Chicago, Illinois: The School Fire That Changed America
On December 1, 1958, in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood, ninety-five people died in a school thatwas breaking no law at all. Our Lady of the Angels was a Catholic parish school running kindergartenthrough eighth grade at 909 North Avers Avenue, with roughly 1,600 children enrolled. The fire started ina cardboard trash barrel at the foot of a basement stairwell sometime between two and two-twenty in theafternoon, and it burned for about twenty minutes before anyone upstairs knew. There were no heat detectorsto find it and nobody down there to see it.The building had one fire escape, no sprinklers, and four extinguishers mounted seven feet off the floor.Its two manual alarm switches sat in the far wing, and neither was wired to the fire department. Pullingone rang a bell inside the building and nothing else. All of that was legal, because a grandfather clausein Chicago's fire code exempted schools built before 1949 and the wing that burned went up in 1910. A cityinspector had walked through eight weeks earlier and signed off on everything. He was not wrong.Timeline of Events1903, 1910, and 1951: Our Lady of the Angels is built in pieces. The north wing, the one that burns, goesup in 1910.December 1, 1958, between about 2:00 and 2:20 PM: A fire starts in a trash barrel at the foot of thenortheast basement stairwell.December 1, 1958, shortly after: A basement window shatters, oxygen rushes in, and the varnished woodenstaircase catches. With no fire door at the second-floor landing, the stairwell funnels smoke and flameinto the north wing.December 1, 1958, about 2:25 PM: Three eighth-grade girls carrying wastebaskets hit a wall of smoke andrun to tell their teacher. That is the school's alarm system.December 1, 1958, 2:42 PM: The alarm reaches the fire department. Companies are on the block in four minutes,then lose time to a misdirected address and a locked iron gate.That evening: Eighty-seven children and three nuns are dead.August 9, 1959: The last of five more children dies of injuries, bringing the toll to 92 children and 3nuns.1960: A new school opens on the same ground at 3814 West Iowa Street, with sprinklers throughout.Historical SignificanceMore than three hundred children were on the second floor, twenty-five feet above the pavement, with thecorridor gone. In one fourth-grade room of fifty-seven, twenty-eight children and their teacher died. Ina room at the far end of the hall that flame never reached, twenty-six children and their teacher diedof smoke and heated gas. In another, a nun had her students pack their textbooks into the gap under thedoor, and it held long enough. The National Fire Protection Association came to Chicago and blamed thecity and the archdiocese for letting fire traps operate legally. Percy Bugbee, who ran the associationthen, said there were no new lessons in this fire, only old ones that had gone unheeded. Within a yearroughly 16,500 older school buildings were brought up to modern codes. Chicago and Illinois rewrote theirsoutright: alarms wired to the fire department, sprinklers, fire doors, enclosed stairwells, class-sizelimits, lockers instead of coats on a hallway hook. Nobody was ever charged. The official cause is stillundetermined.SourcesNational Fire Protection Association investigation report, 1958Chicago Fire Department recordsCook County and Archdiocese of Chicago accounts of the December 1, 1958 fireContemporary Chicago newspaper coverageIf you liked this: Episode 206, Bath, Michigan. Another school tragedy that forced the country to rewritethe rules for keeping children safe.Hometown History explores forgotten stories from small-town America. The overlooked events, hidden triumphs,and buried tragedies that shaped the country we live in. New episodes every Tuesday. Find every episode atmythsandmalice.com/hometown-historyEpisode 215 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane WatersAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
