Today is the 66th anniversary of the worst nightclub fire in American history. On November 28, 1942, Boston’s Cocoanut Grove — located just south of the Common — erupted in flames that killed hundreds within a mere 15 minutes. The club was stuffed that Saturday night with sailors on shore leave, young men from other branches who were preparing to head overseas for the war, as well as football fans who’d watched Holy Cross dismantle Boston College, 55-12, earlier in the day.
The fire began innocently enough, when a busboy — trying to replace a light bulb — lit a match while fumbling about in the dark, looking for the socket. Though he believed he’d extinguished it, the smoldering match accidentally set fire to a cluster of artificial palm fronds. As it turned out, the bulb he was trying to replace had been removed by a young couple who were making out at one of the tables in the Melody Lounge, one of several large rooms in the club.
The busboy survived; the fate of the couple could never be determined.
One of the most popular attractions in the city, the Grove could not have been rigged better for a catastrophe of this magnitude. To deter freeloaders, the club’s owners had sealed off most of the exits, going so far as to weld them shut. At the time of the disaster, there were only two functioning public entrances to the club. One was a pair of doors that swung inward, while the other was a single set of revolving doors. Both exits quickly choked with bodies when the fire — propelled by leaky refrigerator gas, flammable decorations, drapes and furniture that filled the club — surged from one room to another and up the stairwells to the building’s top floors.
John Rizzo, a waiter at the Grove, recalled the fire a half century later in the Boston Globe:
Everybody panicked. I knew there was a door across the dining room, but about 150 people were headed for it, and everybody was pressed together, arms jammed to our sides. The flame came down the side of the dining room like a forest fire, and within minutes, the stage was consumed with fire. Before I could get out, I got pushed through a door and fell head over heels downstairs into the kitchen and landed on other people.
At the foot of the stairs, I was lucky enough to get on my feet. Everybody was scrambling, trying to break doors to the stock room. I said forget it, they don’t go outside. I saw a heavy lady, Mrs. [Katherine] Swett, the cashier. I said, ‘Take the money, let’s go,’ but she said, ‘I can’t leave the money.’ Later, I saw a big person burned to death, and it was her.
Amazingly, some of the club’s employees tried to make sure that fleeing patrons settled their bills and paid for their coats at the check stand. During the recovery effort, officials reported that dozens of corpses had been robbed.
The final death toll eventually reached 492 — roughly half of the night’s patrons. The owner of the Cocoanut Club, Barney Welansky, served four years in prison for negligent homicide. Released in 1946, he died several weeks later of cancer.
Shortly after the fire, the city council passed an ordinance that banned “Cocoanut Grove” from ever being used to name another building in Boston.
(Fire-related trivia: The next time you pass through a set of revolving doors, take note of the flanking set of conventional hinged doors. Those became standard after the Cocoanut Grove fire…)
12 comments
November 28, 2008 at 7:53 pm
md 20/400
Growing up in Boston this was a repeated cautionary tale. My mother was a girl at the time of the fire and the memory stuck. Another code change was that new-built doors had to swing out. I still think of the Grove when I go to stores that have half the front doors (usually the right hand one) locked.
Oh, my mom always said that it could have been worse: BC might have won and even more people would have been there.
November 28, 2008 at 8:55 pm
jacob
I feel it is my duty as a historian of disasters to urge that you take with a grain of salt sources like the Globe’s oral history. People (especially at great temporal distance) will often remember “panic” in disasters when in fact no panic happened. I don’t know much about Cocoanut Grove in particular, but I don’t think there was actually much panic; rather, there was probably activity that looked disorderly from outside. I’m skeptical of stories that club employees tried to charge people, too. It has the ring of an urban legend to me, and in other nightclub evacuations, employees (and regulars) tend to be major helping figures, showing people back exits, for instance, rather than hindrances. Stories of ghouls (as they’re often called) stealing from corpses also almost always turn out to be untrue. Of course, that isn’t to say that it didn’t happen at Cocoanut Grove, only that sources that claim that it happened are often wrong.
There’s much to be said about why people imagine these sorts of negative stories instead of the mostly positive things that disasters actually bring out in people, but I don’t really want to type the first chapter of my dissertation into this comment field.
November 29, 2008 at 10:02 am
Mr Punch
One theory about the disaster is that, due to wartime shortages, the rather primitive air conditioning system had been recharged with a highly flammable coolant that spread the fire rapidly throughout the club.
November 29, 2008 at 12:05 pm
John Emerson
There’s quite a history of high-fatality fires in locked factories, starting with the Triangle fire a century ago and continuing now in SE Asia.
November 29, 2008 at 2:22 pm
jacob
Not just in Southeast Asian factories. Don’t forget the Imperial Foods chicken plant fire in Hamlet, N.C., in 1991.
November 29, 2008 at 6:24 pm
Matt McKeon
Burn victims from the fire caught one break: Boston had a huge number of trained burn treatment medical personnel on hand, training to take part in World War II.
November 29, 2008 at 10:18 pm
JaB
An extensive article on the fire with several eyewitness accounts:
http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/181772174.html
Originally published 7/08 in Doors and Hardware magazine.
December 1, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Beth
This post brings to mind many of the themes in _The Unthinkable_ by Amanda Ripley. e.g., the fact that many employees will remain “in role” during this sort of disaster. For example, she talks about a different fire in which waitrons reported the fire to their supervisors rather than alerting patrons . . . but then, these service employees were much more likely to help rescue people than other customers. I find it tough to credit the claim that employees at the Cocoanut Grove delayed patrons until bills were paid, though.
December 2, 2008 at 9:18 am
Xenos
Trying to figure out the location of the club. Wikipedia cites it as 17 Piedmont Street, which is now the back wall of the Radisson which has the address of 200 Stuart Street. Must have driven down Stuart 100s of times, like anyone living in Boston. Is there some sort of memorial like you find on Commonwealth Avenue for the nine firefighters who died at the Hotel Vendome fire?
December 2, 2008 at 10:29 am
Vance
Wikipedia shows a plaque.
January 3, 2009 at 5:05 am
Grovemaster
I have spent hundreds of hours researching and collecting information on the catastrophe of the Cocoanut Grove fire on November 28, 1942. There are numerous myths and facts repeated above. It is true, one employee, the acting manager (and brother of the club owner) did confess to asking people to settle their bills before leaving – but only before he realized the severity of the fire. It is also true that three of the exits were locked. Two, facing Shawmut Street, were locked in the evenings to protect the safety of the chorus girls, as these doors opened to stairways which led to their changing rooms. One door, facing Piedmont Street, was sealed shut and tongue-locked after someone had broken the panic bar. As for panic within the club, ‘Jacob’ above is quite correct. Medical examiner Dr. Timothy Leary reported only a single broken bone among the scores of deceased, indicating that panic itself was not a significant cause of death. Many who perished were those who did not panic at all and stayed at their tables, only to die (in most cases) of carbon monoxide poisoning.
The substitute refrigerant theory is a relatively recent one and has more or less been dismissed. Methyl Chloride, used during the War, was highly inflammable. But, it was heavier than air, and one of the odd facts of the Cocoanut Grove fire is that the burning for the most part was confined to the upper parts of the various rooms, ‘contrary to all usual fire experience.’
One of the most endearing but completely false tales is the story that the Boston Licensing Board banned the use of the name ‘Cocoanut Grove’ for Hub businesses after the fire. No such edict was ever made. This story first seemed to surface years later, in the late 1950s.
There is a plaque in the ground at the site of the Piedmont Street entrance to the Cocoanut Grove. It was sculpted by a survivor, Anthony Marra, who as a busboy survived the fire by dipping his face in a vat of maple walnut ice cream. It was placed there in 1993. The last traces of the building were removed in the early 1960s. Some of the site is now a parking lot, most would now be in the lobby of the Radisson Hotel.
The busboy that lit the match in the Melody Lounge died in October 1994, at the age of 68. There are still several persons – employees and patrons – living today that survived the holocaust of 66 years ago.
May 21, 2009 at 11:39 am
Lovelylisa
I don’t have much to contribute except my dad was a survivor of the Cocoanut Grove Fire & what happened to him, he took to his grave. He had been asked numerous times over the years up until he died to contribute to books, magazines & newspaper articles & it was something he would not & could not talk about. He was a serviceman that was called in to help fight the fire, he wasn’t patron (he would never ever step foot in such an establishment).