The Brooklyn Theatre fire was a catastrophic theatre fire that broke out on the evening of December 5, 1876, in the city of Brooklyn (now a borough of New York City). The fire took place at the Brooklyn Theatre, near the corner of Washington and Johnson streets, with over 1,000 guests attending. The conflagration killed at least 278 individuals, with some accounts reporting more than 300 dead. 103 unidentified victims were interred in a common grave at Green-Wood Cemetery, marked by an obelisk, while more than two dozen identified victims were interred individually in separate sections at the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn.
The Brooklyn Theatre fire ranks third in fatalities among fires occurring in theatres and other public assembly buildings in the United States, behind the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire and the 1903 Iroquois Theatre fire.
Most deaths occurred in the family circle, the uppermost level of the theatre where the cheapest seats were located. This gallery was quickly exposed to intense heat and thick, suffocating smoke. With only a single stairway for exit, congestion blocked escape, trapping more than half of those inside.
Brooklyn Theatre
The Brooklyn Theatre opened on October 2, 1871 and stood near the southeast corner of Washington and Johnson streets one block north of Brooklyn's City Hall. It was owned by The Brooklyn Building Association, a partnership of affluent Brooklyn residents including Abner C. Keeney, William Kingsley, and Judge Alexander McCue. After its destruction, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle called it Brooklyn's "principal theatre". The theatre had been managed by Sara and Frederick B. Conway until the last 20 months of its existence; the Conways were long involved in New York and Brooklyn theatre, having managed Brooklyn's Park Theatre from 1864 to 1871. Sara Conway died in April 1875, about six months after her husband. Their children Minnie, Lillian, and Frederick Jr. then managed the theatre for a short time, but without success. Albert Marshman Palmer and Sheridan Shook were the manager and proprietor of New York's Union Square Theatre, and they assumed a new lease on the Brooklyn Theatre later in 1875, managing it until the catastrophe took place.
The Brooklyn Theatre stood a block from Fulton Street, the main thoroughfare to the Manhattan ferries and readily accessible to both New York and Brooklyn residents. Its seating capacity was about 1,600. Both Conway and Shook & Palmer sought upscale productions with well-known actors and actresses. The Brooklyn Theatre became a well-respected house in Brooklyn's nascent theatre district, which included the smaller and older Park, Olympic, and Globe theatres.
The Two Orphans
Shook and Palmer were already enjoying success with their Union Square Theatre Company in New York and went on to transplant a number of their productions to the Brooklyn house. Their specialty was the adaptation of French plays to the American stage. The Two Orphans was a melodrama about two young homeless orphans separated by abduction; it featured Kate Claxton and was presented on the night of the fire. It had been a particularly successful play, running for 180 performances in 1874 at the Union Square Theatre. It was originally Les Deux Orphelines by Adolphe d'Ennery and Eugène Cormon, and had been adapted to the American stage by N. Hart Jackson. Shook and Palmer brought it to the Brooklyn Theatre in March 1876 after an American tour, including one performance at the Brooklyn Theatre on April 12, 1875, two weeks before Sara Conway's death.
The 1876 run at the Brooklyn Theatre was well received but was ending. At the time of the fire, Palmer indicated that a number of Union Square Theatre productions had been scheduled for the Brooklyn Theatre and that all the scenery and properties for Ferrsol, Rose Michel, Conscience, and Colonel Sellers had been stored on the premises, along with the wardrobe for The Two Orphans and a suite of furniture for Rose Michel.
Building features
The Brooklyn Theatre was designed by Thomas R. Jackson and constructed in 1871 according to Sara Conway's specifications. Brooklyn Police Fire Marshal Patrick Keady gathered testimony and constructed a chronology of the disaster, and he said that the structure had better exits than many other public buildings in Brooklyn at that time.
The theatre occupied an L-shaped lot, with the Proscenium theatre occupying the 127-by-70-foot (39 m × 21 m) wing fronting Johnson Street. The stage and scene doors opened onto Johnson Street from this wing. The scene doors were 20 ft wide (6.1 m), large enough to accommodate scenic flats and large props. The stage doors were smaller but could accommodate people carrying heavy loads. These Johnson Street doors were utilitarian and little used by the public. The shorter 27-by-40-foot (8.2 m × 12.2 m) wing on Washington Street housed the main entrance to the lower floors and a separate staircase to the third floor theatre gallery. They were for public use, and Jackson considered these main entry ways to be large enough to discharge a full house of 1,450 people in less than five minutes.
There were three sets of doors which Jackson designated as special exits. They led onto Flood's Alley, a small street running along the east side of the building that bisected the block from Johnson to Myrtle Avenue. Each set was six feet (1.8 m) across. The southern door closest to Myrtle Avenue opened into the eastern end of the lobby, underneath the flight of stairs leading from the lobby to the dress circle. The middle set opened onto a hallway adjoining the parquet, and the northern set opened near the stage and orchestra pit. The middle set served a stairway ascending to the second floor dress circle. These alley doors were normally locked to discourage gate-crashing. The structure had no fire escapes in the modern sense: those that connect higher storey windows to the street. Sources from the period often called these alley doors "fire escapes", but designs of the era were untested and tended to be impractical.
Seating, interior passages, and spaces
The Brooklyn Theatre had three levels of seating. Parquet and parquet circle seating occupied the theatre's ground floor and contained 600 seats. The dress circle occupied a second floor balcony which seated 550. A third floor gallery, the family circle, extended to the south wall of the structure and seated 450. The family circle had its own entrance and ticket booth and customers for this seating did not usually commingle with patrons purchasing seating for the lower floors.
Furthest from the stage and up against the theatre ceiling, the family circle offered the cheapest accommodations and had the most roundabout access to the street. The passageway started from the gallery, passed through a curtain partition, then descended southward down a short flight of stairs to a platform set against the south wall. It turned right (west) and descended another flight of stairs anchored to the south wall, ending at a second floor corridor. Patrons then made a right turn into this corridor and follow the passageway northward along the west wall to the family circle box office. The passage then turned left, westward again, descended a third flight of stairs down to a short, street-level hallway that led onto Washington Street (see Floor Plan 2).
Access to the dress circle was more straightforward. Patrons entered and left the dress circle via a flight of 10-foot-wide (3.0 m) stairs that descended south to a landing, then turned right onto a second flight that opened into the lobby. Patrons in the dress circle also had a second emergency exit along the alley side of the building, going down a flight of stairs to the middle exit onto Flood's Alley. The exit was generally locked to thwart gate crashers so the stairs were little used and not well known.
Eight private boxes, four on each side of the stage and each accommodating six people, rounded out the seating, the box seats furnishing the most elegant and expensive accommodations in the house. At the time the theatre opened in 1871, seating in the family circle cost fifty cents and the dress circle cost a dollar. In the lower auditorium, parquet seating, inconveniently close to the stage, cost seventy five cents while the parquet circle cost a dollar fifty. The box seats cost ten dollars.
Stage and flies
As with many 19th-century theatres, the Brooklyn Theatre's stage was a presentation platform, a prop factory and a warehouse. At the back of the stage was the painter's bridge, a walkway which ran the width of the stage and which could be raised or lowered as required for painting backdrops, or drops. These and borders, scenic elements painted on canvas and mounted on wooden frames, were installed in a rigging loft, known as a fly system, a large wooden open frame equipped with the pulleys and tackle needed to raise or lower scenic elements. It was suspended high in the fly space or flies, the volume above the stage never seen by the audience. For a large production with many scene changes, the rigging loft could be heavily loaded with painted canvas. On the night of the fire, it contained drops and borders for The Two Orphans and the scenery for Julius Caesar was stacked on the stage, awaiting pickup. This had bearing on the fire's outset when stage manager Thorpe considered getting the hose but was hampered by scenery.
The proscenium arch housed a 35-by-50-foot (11 m × 15 m) drop curtain. The arch itself was not integral to the theatre but was constructed with a lightweight, plastered curtain wall made of wood. The drama was entirely lit with gaslight controlled at a gas table, where an operator could light a lamp with an electric spark and vary its intensity through regulating gas flow. Arrayed on the side of the proscenium arch were gas-lit border lamps, equipped with tin reflectors that cast light backstage and onto the borders. Each border lamp was in a wire cage intended to keep the canvas borders at least a foot (30 cm) away from the gas lamps within. Personnel were forbidden to ignite gaslights with matches or smoke anywhere on the stage.
Fire
On Tuesday evening, December 5, 1876, about a thousand patrons were in attendance. Samuel Hastings, who collected tickets at the gallery entrance, estimated that there were about 400 people in the family circle. One of the theatre owners, Col. Abner Keeny, said that about 360 people purchased tickets for the dress circle and about 250 people in the parquet and parquet circle. Edward B. Dickinson, a patron in the middle of the parquet about five rows from the stage, thought the auditorium floor was not more than half full. Charles Vine, high in the family circle, thought it was "one of the biggest galleries" he had seen in a long time.
The play proceeded without incident until 11 p.m., the intermission between the fourth and fifth acts. The drop curtain was down, hiding the stage, and the orchestra was playing. Some attendees in the parquet circle heard what sounded like a brawl behind the curtain, shouting and machinery working, noise carrying above the orchestra's playing.
Behind the curtain, actors were taking their positions in a box set of an old boathouse on the bank of the Seine. Made of painted canvas on a flimsy wooden frame, the curtain blocked the backstage from view. Kate Claxton, playing Louise the blind orphan girl, along with actors J. B. Studley and H. S. Murdoch, had taken their places on stage and were waiting for the curtain to rise. Claxton was lying on a pallet of straw, looking up. Actors Mary Ann Farren and Claude Burroughs were waiting in the wings.
Detection of fire
Around 11:20 p.m., while preparations for the final act were under way, stage manager J. W. Thorpe saw a small flame on the left side of the stage. The fire issued from the lower part of a drop hanging below the rigging loft near the center stage border-light. The canvas was partially detached from the frame and, Thorpe thought, possibly slipped past the wire mesh border lamp guard and ignited. He estimated its size to be no larger than his hand. Though water buckets were once kept on the stage and in the rigging loft and though a two and a half inch (6.4 cm) water pipe still serviced a fire hose backstage, none of these facilities were readily available. Thorpe considered the fire hose, but there was much scenery in the way. Deciding that the fire would be well under way by the time the hose was in place, he opted to extinguish the flame by immediately available means. He directed carpenters Hamilton Weaver and William Van Sicken to extinguish the flame, which they attempted by beating the fire with long stage poles. Another carpenter who was backstage tried to fix the drop in one of the grooves but "could barely reach it with his hand and he drew it hastily up. The rapid motion through the air of the half ignited and highly flammable canvas, caused it to burst into a flame, which rapidly spread".