Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 20, Number 58, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 March 1899 — MANY DIE DI FIRE. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

MANY DIE DI FIRE.

Guests of Big New York Hotel Caught in Death SCENE OF WILD PANIC Nearly a Score of People Are Killed and Forty-two Injured. Fashionable Gotham Hostelry, Crowded with Gnests and Sightseers, Burns —Rapid Spread of Flames Cuts Off Escape by the Elevators and Stairways—Men and Women Leap from Windows of Upper Floors to an Awful Death. The Windsor Hotel, occupying a square on Fifth avenue, between Forty-sixth and Forty-seventh streets, in New York, for nearly thirty years one of the most famous hotels in this country, if not in the world, was completely destroyed by fire Friday afternoon, and at least eighteen persons were burned to death, and probably more than half a hundred were injured. There were rescues by the score, some of them the most thrilling imaginable. Among the rescued were Mrs. Abner McKinley, wife of the brother of the President; their daughter, and Miss Helen McKinley, the sister of the President. From the roof and windows, from the fire escapes and cornices, frenzied men and women threw themselves to the pavement five, six, seven stories below. Bewildered guests within the roaring furnace were carried down to death by falling walls, and all the while 50,000 human beings watched the tragedy.

Massed into solid lines, men and women filled side streets, avenues and doorsteps, there to watch the parade of the day, but fated to witness the most grewsome fire New York has ever known. The roll of dead is long. Private homes around the place of sacrifice became field hospitals—spacious mansions, including the Jay Gould home, were made temporary morgues. John Foy, a waiter employed at the Windsor Hotel, in a statement made after the fire to Coroner Bausch declared that the hotel was burned through the gross carelessness of a guest. The waiter was In a corridor of the second floor, walking toward 47th street, when he saw a man near the end of the corridor strike a match to light his cigar. The man threw the match to the floor and walked on without waiting to see that it had gone out. Foy noticed the action, and he also noticed that the match was still blazing when it left the man's hand. When the waiter'reached the spot the lace curtains were ablaze. He tried to extinguish the flame, but it was quickly up the curtain and caught the woodwork. The carpet caught fire, and the walls seemed to burn like tinder. Foy gave the alarm and ran

down stairs and out of the building to reach a firebox. An hour after the fire started the ruin was complete. At ten minutes after 3 o’clock the head of the parade reached 46th street and Fifth avenue, opposite the Windsor. An instant later a policeman saw a tiny blaze and a puff of smoke in a bow window in the drawing room on the second floor, on the 46th street side. He turned in an alarm. Before he could return to the hotel the drawing room was • sheet of flames. The room had been crowded with guests watching the parade. When the curtaia igni ted—for that is said to have been the start of the fire —instant panic came over all. Men and women fled to the stairways and the flames leaped after them. Up the stairs and elevators sped the gnests—up air and light shafts raced the flames. In an incredibly short time the whole building was eaveloped in dull, roaring tongues of fire and heavy stifling smoke. It seems as if the fire must have been burning under the floor and in the walls, for on no other hypothesis can the suddenness of its spreading be accounted for. The width of the corridors made it easy to run, and the guests filled them in their rush for the streets. The elevators, although they were run until aflame.

brought comparatively few down In safety. The road out of the death trap was down the splendid marble stairs. And down these stairs poured a terrified procession. Meanwhile through the tangled mob outside the fire engines had forced their way. It was after the first wild rash that swept so many to safety down the broad staircase that the most awful events of the great fire occurred. All of the women had not sprang from their rooms with the first alarm. Some had stopped to dress, some to gather their most precious belongings. And these were doomed. Then, too, there were sick persons in the house, bedridden men and women. When these belated ones got into the corridors they were for the most part bounded by walls of fire. Up the great central well roared the flames. Right at the stairways, the logical and accustomed avenues to the streets, were the terrible sentries, curling and swirling with threats to all who dared to pass that dread picket line. Then these belated guests took to the fire escapes, throwing open windows and reaching their arms out to the sea of people who groaned below. Many of those who came to the windows were saved at last by daring firemen and citizens. But the fire was too swift, the time too short. While the firemen were helping some to safety, others felt the touch of the red hand upon them from behind, and threw themselves from the windows. The firemen displayed the utmost heroism and daring in saving life at the most imminent risk. The Windsor was the resort and dwelling place of rich people, and there may have been half a million dollars’ worth of jewels alone lost by the women who lived there. Among the dead are the wives of millionaires, as well as the maids, who were shut off in the top story. Abner McKinley, brother of the President of the United States, with his wife and daughter, Miss Mabel McKinley, occupied a suite of rooms on the ground floor of the hotel. Among the dead are Mrs. Warren Leland. wife of the Windsor’s proprietor, and her daughter. Miss Helen Leland, and Mrs. James S. Kirk, widow of the millionaire soap manufacturer of Chicago. Panics Within, Pan’cs Without. The fire occurred in the middle of the afternoon, when Fifth avenue was jam-

med with people from curb line to house line, and from curb to curb with St. Patrick’s Day paraders. To this fact is due, perhaps, some of the loss of life and V good deal of the serious injury to person, for the crowd interfered with the police and the firemen; but so suddenly did the fire start, and so quickly did it sweep through the big hotel from floor to floor, from street to roof, from side to side, if there had been no crowd there, and nothing to hamper the work of the officials, there would still have been many accidents and some fatalities. With such awful rapidity did the fire spread, once it started, that people no higher up in the building than the floor above the street had to fly for their lives. Only by a search of the ruins will the extent of the disaster be known, and so complete was the wreck wrought by the fire that this will be a long and tedious work. The fire started, according to the best information, in a dining room. It was due, it is almost certain, to the careless tossing of a match into a lace curtain. Before an alarm could be sent in to the fire department the building was doomed. Had Mt been a tinder box the fire could not have taken hold quicker and completed the work of demolition in less time. Yet the building has been called fireproof. It was fitted, according to the building and fire officials, with all of the equipment for use in case of fire that the law requires. It had sufficient fire escapes and the halls were equipped with electric alarms and with colored globes that should have shown everybody how to reach the escapes. Yet they might almost as well not have been there, for of all the persons rescued not more than half a dozen were taken down by m-ans of the fire escapes, while scores jumped or slid down murderous rope escapes, which burned their hands and compelled them to drop many feet above the street. Within two hours of the discovery of the fire the hotel itself was a total wreck, and the walls had fallen out on every side except the eastern side, where adjoining buildings shored them up. Those two hours were as full of thrilling incidents as any that Fifth avenue ever witnessed. Over 25,000, and perhaps 50,000, people were jammed together in the smallest space that they could be jammed in, and they saw women and children and men leaping from the windows o? the hotel. They saw firemen climbing up the outer walls with scaling ladders and bringing down panic-stricken and often struggling women. They saw rescues almost without number, and they cheered the firemen as they worked. For a time the mob swamped the police and surged back and forth through the streets, now rushing to see this unfortunate falling to death, now to witness another caught in the life nets by the firemen, and again to look in horror upon another impaled on the iron railings that surrounded the hotel, or dashed to death on the huge iron flower urns. This mob was as panic stricken almost as the people in the hotel. They screamed as unfortunate after unfortunate leaped out; they mingled their cheers now and again with the cries for aid of the people who did not jump. The loss on the hotel is estimated at about >1,000,000. Several adjoining buildings were damaged considerably, but the loss on these is comparatively small. All the papers and books of the hotel are be-' lieved to have been saved.

THE ILL-FATED WINDSOR HOTEL, NEW YORK.

WARREN F. F. LELAND. Proprietor of the Burned Windsor Hotel, Made Insane by the Loss of His Wife and Daughter.