palm trees, satiny fabric draped from the ceiling and walls of stairs, and the Melody Lounge had a satin covered ceiling and walls covered in ratan bamboo and synthetic leather. Previously, the grove had been owned by mob boss Charles Solomon, who was known as King. Solomon was murdered at Boston's Cotton Club in ninety three, and at that point his wife inherited the grove. She gave it to their lawyer, Barnett Wolansky, known as Barney in lieu of legal fees. When Solomon owned it, the grove had kind of a seedy reputation as a prohibition earirest speak easy but well Landski tried to transform it into a more glamorous place that people would want to come for dinner, drinks, dancing, and entertainment. On the night of November, the grove was busy. It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving. There had been a big college football game earlier in the day between rivals Boston College and Holy Cross College. Boston College was at the end of an undefeated season and everyone expected them to win and then be invited to play in the Sugar Bowl. There was reportedly even a committee on hand to deliver that invitation after the game, but surprise, Boston College lost fifty five to twelve. That was an enormous upset. A formal celebration had been planned at the grove, which was canceled because of that loss, but a lot of people made their way there after the game anyway. A party that went on as planned that night was in honor of actor Buck Jones. Jones was known for his work in westerns. He had acting credits and more than a hundred and fifty films, almost all of them Westerns. He was on a tour promoting war bonds, and about thirty people were at his party. A lot of them were affiliated with Monogram Theater Group. Since this happened as the United States was involved in World War Two, there were also a lot of servicemen there. At about ten fifteen that night, the grove was absolutely packed. The club's license applications with the City of Boston specified that it had four hundred chairs and thirty stools, although sources contradict about what the club's maximum occupancy was. There are sources that list both four hundred sixty and six hundred people. Regardless, it's estimated that there were about a thousand people in the building that night, so roughly twice the planned number. Downstairs, in a corner of the mill the lounge, someone loosened a light bulb in one of the artificial palm trees. That corner was already pretty dimly lit, but this person apparently wanted some more privacy with his date. The bartender noticed this and told a bus boy to go fix the bulb. Without that bulblet, it was too dark in the corner to see, so the bus boy lit a match, and then once he was done, he extinguished the match, stomping it out on the floor with his foot. Very soon after this, people noticed sparks in the vicinity of this palm tree near the ceiling, but for a moment there was not an obvious flame. But then the fire spread very rapidly along the underside of the fabric draped below the ceiling. It took somewhere between two and four minutes for a very hot, fast moving fire to engulf the melody lounge. The stairway out of the lounge, which was narrow and steep, acted like a chimney, drawing the fire and the heat up to the ground floor of the building, where it burst into the foyer. The foyer had a high, arched ceiling, and it similarly acted like a chimney and pulled the fire into the rest of the ground floor. The fabric draped walls and ceiling quickly caught fire. Within about five minutes, the fire had moved through the ground floor restaurant and into the New Broadway lounge. When people noticed the flames, they panicked, and that panic became much worse when the lights went out Just minutes after the fire started, there were no emergency lights, and the exits were not marked. Even if they had been. Many of the doors were locked. People overturned tables and punched and shoved one another as they fought to get to an exit. And the exit the vast majority of people were pushing for was the revolving door that they used to enter the building that was quickly jammed with bodies. As the fire burned through the oxygen and the melody lounge, it left very hot, flammable gases that burst into flame again when they got to the top of the stairs, where there was more fresh air, and that meant people who didn't make it up the stairs ahead of the fire found those stairs blocked by flames. The same was true for the buildings working doors to the outside. The fire surged as it came into contact with the fresh air. This included surging around the sides of the revolving door, so the doors that were not locked became totally impassable. They were blocked by bursts of flame and by bodies stacked on top of one another. Together, all of this was disastrous. Four hundred two people died. Official lists include four nine names. One person who died in the hospital is not included for reasons that are unclear. Another person survived the fire but lost his wife, and he took his own life at the hospital. There were also one hundred sixties x reported injuries, but those are only the people who were taken to the hospital. With an estimated one thousand people in the building that night, that means about half of the people who were there died. Only one in four made it out without an injury bad enough to send them to the hospital. Most of the deaths were from burns, smoke annilation, or carbon monoxide poisoning, but there were also deaths from crushing injuries or other injuries sustained while trying to escape. We're going to take a quick sponsor break, and then we'll talk about efforts to put out the fire and the rescue efforts. The Coconut Grove fire happened at a moment when Boston's fire department and other emergency services were simultaneously reeling and also well prepared for such an emergency. On November, less than two weeks before the Coconut Grove fire, six firefighters had been killed and about fifty others trapped or injured. After a wall collapsed. The restaurant fire they had been fighting had been brought under control, and the wall collapsed after that part was basically finished. Then, the weekend before the Coconut Grove fire, Boston had also conducted a civil defense drill. This was a drill that simulated a blitzkrieg like attack on the city with mass casualties. So while the fire department and other people who had responded to that fire were still really recovering from this earlier disaster, thousands of people had also just practiced exactly what to do. Because Boston is a major city on the US eastern Seaboard, officials had been preparing for the possibility of an enemy attack. In addition to the civil defense drill, area hospitals had started establishing blood banks and stockpiling blood and plasma. Blood banks were really a brand new innovation at this point. That's something else that has been on Tracy's list for a bit, so expect an episode on that fairly soon as well. I am working on it right now. In fact, at about ten fift PM on the night of the fire, just as it was getting started in the Melody Lounge, the Boston Fire Department responded to a signal from a fire alarm box at the corner of Stewart and Carver Streets. Carver Street is Charles Street today. M turned out to be a vehicle fire, which they extinguished, but then firefighters heard a commotion and noticed smoke coming from the direction of coconut growth, which was not far away. As the firefighters moved to investigate, they also ran into bystanders who were calling for help. So, by total coincidence, the Boston Fire Department was already there on the scene working to bring the fire under control. Within minutes of its starting, another bystander pulled the alarm at another fire department call box, and at ten twenty three, roughly eight minutes after the fire started, the fire chief on the scene ordered a third alarm to be called. A fourth alarm followed almost immediately at eleven o two. This became a five alarm fire. Over that period, twenty five engine companies, five ladder companies, a water tower, and a rescue company had all arrived, along with other emergency responders. Other people soon on the scene included Boston Mayor Maurice J. Tobin, the Fire Commissioner, the Building Commissioner, the Police Commissioner and the Superintendent of Police, the State Fire Marshal, Boston's acting Commissioner of Public Safety, and the director of the Boston Committee on Public Safety were all there as well. Civilian defense units arrived, as well as people from the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. The military was involved in the response as well. A call went out to Boston Navy Yard at about ten pm, and members of the Navy Army, Coast Guard, National Guard, and the Naval Hospital in Chelsea, Massachusetts were all involved in the response. And of course there were also many civilians who came and tried to help, and we're not affiliated with any specific group. By coincidence, the club's owner, Barney Wolanski, was not present. He was at Massachusetts General Hospital recovering from a heart attack he had experienced days before. Tragically, it really did not matter how quickly the fire department or any of these other responders got there. The fire had just been much faster and people were already dead and dying. In the words of Fire Commissioner William Arthur Riley's official report quote, within two to five minutes of the first appearance of the fire, most of the possible exits, including all exits normally open to the public, were useless. Pouring of fire through such exits made it impossible for humans to pass simultaneously through these exits safely. In the course of such pouring, the mass of burning gaseous material appears to have been depressed from its high elevation within the premises in order to pass through the exits. The finding of bodies piled up at many of the exits is attributable to this fact. These persons, in attempting to pass through the exits, were overcome by the great heat of the gaseous material pouring through them. At the same time, to the same cause must be set down the bodies found in the passageway in the corridor at the head of the stairway leading from the melody Lounge. In pouring through these low seed linked passageways, the mass of gaseous material passed so close to such persons as to overcome them. Most of the people who survived the fire had managed to get out of the building before the flames reached the doorways. A few people made it up to the roof. Some of them jumped down onto the roofs of parked cars below. While others found a adder, although this ladder wasn't long enough to reach to the ground from the roof, so the people on the roof were trying to hold it up for people to climb down as far as they could and then dropped to the ground from the bottom of it. Once firefighters spotted people on the roof, they moved in to help bring them down. A few people got out through windows, but most of the windows were glass block windows that just could not be opened or broken. Coconut Grove employees and entertainers who knew the layout of the building made their way out through the kitchen or other non public areas, and some customers did manage to follow them out. A few people survived by hiding in one of the walk in refrigerators. Some in the melody lounge survived by simply covering their faces with a wet cloth and lying on the floor below the flames until the fire was over and rescuers could get into the building. Even though the city of Boston had just been through a big drill about exactly such an occurrence for spawning to a catastrophe of this size was still really challenging. Many of the streets around the club were small, Some of them were paved with cobblestones, and they quickly became jammed with emergency vehicles and people, including bystanders, people who needed emergency medical care, and the bodies of people who had died. They're also simply were not enough ambulances to carry so many people to hospitals. People were transported to the hospital in delivery trucks, taxi cabs, basically any other vehicle that could be used. Most of the victims were taken to one of two hospitals, Boston City Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. Boston City Hospital received three hundred victims of the fire over the course of only an hour. Rescuers started sending more people to m g H when it became clear that Boston City Hospital was overwhelmed, and MGH received a hundred and fourteen people over the course of about two hours. Much smaller numbers of people were sent to hospitals elsewhere in Boston and in neighboring cities, including Cambridge and Malden. At many of the hospitals, patients started arriving around a shift change that meant that extra people were already on hand, but the hospital still needed help from other medical personnel all over the area beyond the sheer numbers of patients. One of the challenges that the hospitals faced was that the ratio of injured and dead was very different from most major fires and other disasters. Often, far more people are injured than are killed, but in the Coconut Grove fire, far more people were killed than were injured. The hospitals were receiving so many people who were dead by the time they arrived, or who died very shortly after arriving, that it created delays in treating the people who were still living, whose injuries weren't fatal, but who really did need to be treated as quickly as possible. Eventually, a temporary morgue was set up in a parking deck across the street from the grove to try to reduce the number of dead who wound up at the hospitals, but in a few cases, people who were taken to the temporary morgue turned out to still be alive. In many disasters like these, it takes a long time to get a final death count, but in the case of the Coconut Grove fire, that was established very quickly, less than twelve hours after the fire, the known death toll had already passed four hundred. What took a lot longer was identifying the bodies. Many people had died of asphyxiation or smoke in elation, and their clothing was mostly intact, so anyone carrying their i d In a wallet or in their pockets definitely identified fairly quickly, But most people who had carried their i d In a purse or in a handbag had lost it in the scramble to escape, so in general, many women's bodies took much longer to identify, especially before a responders set up a centralized information hub. This led to problems at the hospitals as people desperately tried to get information about missing loved ones who had not yet been identified. The people killed as a result of the fire included Buck Jones, who died in the hospital two days later. Only one of the people who had been at his party escaped uninjured, and more than half died. Fifty one servicemen and two members of the Women's Army Corps were killed, and another twenty seven servicemen were injured. This was so many that it raised suspicions that this had been an intentional act of wartime sabotage, and that prompted the First Naval District to conduct its own investigation into the fire. For a while, this fire displaced World War Two on the front page of Boston's newspapers and some of the newspapers in the region. After another quick sponsor break, we're going to talk about investigations into the fire's cause and its aftermath and some of the advances that came about in the wake of the fire. Like we said at the top of the show, we're coming up on the eightieth anniversary of the Coconut Grove fire, but we still don't know exactly how it started or why it burned the way that it did. It was an extremely hot and fast moving, deadly fire, while also leaving sections of carpeting and decor and some of the furniture essentially untouched. But immediately after the fire, news reports in Boston placed the blame on one specific person who still often comes up today, and that's the bus boy who had let the match. That was Stanley Tomaschowski, who was only sixteen. Stanley was an honors student at Roxbury Middle School for Boys. His mother was seriously ill and he was supplementing his father's in as a janitor by working at the grove on busy weekends. While it is clear that he did light a match, it is not at all clear that that match started the fire. This was an arrow when smoking indoors was a lot more common, and businesses, including Coconut Grove, routinely handed out matchbooks to customers, so this certainly was not the only match lit in the lounge that night. Investigations also reveal a lot of problems with the building's electrical wiring, and its most recent electrical work had not been done by a licensed electrician. It's possible that the act of loosening and tightening that lightbulb had led to a spark that ignited the fire, or that a spark came from one of the blower units used to heat the lounge, or some other source. Entirely. Boston Fire Commissioner William Arthur Riley cleared Stanley of any blame in his official report, writing quote, after a careful study of all the evidence, and in an analysis of all the facts presented before me, I am unable to find the conduct of this boy was the cause of the fire. State Fire Marshal Stephen C. Garrity came to the same conclusion quoted in is saying quote, it is clear to me that he did not ignite the palm tree in the Melody Lounge. The official report on the fire described it as being of unknown origin, but early news reports described Stanley as having unquestionably started the fire, even though friends, teachers, and others came to his defense, and later news reports walked this back. Stanley and his family had to stay in a hotel under police protection for months, and he continued to deal with things like harassing phone calls and threats about it for the rest of his life. He died in Even if Stanley's match is what started the fire, he the bartender, and other employees had immediately tried to extinguish it, and none of them had anything to do with the factors that made this fire so deadly. It's still not clear at all exactly why it burned so hot and so fast. One possibility is that there was a methyl chloride leak from the club's air conditioners. Methyl chloride, also called chloro methane, is a flammable gas that was used as a refrigerant. Another possibility is that the asbestos tiles in the ceilings had been held down with a flammable glue. A third possibility is that there was just a lot of alcohol present and a lot of flammable material had been used as part of the furnishings and the decor. The design of the building certainly played a role, with parts of it essentially acting as chimneys. Vents over stages to allow fires to escape upward and out of the building were required by law, but they were not in place at Coconut Grove. But one of the most critical actors and the fires deadliness was the building's exits. The building had six exits on the ground floor and three in the basement, but out of these nine exits, only three of them could be opened by the public. One door was equipped with a panic bar that should have opened it to the outside if somebody pressed on the bar, but that bar had been disabled with a bolt. According to some sources, the door was actually bolted shut. Into places like exactly how this door was shut. There's a couple of different accounts of a door out of the Broadway Lounge opened inwards, so while some people were able to get out of it at first, once it was shut, people were jammed up against it and they couldn't get it open again. One door had been bricked completely over. A lot of people concluded that Barney Willlanski had locked and covered over the doors to keep people from leaving without paying their bill, although at least some of this might have gone back to the nightclubs earlier time as a speakeasy, and the fact that none of the exits were marked meant that most people tried to escape by going out the way they came in. As we said, that was through those revolving doors onto Piedmont Street. Revolving doors were invented in the eighteen eighties, and they're really useful for energy efficiency and for cutting down on street noise inside a building, but it was obvious from the beginning that they could become blocked in an emergency like a fire. The National Fire Protection Association already recommended that revolving doors be flanked on either side with standard hinged doors, but at Coconut Grove they were not, and the immediate aftermath of the fire, all of Boston's nightclubs were closed for a week. The use of revolving doors was temporarily banned. With revolving doors removed from Boston City Hall just days after the fire. Once the ban on revolving doors was lifted, they were required to be installed with adjacent hinged doors, just the configuration you usually see today. It also became clear that this was not simply an issue of needing new and better laws or fire codes, but that existing laws and codes were not being enforced. Some of the exact same problems at Coconut Grove had contributed to earlier fires. As we said at the top of the show, the deadliest single building fire in US history was the Iroquois Theater fire, almost forty years before, and in many ways these fires were extremely similar. Both buildings lacked emergency lighting, had exits that were obscured and locked or that patrons couldn't get open, lacked required sealing, ventilation over the stages, just on and on. In both fires, rescuers had to remove piles of bodies that were blocking doorways before they could get through them to the people inside. Just a couple of days after the Coconut Grow fire, Robert Moulton, technical secretary of the National Fire Protection Association, was quoted in a press release is saying, quote the Coconut Grove nightclub tragedy is clearly due to gross violation of several fundamental principles of fire safety, which had been demonstrated by years of experience in other fires, and which should be known to everybody. In light of all of this, people were outraged to learn that a Boston fire captain had inspected Coconut Grove less than two weeks before the fire and had found it to be safe. Another source of outrage was rumors that Barney Wolanski had bragged that he didn't need to follow the fire code because the mayor was a friend of his. Mayor Tobin denied that Welanski was getting any kind of special privileges, but people really doubted that he would face any kind of consequences for the fire. Welanski was Jewish, and a lot of discussion about how much he was to blame was also threaded through with anti semitism. A grand jury indicted ten people on very as charges connected to the fire. Fire Department Inspector Lieutenant Frank J. Lenney for neglect of duty and as an accessory after the fact, Captain Joseph Bucha Gross for neglecting to enforce fire laws, a designer contractor and foreman, who had all worked on the nightclub, were all indicted for conspiracy to violate building laws. Boston City building inspector Theodore el Dratcher was indicted for failing to report building law violations, including lack of sufficient exits, and Barney Willanski and his brother James, who was in charge of the club that night, were indicted for both manslaughter and conspiracy to violate the building laws. But of all these indictments, only Willanski was convicted. He was convicted of nineteen counts of manslaughter and sentence to twelve to fifteen years in prison. It was technically for each count he had been convicted on, but they were going to be served concurrently this trial. Commonwealth versus Welansky also said a precedent that a person didn't have to be actively behaving in a reckless or dangerous way, like personally starting a fire to be considered guilty of manslaughter. Disregarding safety standards that led to people's death or a failure to act was enough. Wellanski served about four years of his sentence. He was pardoned by Maurice Tobin, who had become governor in Massachusetts. After developing terminal cancer, Wellansky died about nine weeks after being released. Civil suits had been filed against him after the fire, but he had almost no assets to pay it with, so there was very little compensation to survivors and the families of people who died. The fire Commissioner's report made a series of recommendations to prevent similar future tragedies. They included requiring automatic sprinklers, banning the use of basements as places of assembly unless those basements met specific requirement for safe exits, requiring aisle spaces around restaurant tables which needed to be secured to the floor so that they couldn't be overturned and become an obstacle in an emergency, requiring illuminated exit signs and panic locks at all doors, Banning decor that contained peroxyl in, which is a flammable form of cellulose, and requiring basement rooms that were used as places of assembly to have windows that could open up automatically and draw off flames and gases in the event of a fire. The National Fire Protection Association also revised its safety codes in the wake of this and other major fires. This code was originally written to provide guidelines for contractors, builders, and building inspectors. But after these fires in the nineteen forties, the National Fire Protection Association also revised the way the code was written so that its language could be used as the basis for laws and official fire codes. That n f p A doesn't have in horsement powers over the codes that it recommends, that enforcement falls to governments. But a lot of these things that made the Coconut Grow fire so deadly are still issues today. For example, the fourth deadliest nightclub fire in the US happens less than twenty years ago. That was the Station nightclub fire in Rhode Island, which started when stage pyrotechnics ignited flammable acoustic foam. A hundred people died and more than two hundred were injured, and various fire codes had not been followed that included a requirement for sprinklers to be installed in buildings with an occupancy of more than a hundred people. In addition to its impact on things like fire codes, the Coconut Grow fire led to advances in the treatment of burns and respiratory injuries sustained in fires. This research was already underway due to World War Two. The fires that occurred during attacks like the Blitz and the bombing of Pearl Harbor to large numbers of people sustaining serious burns. The National Research Council had been funding research through Harvard Medical School, which was being carried out in conjunction with Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston General Hospital. At the time, serious burns were often treated using a process known as tanning, using either a combination of three antimicrobial dyes or tannic acid. Both of these methods required the burns to be heavily dibrided and scrubbed. That was often done under anesthesia because it was just so painful, and because of the war, anesthesia was in short supply, so people had already been trying to find other ways to successfully treat burns. Dr Oliver Cope at MGH had developed a burn treatment protocol that involved a boric acid ointment and wraps that were infused with petroleum jelly that could be used without so much debridement. Boston City High Hospital, which is part of Boston Medical Center today, they started out treating victims of the Coconut Grove fire with either the triple die or tanic acid methods, but they phased those out in favor of a boric acid protocol that was similar to what Coke was using at MGH. Doctors in both hospitals also made advances in figuring out when and whether antibiotics were helpful in treating burns. SOLFA drugs were commonly used in burn treatments, and at m g H they were part of initial treatments for all burned patients. Penicillin was also brand new at this point, when nearly all of it being used for the military. Some of it was diverted into Boston to treat people who had survived the fire, which was one of the earliest uses of penicillin in the United States outside of clinical trials. Doctors found that antibiotics made the most difference in patients with full thickness burns, but were often unnecessary and patients whose burns were not as deep as long as an infection was not introduced into the wound. Yeah, maintaining a sterile area was really important for that. As we said earlier, blood banks were fairly new. The one at MGH had just been established that same year, and m g H had two units of dried plasma on hand in the event of some kind of wartime need in Boston, Prior to this point, a lot of medical experts had been cautious about giving a lot of fluids to burn patients. There were concerns that doing so might lead them to develop pulmonary edema. It became clear, though, through treating all of these patients, that fluid therapies really helped patients heal without causing pulmonary edema. Through treating the victims of the Coconut grove fire, doctors also gained a much greater understanding of how often a burn patient's biggest issue was a respiratory injury rather than the burns on their skin. Many people arrived at the hospital in serious condition but did not outwardly appear injured. Some even walked into the hospital under their own power, but then collapsed after getting there. Some had clear signs of carbon monoxide poisoning, but others had respiratory damage from inhaling hot toxic gases and smoke. People whose noses and mouths were burned, or who had lost consciousness inside the building seemed to be at the greatest risk. This is not even everything. For example, the entire June volume of Annals of Surgery was devoted to developments made at m g H while treating victims of the Coconut growth fire. The forward to this issue of the journal was written by Dr Oliver Cope, and papers in it covered topics like protocols, shock pulmonary complications, resuscitating people whose airways were burned, surface burned treatments, infections and antibiotics, rehabilitation and physical therapy, and hospital administration issues. And article on neuropsychiatric observations was authored by Dr Stanley Cobb and Eric Lindeman. Cobb was a neurologist who helped establish a department of psychiatry at m GH, and some of his work focused on the connection between the mind and the body. Lindemann was a psychiatrist whose focus was on bereavement and grief. They described patients whose recoveries were impacted by a state of acute grief and trauma, including an early description of what would come to be known as post traumatic stress disorder. This research also became part of Lindeman's nineteen forty four paper Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief. The Dr Lindeman especially did a lot of work on trauma and grief and became really groundbreaking with a lot of that. The area where Coconut Grove used to be is really different now than it was in ninety two. Various streets have been renamed or moved. There's a hotel and condos where the nightclub used to be. And nine three, the Bay Village Neighborhood Association installed a memorial plaque made by fire survivor Anthony P. Mara on Piedmont Street at the approximate site of where the revolving door had been. In Shawmant Street extension, which connected Shawmant Street with Piedmont Street was renamed Coconut Grove Lane. In the memorial plaque was removed so the condos could be built, with the agreement that it be returned to its original location after construction was done. Instead, the plaque was moved farther down the street. Condo owners wrote to the Bay Village Neighborhood Association saying, quote, only a small portion of our building overlays the site of the club. We now occupy these homes with our families as part of the Bay Village Neighborhood and would like to enjoy our homes in peace without tragic memories hanging reaths at our doors and tourists peaking into our houses. People were very upset with a sense that rich people buying three condos were putting their feelings over the memory of victims and survivors and their descendants. I found one article that interpreted this as the correct decision, and many others by people who either were livid about it, or like reporters trying to sound neutral, who clearly we're also livid about it. The Coconut Grove Memorial Committee is a nonprofit that was established in to try to establish an actual memorial for the victims of the Coconut Grove fire, as well as to survivors, first responders, and medical professionals, rather than only having this plaque in one The Boston City Council awarded two fifty thousand dollars in Community Preservation Act funds for a memorial at Statler Park, which is a small park that's not far away from where the night club was. The current proposed design for this memorial involves a set of three archways to resemble that arch entryway into Coconut Grove. A documentary called Six Locked Doors played at various film festivals in twenty nineteen. It's been aired on various PBS stations around the region since then. As of when we're recording this, there are two known survivors of the fire who were still living. Both of them were only eighteen when the fire happened, So that as a Coconut Grove nightclub fire, that's a rough one. Do you have some listener may I do? This is from Jen and Jen wrote about um our Helen Duncan episode, and Jen said, Dear Holly and Tracy, I adore your show and hearing about people, places and events that are new to me, as it broadens my knowledge and provides context for so many modern events that I would otherwise lack. Thank you for making the past present. I also like it when a story touches closer to home, and your recent episode about Helen Duncan is one such episode. As a friend of mine met Helen Duncan. Jen goes on to talk a little bit about how this friend is in their later years at this point, at least in at least in his eighties, and they know one another from church. A few years ago. I was talking to my friend and we got onto the subject of Helen Duncan. He then gestured for me to lean in and whispered that when he was sixteen he had been to a seance by Helen Duncan. He was taken by his minister. At the time. This was a big taboo within Presbyterianism, which is why he whispered it, as even today he didn't want other members of the church to know in case they disapproved. Despite it now being no big deal. It's also why I'm not naming him. He talked about how she strode across the stage like a tiger. I asked him if he thought she was genuine, knowing the fact that she was convicted for being a false medium, and without any hesitation, he proclaimed that she was the real deal. He was convinced that night that she contacted the deads picking up on the favorite color flower of that one person had in their garden, and the smell of pigs from some people visiting Edinburgh from an outside village who kept pigs at their place. It was fascinating to think an old friend of mine met and engaged with such a famous historical figure, and to hear his experience of one of her seances. These things are not as far in the past as we might think, and these personal connections to the subjects of the podcast are still alive and thriving. Jen then asked if it was okay to Um to burn a copy of the episode onto a CD for her friends to listen to, because he does not really know how to do podcasts. Uh. If you if you want to burn an episode of a podcast onto a CD for your own personal use, that is generally fine. UM and Jen also sent some really great pictures of a cat named Tibby Tippy You Jenn was not able to see for a really long time, as as things as travel was not happening during the pandemic. UM, So thank you so much Jen for sending this. I wanted to read it because one of the things Jen notes, and the part of this that I kind of skimmed over, is that Presbyterianism today is a lot more progressive than it was in the nineteen forties when we talked in that episode about how there had been one account that said that Helen Duncan's parents said she was going to be burned in the steak if she kept doing this talking to spirits Um. They had said specifically that it was because they were Presbyterian, And I just wasn't able to really confirm whether that was the case, and so I did not get into that particular detail, but the fact that it came back up again in this um, in this email, uh made me want to read it also. UM, I hope Jen's friend is not disappointed in the episode, since we made it clear in the episode that a lot of the stuff she was doing with manifestations was pretty easily pointed at as like not not the real thing. But we also said in the behind the scenes that like, we don't know if she felt she was she really truly sincerely felt she was speaking to spirits or not, or if well we really know. So thank you again, Jim for this note and for the cap picture and for giving us a chance to read this. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, where a history podcast at I heart radio dot com. We're also all over social media at miss in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterson Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app and wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We've gotten a lot of requests over the years to do an episode about the Coconut Grove nightclub fire, and I have really really put off doing it because of all the different types of disasters there are to research. For me, the fires are the worst ones there. They're bad. Yeah, they're bad. We can talk about reasons why on Friday and the behind the scenes. But the Coconut Grove fire came up not long ago on our episode on Charles Ponzi because his wife Rose worked there. She went to work there after he had been deported back to Italy, but she was not at work that night, so I thought about moving it onto the list. Then after it had come up, and as I was looking at it, I realized this year is the fires eightieth anniversary. It happened on November. This is still the deadliest nightclub fire in history, and in terms of single building fires, it is the second deadliest in United States history. The deadliest was the Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago that happened on December nineteen oh three, and we covered that fire on this show on December eight. As we will discuss, though, there are a lot of lessons from the Iroquois Theater fire that had not been heated at Coconut Grove almost forty years later. Coconut Grove, often known just as the Grove, was at seventeen Piedmont Street in Boston, Massachusetts, with an entrance set behind a trio of archways. It's theme may have been inspired by the Coconut Grove nightclub at the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. Boston's Coconut Grove had opened in in what had previously been a garage and warehouse. Over time, it had been built on and expanded and remodeled and by The club had this kind of odd, almost zigzag shape. The ground floor contained the caricature bar as well as a full service restaurant. The restaurant had a central dance floor with tables and chairs on three sides of it and an orchestra stage on the fourth. This area had a retractable roof that could be opened in good weather, which I think sounds very nice. This was November, though, so it was closed the night of the fire. The ground floor also had a newly opened lounge called the Broadway Lounge also just called the New Lounge, that also had a bar in it. There were also coat check rooms, restrooms, dressing rooms for the entertainer, is, a telephone room, and a service bar. So there was a lot of stuff packed into this relatively small kind of zigzag shaped space. The basement of the grove had only one public space, the Melody Lounge. The rest of the basement house the furnace room, the kitchens, with walking, cold storage and other storage spaces on both floors. The club was decorated with lighted artificial palm trees, satiny fabric draped from the ceiling and walls of stairs, and the Melody Lounge had a satin covered ceiling and walls covered in ratan bamboo and synthetic leather. Previously, the grove had been owned by mob boss Charles Solomon, who was known as King. Solomon was murdered at Boston's Cotton Club in ninety three, and at that point his wife inherited the grove. She gave it to their lawyer, Barnett Wolansky, known as Barney in lieu of legal fees. When Solomon owned it, the grove had kind of a seedy reputation as a prohibition earirest speak easy but well Landski tried to transform it into a more glamorous place that people would want to come for dinner, drinks, dancing, and entertainment. On the night of November, the grove was busy. It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving. There had been a big college football game earlier in the day between rivals Boston College and Holy Cross College. Boston College was at the end of an undefeated season and everyone expected them to win and then be invited to play in the Sugar Bowl. There was reportedly even a committee on hand to deliver that invitation after the game, but surprise, Boston College lost fifty five to twelve. That was an enormous upset. A formal celebration had been planned at the grove, which was canceled because of that loss, but a lot of people made their way there after the game anyway. A party that went on as planned that night was in honor of actor Buck Jones. Jones was known for his work in westerns. He had acting credits and more than a hundred and fifty films, almost all of them Westerns. He was on a tour promoting war bonds, and about thirty people were at his party. A lot of them were affiliated with Monogram Theater Group. Since this happened as the United States was involved in World War Two, there were also a lot of servicemen there. At about ten fifteen that night, the grove was absolutely packed. The club's license applications with the City of Boston specified that it had four hundred chairs and thirty stools, although sources contradict about what the club's maximum occupancy was. There are sources that list both four hundred sixty and six hundred people. Regardless, it's estimated that there were about a thousand people in the building that night, so roughly twice the planned number. Downstairs, in a corner of the mill the lounge, someone loosened a light bulb in one of the artificial palm trees. That corner was already pretty dimly lit, but this person apparently wanted some more privacy with his date. The bartender noticed this and told a bus boy to go fix the bulb. Without that bulblet, it was too dark in the corner to see, so the bus boy lit a match, and then once he was done, he extinguished the match, stomping it out on the floor with his foot. Very soon after this, people noticed sparks in the vicinity of this palm tree near the ceiling, but for a moment there was not an obvious flame. But then the fire spread very rapidly along the underside of the fabric draped below the ceiling. It took somewhere between two and four minutes for a very hot, fast moving fire to engulf the melody lounge. The stairway out of the lounge, which was narrow and steep, acted like a chimney, drawing the fire and the heat up to the ground floor of the building, where it burst into the foyer. The foyer had a high, arched ceiling, and it similarly acted like a chimney and pulled the fire into the rest of the ground floor. The fabric draped walls and ceiling quickly caught fire. Within about five minutes, the fire had moved through the ground floor restaurant and into the New Broadway lounge. When people noticed the flames, they panicked, and that panic became much worse when the lights went out Just minutes after the fire started, there were no emergency lights, and the exits were not marked. Even if they had been. Many of the doors were locked. People overturned tables and punched and shoved one another as they fought to get to an exit. And the exit the vast majority of people were pushing for was the revolving door that they used to enter the building that was quickly jammed with bodies. As the fire burned through the oxygen and the melody lounge, it left very hot, flammable gases that burst into flame again when they got to the top of the stairs, where there was more fresh air, and that meant people who didn't make it up the stairs ahead of the fire found those stairs blocked by flames. The same was true for the buildings working doors to the outside. The fire surged as it came into contact with the fresh air. This included surging around the sides of the revolving door, so the doors that were not locked became totally impassable. They were blocked by bursts of flame and by bodies stacked on top of one another. Together, all of this was disastrous. Four hundred two people died. Official lists include four nine names. One person who died in the hospital is not included for reasons that are unclear. Another person survived the fire but lost his wife, and he took his own life at the hospital. There were also one hundred sixties x reported injuries, but those are only the people who were taken to the hospital. With an estimated one thousand people in the building that night, that means about half of the people who were there died. Only one in four made it out without an injury bad enough to send them to the hospital. Most of the deaths were from burns, smoke annilation, or carbon monoxide poisoning, but there were also deaths from crushing injuries or other injuries sustained while trying to escape. We're going to take a quick sponsor break, and then we'll talk about efforts to put out the fire and the rescue efforts. The Coconut Grove fire happened at a moment when Boston's fire department and other emergency services were simultaneously reeling and also well prepared for such an emergency. On November, less than two weeks before the Coconut Grove fire, six firefighters had been killed and about fifty others trapped or injured. After a wall collapsed. The restaurant fire they had been fighting had been brought under control, and the wall collapsed after that part was basically finished. Then, the weekend before the Coconut Grove fire, Boston had also conducted a civil defense drill. This was a drill that simulated a blitzkrieg like attack on the city with mass casualties. So while the fire department and other people who had responded to that fire were still really recovering from this earlier disaster, thousands of people had also just practiced exactly what to do. Because Boston is a major city on the US eastern Seaboard, officials had been preparing for the possibility of an enemy attack. In addition to the civil defense drill, area hospitals had started establishing blood banks and stockpiling blood and plasma. Blood banks were really a brand new innovation at this point. That's something else that has been on Tracy's list for a bit, so expect an episode on that fairly soon as well. I am working on it right now. In fact, at about ten fift PM on the night of the fire, just as it was getting started in the Melody Lounge, the Boston Fire Department responded to a signal from a fire alarm box at the corner of Stewart and Carver Streets. Carver Street is Charles Street today. M turned out to be a vehicle fire, which they extinguished, but then firefighters heard a commotion and noticed smoke coming from the direction of coconut growth, which was not far away. As the firefighters moved to investigate, they also ran into bystanders who were calling for help. So, by total coincidence, the Boston Fire Department was already there on the scene working to bring the fire under control. Within minutes of its starting, another bystander pulled the alarm at another fire department call box, and at ten twenty three, roughly eight minutes after the fire started, the fire chief on the scene ordered a third alarm to be called. A fourth alarm followed almost immediately at eleven o two. This became a five alarm fire. Over that period, twenty five engine companies, five ladder companies, a water tower, and a rescue company had all arrived, along with other emergency responders. Other people soon on the scene included Boston Mayor Maurice J. Tobin, the Fire Commissioner, the Building Commissioner, the Police Commissioner and the Superintendent of Police, the State Fire Marshal, Boston's acting Commissioner of Public Safety, and the director of the Boston Committee on Public Safety were all there as well. Civilian defense units arrived, as well as people from the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. The military was involved in the response as well. A call went out to Boston Navy Yard at about ten pm, and members of the Navy Army, Coast Guard, National Guard, and the Naval Hospital in Chelsea, Massachusetts were all involved in the response. And of course there were also many civilians who came and tried to help, and we're not affiliated with any specific group. By coincidence, the club's owner, Barney Wolanski, was not present. He was at Massachusetts General Hospital recovering from a heart attack he had experienced days before. Tragically, it really did not matter how quickly the fire department or any of these other responders got there. The fire had just been much faster and people were already dead and dying. In the words of Fire Commissioner William Arthur Riley's official report quote, within two to five minutes of the first appearance of the fire, most of the possible exits, including all exits normally open to the public, were useless. Pouring of fire through such exits made it impossible for humans to pass simultaneously through these exits safely. In the course of such pouring, the mass of burning gaseous material appears to have been depressed from its high elevation within the premises in order to pass through the exits. The finding of bodies piled up at many of the exits is attributable to this fact. These persons, in attempting to pass through the exits, were overcome by the great heat of the gaseous material pouring through them. At the same time, to the same cause must be set down the bodies found in the passageway in the corridor at the head of the stairway leading from the melody Lounge. In pouring through these low seed linked passageways, the mass of gaseous material passed so close to such persons as to overcome them. Most of the people who survived the fire had managed to get out of the building before the flames reached the doorways. A few people made it up to the roof. Some of them jumped down onto the roofs of parked cars below. While others found a adder, although this ladder wasn't long enough to reach to the ground from the roof, so the people on the roof were trying to hold it up for people to climb down as far as they could and then dropped to the ground from the bottom of it. Once firefighters spotted people on the roof, they moved in to help bring them down. A few people got out through windows, but most of the windows were glass block windows that just could not be opened or broken. Coconut Grove employees and entertainers who knew the layout of the building made their way out through the kitchen or other non public areas, and some customers did manage to follow them out. A few people survived by hiding in one of the walk in refrigerators. Some in the melody lounge survived by simply covering their faces with a wet cloth and lying on the floor below the flames until the fire was over and rescuers could get into the building. Even though the city of Boston had just been through a big drill about exactly such an occurrence for spawning to a catastrophe of this size was still really challenging. Many of the streets around the club were small, Some of them were paved with cobblestones, and they quickly became jammed with emergency vehicles and people, including bystanders, people who needed emergency medical care, and the bodies of people who had died. They're also simply were not enough ambulances to carry so many people to hospitals. People were transported to the hospital in delivery trucks, taxi cabs, basically any other vehicle that could be used. Most of the victims were taken to one of two hospitals, Boston City Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. Boston City Hospital received three hundred victims of the fire over the course of only an hour. Rescuers started sending more people to m g H when it became clear that Boston City Hospital was overwhelmed, and MGH received a hundred and fourteen people over the course of about two hours. Much smaller numbers of people were sent to hospitals elsewhere in Boston and in neighboring cities, including Cambridge and Malden. At many of the hospitals, patients started arriving around a shift change that meant that extra people were already on hand, but the hospital still needed help from other medical personnel all over the area beyond the sheer numbers of patients. One of the challenges that the hospitals faced was that the ratio of injured and dead was very different from most major fires and other disasters. Often, far more people are injured than are killed, but in the Coconut Grove fire, far more people were killed than were injured. The hospitals were receiving so many people who were dead by the time they arrived, or who died very shortly after arriving, that it created delays in treating the people who were still living, whose injuries weren't fatal, but who really did need to be treated as quickly as possible. Eventually, a temporary morgue was set up in a parking deck across the street from the grove to try to reduce the number of dead who wound up at the hospitals, but in a few cases, people who were taken to the temporary morgue turned out to still be alive. In many disasters like these, it takes a long time to get a final death count, but in the case of the Coconut Grove fire, that was established very quickly, less than twelve hours after the fire, the known death toll had already passed four hundred. What took a lot longer was identifying the bodies. Many people had died of asphyxiation or smoke in elation, and their clothing was mostly intact, so anyone carrying their i d In a wallet or in their pockets definitely identified fairly quickly, But most people who had carried their i d In a purse or in a handbag had lost it in the scramble to escape, so in general, many women's bodies took much longer to identify, especially before a responders set up a centralized information hub. This led to problems at the hospitals as people desperately tried to get information about missing loved ones who had not yet been identified. The people killed as a result of the fire included Buck Jones, who died in the hospital two days later. Only one of the people who had been at his party escaped uninjured, and more than half died. Fifty one servicemen and two members of the Women's Army Corps were killed, and another twenty seven servicemen were injured. This was so many that it raised suspicions that this had been an intentional act of wartime sabotage, and that prompted the First Naval District to conduct its own investigation into the fire. For a while, this fire displaced World War Two on the front page of Boston's newspapers and some of the newspapers in the region. After another quick sponsor break, we're going to talk about investigations into the fire's cause and its aftermath and some of the advances that came about in the wake of the fire. Like we said at the top of the show, we're coming up on the eightieth anniversary of the Coconut Grove fire, but we still don't know exactly how it started or why it burned the way that it did. It was an extremely hot and fast moving, deadly fire, while also leaving sections of carpeting and decor and some of the furniture essentially untouched. But immediately after the fire, news reports in Boston placed the blame on one specific person who still often comes up today, and that's the bus boy who had let the match. That was Stanley Tomaschowski, who was only sixteen. Stanley was an honors student at Roxbury Middle School for Boys. His mother was seriously ill and he was supplementing his father's in as a janitor by working at the grove on busy weekends. While it is clear that he did light a match, it is not at all clear that that match started the fire. This was an arrow when smoking indoors was a lot more common, and businesses, including Coconut Grove, routinely handed out matchbooks to customers, so this certainly was not the only match lit in the lounge that night. Investigations also reveal a lot of problems with the building's electrical wiring, and its most recent electrical work had not been done by a licensed electrician. It's possible that the act of loosening and tightening that lightbulb had led to a spark that ignited the fire, or that a spark came from one of the blower units used to heat the lounge, or some other source. Entirely. Boston Fire Commissioner William Arthur Riley cleared Stanley of any blame in his official report, writing quote, after a careful study of all the evidence, and in an analysis of all the facts presented before me, I am unable to find the conduct of this boy was the cause of the fire. State Fire Marshal Stephen C. Garrity came to the same conclusion quoted in is saying quote, it is clear to me that he did not ignite the palm tree in the Melody Lounge. The official report on the fire described it as being of unknown origin, but early news reports described Stanley as having unquestionably started the fire, even though friends, teachers, and others came to his defense, and later news reports walked this back. Stanley and his family had to stay in a hotel under police protection for months, and he continued to deal with things like harassing phone calls and threats about it for the rest of his life. He died in Even if Stanley's match is what started the fire, he the bartender, and other employees had immediately tried to extinguish it, and none of them had anything to do with the factors that made this fire so deadly. It's still not clear at all exactly why it burned so hot and so fast. One possibility is that there was a methyl chloride leak from the club's air conditioners. Methyl chloride, also called chloro methane, is a flammable gas that was used as a refrigerant. Another possibility is that the asbestos tiles in the ceilings had been held down with a flammable glue. A third possibility is that there was just a lot of alcohol present and a lot of flammable material had been used as part of the furnishings and the decor. The design of the building certainly played a role, with parts of it essentially acting as chimneys. Vents over stages to allow fires to escape upward and out of the building were required by law, but they were not in place at Coconut Grove. But one of the most critical actors and the fires deadliness was the building's exits. The building had six exits on the ground floor and three in the basement, but out of these nine exits, only three of them could be opened by the public. One door was equipped with a panic bar that should have opened it to the outside if somebody pressed on the bar, but that bar had been disabled with a bolt. According to some sources, the door was actually bolted shut. Into places like exactly how this door was shut. There's a couple of different accounts of a door out of the Broadway Lounge opened inwards, so while some people were able to get out of it at first, once it was shut, people were jammed up against it and they couldn't get it open again. One door had been bricked completely over. A lot of people concluded that Barney Willlanski had locked and covered over the doors to keep people from leaving without paying their bill, although at least some of this might have gone back to the nightclubs earlier time as a speakeasy, and the fact that none of the exits were marked meant that most people tried to escape by going out the way they came in. As we said, that was through those revolving doors onto Piedmont Street. Revolving doors were invented in the eighteen eighties, and they're really useful for energy efficiency and for cutting down on street noise inside a building, but it was obvious from the beginning that they could become blocked in an emergency like a fire. The National Fire Protection Association already recommended that revolving doors be flanked on either side with standard hinged doors, but at Coconut Grove they were not, and the immediate aftermath of the fire, all of Boston's nightclubs were closed for a week. The use of revolving doors was temporarily banned. With revolving doors removed from Boston City Hall just days after the fire. Once the ban on revolving doors was lifted, they were required to be installed with adjacent hinged doors, just the configuration you usually see today. It also became clear that this was not simply an issue of needing new and better laws or fire codes, but that existing laws and codes were not being enforced. Some of the exact same problems at Coconut Grove had contributed to earlier fires. As we said at the top of the show, the deadliest single building fire in US history was the Iroquois Theater fire, almost forty years before, and in many ways these fires were extremely similar. Both buildings lacked emergency lighting, had exits that were obscured and locked or that patrons couldn't get open, lacked required sealing, ventilation over the stages, just on and on. In both fires, rescuers had to remove piles of bodies that were blocking doorways before they could get through them to the people inside. Just a couple of days after the Coconut Grow fire, Robert Moulton, technical secretary of the National Fire Protection Association, was quoted in a press release is saying, quote the Coconut Grove nightclub tragedy is clearly due to gross violation of several fundamental principles of fire safety, which had been demonstrated by years of experience in other fires, and which should be known to everybody. In light of all of this, people were outraged to learn that a Boston fire captain had inspected Coconut Grove less than two weeks before the fire and had found it to be safe. Another source of outrage was rumors that Barney Wolanski had bragged that he didn't need to follow the fire code because the mayor was a friend of his. Mayor Tobin denied that Welanski was getting any kind of special privileges, but people really doubted that he would face any kind of consequences for the fire. Welanski was Jewish, and a lot of discussion about how much he was to blame was also threaded through with anti semitism. A grand jury indicted ten people on very as charges connected to the fire. Fire Department Inspector Lieutenant Frank J. Lenney for neglect of duty and as an accessory after the fact, Captain Joseph Bucha Gross for neglecting to enforce fire laws, a designer contractor and foreman, who had all worked on the nightclub, were all indicted for conspiracy to violate building laws. Boston City building inspector Theodore el Dratcher was indicted for failing to report building law violations, including lack of sufficient exits, and Barney Willanski and his brother James, who was in charge of the club that night, were indicted for both manslaughter and conspiracy to violate the building laws. But of all these indictments, only Willanski was convicted. He was convicted of nineteen counts of manslaughter and sentence to twelve to fifteen years in prison. It was technically for each count he had been convicted on, but they were going to be served concurrently this trial. Commonwealth versus Welansky also said a precedent that a person didn't have to be actively behaving in a reckless or dangerous way, like personally starting a fire to be considered guilty of manslaughter. Disregarding safety standards that led to people's death or a failure to act was enough. Wellanski served about four years of his sentence. He was pardoned by Maurice Tobin, who had become governor in Massachusetts. After developing terminal cancer, Wellansky died about nine weeks after being released. Civil suits had been filed against him after the fire, but he had almost no assets to pay it with, so there was very little compensation to survivors and the families of people who died. The fire Commissioner's report made a series of recommendations to prevent similar future tragedies. They included requiring automatic sprinklers, banning the use of basements as places of assembly unless those basements met specific requirement for safe exits, requiring aisle spaces around restaurant tables which needed to be secured to the floor so that they couldn't be overturned and become an obstacle in an emergency, requiring illuminated exit signs and panic locks at all doors, Banning decor that contained peroxyl in, which is a flammable form of cellulose, and requiring basement rooms that were used as places of assembly to have windows that could open up automatically and draw off flames and gases in the event of a fire. The National Fire Protection Association also revised its safety codes in the wake of this and other major fires. This code was originally written to provide guidelines for contractors, builders, and building inspectors. But after these fires in the nineteen forties, the National Fire Protection Association also revised the way the code was written so that its language could be used as the basis for laws and official fire codes. That n f p A doesn't have in horsement powers over the codes that it recommends, that enforcement falls to governments. But a lot of these things that made the Coconut Grow fire so deadly are still issues today. For example, the fourth deadliest nightclub fire in the US happens less than twenty years ago. That was the Station nightclub fire in Rhode Island, which started when stage pyrotechnics ignited flammable acoustic foam. A hundred people died and more than two hundred were injured, and various fire codes had not been followed that included a requirement for sprinklers to be installed in buildings with an occupancy of more than a hundred people. In addition to its impact on things like fire codes, the Coconut Grow fire led to advances in the treatment of burns and respiratory injuries sustained in fires. This research was already underway due to World War Two. The fires that occurred during attacks like the Blitz and the bombing of Pearl Harbor to large numbers of people sustaining serious burns. The National Research Council had been funding research through Harvard Medical School, which was being carried out in conjunction with Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston General Hospital. At the time, serious burns were often treated using a process known as tanning, using either a combination of three antimicrobial dyes or tannic acid. Both of these methods required the burns to be heavily dibrided and scrubbed. That was often done under anesthesia because it was just so painful, and because of the war, anesthesia was in short supply, so people had already been trying to find other ways to successfully treat burns. Dr Oliver Cope at MGH had developed a burn treatment protocol that involved a boric acid ointment and wraps that were infused with petroleum jelly that could be used without so much debridement. Boston City High Hospital, which is part of Boston Medical Center today, they started out treating victims of the Coconut Grove fire with either the triple die or tanic acid methods, but they phased those out in favor of a boric acid protocol that was similar to what Coke was using at MGH. Doctors in both hospitals also made advances in figuring out when and whether antibiotics were helpful in treating burns. SOLFA drugs were commonly used in burn treatments, and at m g H they were part of initial treatments for all burned patients. Penicillin was also brand new at this point, when nearly all of it being used for the military. Some of it was diverted into Boston to treat people who had survived the fire, which was one of the earliest uses of penicillin in the United States outside of clinical trials. Doctors found that antibiotics made the most difference in patients with full thickness burns, but were often unnecessary and patients whose burns were not as deep as long as an infection was not introduced into the wound. Yeah, maintaining a sterile area was really important for that. As we said earlier, blood banks were fairly new. The one at MGH had just been established that same year, and m g H had two units of dried plasma on hand in the event of some kind of wartime need in Boston, Prior to this point, a lot of medical experts had been cautious about giving a lot of fluids to burn patients. There were concerns that doing so might lead them to develop pulmonary edema. It became clear, though, through treating all of these patients, that fluid therapies really helped patients heal without causing pulmonary edema. Through treating the victims of the Coconut grove fire, doctors also gained a much greater understanding of how often a burn patient's biggest issue was a respiratory injury rather than the burns on their skin. Many people arrived at the hospital in serious condition but did not outwardly appear injured. Some even walked into the hospital under their own power, but then collapsed after getting there. Some had clear signs of carbon monoxide poisoning, but others had respiratory damage from inhaling hot toxic gases and smoke. People whose noses and mouths were burned, or who had lost consciousness inside the building seemed to be at the greatest risk. This is not even everything. For example, the entire June volume of Annals of Surgery was devoted to developments made at m g H while treating victims of the Coconut growth fire. The forward to this issue of the journal was written by Dr Oliver Cope, and papers in it covered topics like protocols, shock pulmonary complications, resuscitating people whose airways were burned, surface burned treatments, infections and antibiotics, rehabilitation and physical therapy, and hospital administration issues. And article on neuropsychiatric observations was authored by Dr Stanley Cobb and Eric Lindeman. Cobb was a neurologist who helped establish a department of psychiatry at m GH, and some of his work focused on the connection between the mind and the body. Lindemann was a psychiatrist whose focus was on bereavement and grief. They described patients whose recoveries were impacted by a state of acute grief and trauma, including an early description of what would come to be known as post traumatic stress disorder. This research also became part of Lindeman's nineteen forty four paper Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief. The Dr Lindeman especially did a lot of work on trauma and grief and became really groundbreaking with a lot of that. The area where Coconut Grove used to be is really different now than it was in ninety two. Various streets have been renamed or moved. There's a hotel and condos where the nightclub used to be. And nine three, the Bay Village Neighborhood Association installed a memorial plaque made by fire survivor Anthony P. Mara on Piedmont Street at the approximate site of where the revolving door had been. In Shawmant Street extension, which connected Shawmant Street with Piedmont Street was renamed Coconut Grove Lane. In the memorial plaque was removed so the condos could be built, with the agreement that it be returned to its original location after construction was done. Instead, the plaque was moved farther down the street. Condo owners wrote to the Bay Village Neighborhood Association saying, quote, only a small portion of our building overlays the site of the club. We now occupy these homes with our families as part of the Bay Village Neighborhood and would like to enjoy our homes in peace without tragic memories hanging reaths at our doors and tourists peaking into our houses. People were very upset with a sense that rich people buying three condos were putting their feelings over the memory of victims and survivors and their descendants. I found one article that interpreted this as the correct decision, and many others by people who either were livid about it, or like reporters trying to sound neutral, who clearly we're also livid about it. The Coconut Grove Memorial Committee is a nonprofit that was established in to try to establish an actual memorial for the victims of the Coconut Grove fire, as well as to survivors, first responders, and medical professionals, rather than only having this plaque in one The Boston City Council awarded two fifty thousand dollars in Community Preservation Act funds for a memorial at Statler Park, which is a small park that's not far away from where the night club was. The current proposed design for this memorial involves a set of three archways to resemble that arch entryway into Coconut Grove. A documentary called Six Locked Doors played at various film festivals in twenty nineteen. It's been aired on various PBS stations around the region since then. As of when we're recording this, there are two known survivors of the fire who were still living. Both of them were only eighteen when the fire happened, So that as a Coconut Grove nightclub fire, that's a rough one. Do you have some listener may I do? This is from Jen and Jen wrote about um our Helen Duncan episode, and Jen said, Dear Holly and Tracy, I adore your show and hearing about people, places and events that are new to me, as it broadens my knowledge and provides context for so many modern events that I would otherwise lack. Thank you for making the past present. I also like it when a story touches closer to home, and your recent episode about Helen Duncan is one such episode. As a friend of mine met Helen Duncan. Jen goes on to talk a little bit about how this friend is in their later years at this point, at least in at least in his eighties, and they know one another from church. A few years ago. I was talking to my friend and we got onto the subject of Helen Duncan. He then gestured for me to lean in and whispered that when he was sixteen he had been to a seance by Helen Duncan. He was taken by his minister. At the time. This was a big taboo within Presbyterianism, which is why he whispered it, as even today he didn't want other members of the church to know in case they disapproved. Despite it now being no big deal. It's also why I'm not naming him. He talked about how she strode across the stage like a tiger. I asked him if he thought she was genuine, knowing the fact that she was convicted for being a false medium, and without any hesitation, he proclaimed that she was the real deal. He was convinced that night that she contacted the deads picking up on the favorite color flower of that one person had in their garden, and the smell of pigs from some people visiting Edinburgh from an outside village who kept pigs at their place. It was fascinating to think an old friend of mine met and engaged with such a famous historical figure, and to hear his experience of one of her seances. These things are not as far in the past as we might think, and these personal connections to the subjects of the podcast are still alive and thriving. Jen then asked if it was okay to Um to burn a copy of the episode onto a CD for her friends to listen to, because he does not really know how to do podcasts. Uh. If you if you want to burn an episode of a podcast onto a CD for your own personal use, that is generally fine. UM and Jen also sent some really great pictures of a cat named Tibby Tippy You Jenn was not able to see for a really long time, as as things as travel was not happening during the pandemic. UM, So thank you so much Jen for sending this. I wanted to read it because one of the things Jen notes, and the part of this that I kind of skimmed over, is that Presbyterianism today is a lot more progressive than it was in the nineteen forties when we talked in that episode about how there had been one account that said that Helen Duncan's parents said she was going to be burned in the steak if she kept doing this talking to spirits Um. They had said specifically that it was because they were Presbyterian, And I just wasn't able to really confirm whether that was the case, and so I did not get into that particular detail, but the fact that it came back up again in this um, in this email, uh made me want to read it also. UM, I hope Jen's friend is not disappointed in the episode, since we made it clear in the episode that a lot of the stuff she was doing with manifestations was pretty easily pointed at as like not not the real thing. But we also said in the behind the scenes that like, we don't know if she felt she was she really truly sincerely felt she was speaking to spirits or not, or if well we really know. So thank you again, Jim for this note and for the cap picture and for giving us a chance to read this. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, where a history podcast at I heart radio dot com. We're also all over social media at miss in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterson Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app and wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.