City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (4 page)

That was when the entire bank seemed to detonate.

“I thought a bomb had been exploded,” one man said. Bombings had been in the news all year, and many bank employees worried that the Illinois Trust might be a target. But it instantly became clear that this was no ordinary explosive device.

A. W. Hiltabel was working in one of the teller cages at the south end of the room: “The first thing I heard was the breaking of the skylight,” he said. “I looked up and saw fire raining down from the roof. There seemed to be a stream of liquid fire pouring down into the room.”

Debris was suddenly falling everywhere. A huge engine and fuel tank slammed to the marble floor in front of him. “They exploded,” Hiltabel said. “Flames shot high into the room and all over the place. I ducked under my desk.”
¹⁴

Carl Otto and his colleague Edward Nelson were in conference at the telegraph desk when they heard the terrific explosion above them. Suddenly they found themselves showered by “an avalanche of shattered window panes and twisted iron.” Something sharp and heavy struck Nelson in the knee, throwing him to the ground. As hot sheets of flame billowed around him, he managed to crawl across the floor to an open teller cage. He scrambled up over the marble counter and out of the teller window to the lobby outside.

Carl Otto was not so lucky. The telegrapher took a direct hit from the falling engine and was instantly, horribly, crushed.

The initial shattering of the skylight had brought C. C. Hayford out of his office in the credit department. “I ran out and an explosion … hurled me over,” he later explained. “I got up and someone ran into me, screaming, ‘Oh my God, it’s raining hell!’ ” Then Hayford saw great columns of fire rising almost majestically above the line of teller cages before him. He could make out silhouetted figures struggling in the flames. “The screams were indescribable,” he said. “I turned sick. A man—I don’t know his name—staggered out of
the cage carrying the body of a girl. His own face was covered with blood.”

By this time, the central court was, according to workers in the balcony, “a well of fire, a seething furnace.” Clerks, stenographers, and bookkeepers, many of them with clothes ablaze, were clawing toward the two exits; others managed to escape through the narrow teller windows. “I saw women and men burning,” said Joseph Dries, a clerk in the bond department. “I saw everybody trying to get out through the doors of the cages.”

But many didn’t move fast enough. Stenographer Maria Hosfield looked on in horror as her boss was burned alive: “I was sitting next to Helen Berger and saw her become enveloped in flames,” she said. Several men ran to the chief stenographer and tried to extinguish her burning clothes. “She was saturated with gasoline,” said bank guard William Elliott. “Everything was so confused … but I heard the screams, and I looked and saw flames eating her.” He took off his coat and wrapped it around her. Pushing her to the ground, he rolled her on the floor to douse the flames, severely burning his hands. But he knew he had been too late.
¹⁵

By now, police and firefighters were arriving on the scene. The intense heat of the fire, however, made it difficult for them to enter the caged rotunda. People were pouring out of the bank’s windows like bees escaping a burning hive. Half-naked, dazed, and bloodied, many were now wandering numbly through the streets of the financial district. “When I got to the street,” bank employee W. A. Woodward said, “I noticed that my face, head, and arms were covered with blood.… A man I had never seen before rushed up to me and said, ‘Man, don’t you know that you are badly hurt?’ There was no ambulance near, so this man hustled me into a taxicab and took me to St. Luke’s Hospital.”

A crowd estimated at twenty thousand people had been drawn to the streets of the southern Loop to watch the disaster. Many were
trying to help the victims. Several gathered around Milton Norton. The photographer lay in the street in front of the Board of Trade Building, still attached by rope to his smoldering parachute. By all appearances, the man seemed dead. But someone flagged down a passing automobile and ordered the driver to take the battered man to the hospital.
¹⁶

Meanwhile, Jack Boettner had made his way to the street. After detaching himself from his burning chute on the roof of the Board of Trade Building, the pilot had found a fire escape and started down. It took a long time for him to reach street level. Amazed to find himself only slightly injured, he set off amid the confusion to search for his men. He was intercepted on the street by two police detectives, and when he told them who he was, they immediately arrested him and took him away for questioning.

Back at the Illinois Trust Building, firemen struggled to bring the blaze under control. Charred and bloody bodies were now being removed from the rotunda. Friends and relatives of bank employees ran frantically around the streets, looking for their loved ones. Bystanders were doing what they could, wrapping the injured in their own jackets and helping them to waiting automobiles. Even those people who had only witnessed the disaster were stunned, incredulous. No one could quite take in the reality of what had happened. How had this experimental blimp—this enormous, floating firebomb—been allowed to fly over one of the most densely populated square miles on Earth? Shouldn’t someone have recognized the potential disaster and prevented it?

It was a question that would be asked numerous times over the next days, as the people of Chicago learned the details of what had happened that afternoon. The crash of the
Wingfoot Express
—the first major aviation disaster in the nation’s history—had taken the lives of more than a dozen people, while injuring dozens more, and had brought utter panic to the heart of the second largest city in the
country. To many, it was unthinkable that such a thing could occur, that people quietly conducting their business in a downtown bank could suddenly find themselves in the midst of a hydrogen-fueled inferno. Chicago had recently come through a world war and an influenza epidemic relatively unscathed. But in the new age of twentieth-century technology, there were exotic new dangers to fear, new sources of turmoil to be reckoned with.
¹⁷

What no one could possibly realize at the time, however, was that the turmoil of the summer of 1919 had just begun. Over the next weeks, Chicago would plunge headlong into a crisis of almost unprecedented proportions, suffering an appalling series of trials that would push the entire city to the edge of civic disintegration. A population so recently preoccupied with fighting an enemy abroad would suddenly find no shortage of enemies within its own ranks, threatening residents’ homes, their jobs, even their children. The result would be widespread violence in the streets, turning neighbor against neighbor, white against black, worker against coworker, while rendering the city’s leaders helpless to maintain order. The Red Summer, as it would later be called, would leave Chicago a changed and chastened city, its greatest ambitions for the future suddenly threatened by the spectacle of a community hopelessly at war with itself.

All of this would happen over just twelve days. In retrospect, the crash of the
Wingfoot Express
—as horrifying as it may have seemed on that warm July evening—would come to be regarded as the least of the city’s woes.

W
ET SNOW PELTED
the city all evening, glazing the traffic-choked streets and wrapping every arc light in a gauzy halo of mist. In the chill hour before midnight, noisy groups of revelers rushed along the slippery sidewalks of the Loop. Music spilled from cabaret doorways; patrolmen blew their whistles; taxicabs caromed along the avenues, their thin tires throwing sprays of half-frozen slush toward the curbs.

Occasionally, the grimy trestles of the L would shudder as a crowded train rumbled past overhead.

December 31, 1918—proclaimed by the
Herald and Examiner
as “the most epochal New Year’s Eve” in the city’s memory. Despite the snow and a stinging gale off the lake, Chicagoans were coming out in huge numbers to celebrate. Every theater in the Loop was playing to sold-out houses, while hotels, saloons, and restaurants did record business, turning away latecomers at their doors. There were raucous dances at the Soldiers and Sailors Club, the Randolph Hotel, and even the normally staid Women’s Club. At the Terrace Garden Restaurant, a skater dressed as Father Time performed a last turn on the ice while a little girl, representing the brand-new year to come, was lowered from the ceiling on a wire.

There were festivities for everyone in town, whether young or old, rich or poor, “old settler” or newly arrived immigrant. At the elegant Casino Club, Chicago’s purest blue bloods watched Charlie Chaplin’s recent comedy
Shoulder Arms
before settling down to songs and
champagne before midnight. More daring souls jammed the cafés on Wabash and Van Buren, where frantic jazz—that scandalous new import from New Orleans—promised to continue until well past the mandatory 1 a.m. closing time. The city’s destitute were also having their fun: At Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna’s tavern on Clark Street, where ten cents bought an evening’s warmth and plenty of cheer, a homeless man named Curly Tim sat for hours over a pot of beer, singing a song about a “lemonade tree” in a “paradise where bums and little children live at peace.”
¹

Chicago, in short, was greeting the new year in a spirit of high optimism. And why not feel optimistic? As the
Daily News
noted just that afternoon: “This year, the holiday breathes peace and contentment. The year 1919 is seen as the greatest in the history of Chicago, of America, and of the world.” Long gone were the gloomy days of the German spring offensive of 1918. The Great War was over now. The Hun had been soundly defeated, and soldiers who had been leaving for combat in Europe a year ago would soon be returning home. Crime in the city was down, and the Spanish influenza, which in late 1918 had swelled the columns of death notices in the newspapers, seemed finally to be tapering off. Even the imminent arrival of Prohibition, almost certain to become law later in the year, had its hopeful aspects; though opposed by a large majority in the city, the abolition of alcohol held out the promise—in theory, at least—of significant reductions in vice, public drunkenness, domestic violence, and other urban ills.
²

But perhaps the greatest hopes of Chicagoans on this snowy New Year’s Eve were those stirred by the city’s bold and wildly ambitious program for its own civic future. The so-called Plan of Chicago—a multimillion-dollar scheme to transform the city into a model metropolis more beautiful than the great urban centers of Europe—had been in the making for more than ten years. First conceived by the late architect Daniel Burnham (the creative force behind Chicago’s
1893 World’s Fair), the plan would expand, reshape, and modernize the entire city. It called for, among other things, redeveloping the Lake Michigan waterfront, widening dozens of roads, improving and expanding the park system, building major new bridges and highways, consolidating the city’s railroad terminals, and even straightening a portion of the Chicago River. Considered one of the most ambitious urban improvement programs ever proposed, the plan promised to rationalize the city from top to bottom, creating “a practical, beautiful piece of fabric out of Chicago’s crazy quilt.” Advocates hoped that a more orderly and attractive urban environment would, in turn, create a new sense of community in Chicago, reducing social conflict and bringing out the best in all of its residents.

Naturally, there had been resistance to the plan at first. Many early skeptics had regarded the whole idea as too idealistic, too impractical, and altogether too expensive. But thanks to an all-out public relations campaign (which involved, among other things, distributing seventy thousand copies of a propaganda booklet to the city’s schoolchildren), the effort had gradually gained acceptance. In the years since the plan’s conception, numerous factions in the city had worked together to overcome a plethora of financial, legal, and technological obstacles. Property owners had been compensated for their land rights; railroads had been convinced to alter their rights-of-way; businesses had been compelled to move their factories and warehouses. None of this had been easy. For one project alone—the creation of a grand Michigan Avenue boulevard with a monumental bridge connecting the North and South Sides—the city had had to settle more than eight thousand lawsuits.