1876 Brooklyn Theater fire...

Item # 575930

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December 07, 1876

THE NEW YORK HERALD, December 7, 1876

* Brooklyn Theater Fire
* Lengthy report
* NYC paper

Page 3 has one column headlines that include:

* A HORROR OF HORRORS
* Wholesale Holocaust at the Brooklyn Theater
* Men, Women and Children Buried in the Blazing Ruins
* Two Hundred and Eighty Bodies Discovered
* No Water On Hand

and more with related diagrams of the theater. (see) LOads of text which takes up all of pages 3 and 4 with a list of the dead on page 5. Too much to photograph here. Great title to have this in.

Other news of the day. Never bound, little spine wear, generally in nice condition.

wikipedia notes: The Brooklyn Theater Fire was a catastrophic theater fire that broke out on the evening of December 5, 1876 in the city of Brooklyn, New York, United States. The conflagration claimed the lives of at least 278 individuals, with some accounts reporting over 300 dead. 103 unidentified victims were interred in a common grave at Green-Wood Cemetery. An obelisk near the main entrance at Fifth Avenue and 25th Street marks the burial site. More than two dozen identified victims were interred individually in separate sections at the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn.

The Brooklyn Theater Fire ranks third in fatalities, among fires occurring in theaters and other public assembly buildings in the United States, falling behind the 1942 Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire and the 1903 Iroquois Theater Fire.

Fatalities mainly arose in the family circle, a gallery of inexpensive seats situated high in the auditorium. Only one stairway serviced this gallery, which sustained extreme temperatures and dense, suffocating smoke early in the conflagration. The stairway jammed with people, cutting off the escape of more than half of the gallery's occupants who quickly succumbed to smoke inhalation.

Category: Post-Civil War