Walkabout: The Glass House Disaster, Part 2

Read Part 1 and Part 3 of this story.

It’s hard to believe that the relatively small footprint of the block of Atlantic Avenue, Columbia, Hicks and State streets could have held a thriving industrial park with at least 18 businesses in it.

But this very block in 1885 was home to machinists, a soap maker, Benjamin Moore’s earliest factory, a button maker, and more. All of these buildings were either attached to, or adjacent to, a central H shaped building called the Glass House.

This series of connected buildings, which had been built over the years, a section at a time, with party walls and shared facilities, all facing the backs of the tenement buildings of Atlantic Avenue, was a disaster in waiting, and that disaster happened in the spring of 1885.

Rotted support beams in the waterlogged basement of the glass house factory, were replaced by a team of workers who didn’t know what they were doing, and under the instruction of a building manager who seemed to care more about cost than safety. On the morning of May 5, 1885, the walls came tumbling down, bringing death and destruction with them.

Soon after 9 a.m., Frank Miller, a house mover, and his fellow workmen, John McDermott, a mason and Peter Watson, a carpenter, had just finished removing the old beams from the cellar of the glass house factory, having replaced them with new ones.

For over two years, tenants in the building had complained to George Abbott, the building manager, that the conditions were not safe. Waste pipes from an oleo margarine company, which had just moved out, as well as an industrial soap manufacturer in the complex, had backed up, dumping so much water in the cellar that boards had to be placed on the floor so people could walk there.

The beams holding up the building were rotting and sagging, and the machinist companies located on the ground floor could not get their heavy machinery plumb on the uneven floors. Abbott hired his crew to replace the beams, and jack up the floors. Although the men were familiar with the concepts involved, none of them had ever done this before.

No permits were asked for, or obtained, and the work took place during the work day while the factories were in full operation with over 500 people on the premises. None of the company owners or their workmen knew that dangerous work was going on below them, while they and their employees worked with heavy machinery, open fires, flammable materials and toxic chemicals.

The men had barely made it outside when suddenly, the glass house gave out a great groan, and one wall tore away from its neighbors and started to fall. William Durst, a brass metal spinner, whose business was on the third floor of the glass house, testified that a funnel shaped hole opened up in the center of the room, and everything disappeared down the hole, crashing to the cellars below.

Henry Durst, William’s uncle, disappeared into the hole along with tons of equipment, much of it super-heated and already on fire, along with four other employees, including a 15 year old boy. William and several co-workers were able to jump down to the floor below, and escape through the windows before the rest of the building fell.

One of the workers in one of the ground floor machinist shops said that they saw bricks start to fall from the ceiling, and then saw the walls spreading, and the floor opening up, and they were able to run out of the front entrance to safety, before the entire building collapsed. Far too many were not as lucky.

In the button factory on the top floor of one of the adjoining buildings, the teenaged, mostly female employees were shocked from their work by the sound of the glass house collapsing, followed by part of the floor in their own building collapsing.

Most of them and their employer were able to climb a ladder to the roof and escape to an unaffected building, and down a fire escape. Fire and smoke soon began to pour from first, one of the adjoining tenements, and then their factory windows. At least five girls and one male supervisor did not make it out.

As building after building began catching fire, the collapsing walls crashed into the backs of the wooden tenements, pulling the backs down, and sending bricks and debris into the apartments. Fortunately, people were able to escape to the street from the front of the buildings, but people risked life and limb to rescue family members and pets.

The fires were caused by broken gas lines, and all of the businesses that used open flame, including gold and silver watch makers, the brass foundry and other metalworkers. The fires mixed with open chemicals from some of the other businesses, as well as tons of flammable materials like fabric, window shades and paint.

The soap manufacturer, which made Pride of the Kitchen Soap, had just received tons of silica, used in the making of their products. Employees had often joked that they risked their lives every time a delivery came in, which filled their space from floor to ceiling, and made the floorboards of the old factory creak.

When the building collapsed, tons of the silica, now mixed with water, and heated by the fire, oozed down the factory walls into the basement, where it sat, a gelatinous and deadly mess.

Benjamin Moore, the paint maker, was initially thought to have been missing, but turned up later. He had been in another part of the building complex when the glass house came down, and was able to get the nine girls in that part of the plant out safely through one of the State Street exits.

Charles Schwetter, who manufactured gold watch cases on the third floor of one of the extensions, was also able, with all of his employees, to escape in time. He left behind significant amounts of gold which melted in the heat of the fire and fell to the basement below. This would be hamper some of the rescue and recovery operations, as some opportunists tried to look for gold, rather than survivors or bodies.

The fire department was at the scene within 15 minutes after the alarm was sounded. Four of the firemen were severely injured trying to rescue people, and had to be hospitalized themselves. Almost to the hour, at 10 a.m., the walls of the factory building facing State Street collapsed, exposing the rest of the complex to the street, making it much easier for firemen to pump water onto the blazes.

The first thing the police did was take house mover Frank Miller into custody, the common thought being that there was no way he could have escaped, if the collapse had truly been an accident due to some other factor other than the beams. But it soon became quite clear that finding and identifying the dead was going to be much more difficult than finding someone to blame.

In the conclusion: Trying to identify the dead, finding heroes, laying blame, and the coroner’s inquest. The aftermath of the Glass House Disaster.

Related Stories
Walkabout: The Glass House Disaster, Part 1
Walkabout: The Glass House Disaster, Conclusion
Walkabout: The Lost Boys of St. John’s

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