Hearts Afire (21 page)

Mrs. Caroline
Berri
and her mother, Mrs. Martin,
were undoubtedly trampled upon by the panic-stricken audience, and then fell
victims to the flames. Mrs.
Berri
was the wife of Officer
Richard
Berri
, of District-Attorney Britton’s office.
He accompanied her and Mrs. Martin to the theater; but when the cry of fire
rang through the house, and the audience became uncontrollable, he was standing
in the vestibule. He tried to push into the theater to rescue his relatives,
but was carried by the rushing crowd out into the street. His wife and her
mother undoubtedly perished together.

Officer Patrick McKean, of the Central Office Squad, who was detailed to
preserve order in the gallery of the theater, is among the dead. He was a good
officer, and had been made a member of the Central Squad for his exemplary
conduct. He was seen working bravely in the vestibule of the theatre, trying to
get the panic-stricken people to move out in an orderly manner. Just before the
fatal blast of smoke and gas filled the entire building it was noticed that he
was exhausted by his hard labors; that he had lost his hat, and that his coat
was torn from him by the surging crowd. It is supposed that he was
precipitated, when the flooring gave way, into the horrible pit from which so
many dead were taken on Wednesday. Officer McKean was a young man—about thirty
years of age, and the support of a widowed mother.

John
McGinniss
, an old employee of the Brooklyn
Eagle, was among the killed, with two lady friends whom he had escorted to the
theater. He was about thirty-five years old, and was well known in Brooklyn. It
is likely that he bravely remained with his lady friends until the last. He was
an old fireman of the former volunteer department, accustomed to battling with
flames, cool-headed, and rapid in decision, and if he had been alone would
undoubtedly have found means of escape.

The body of Nicholas F. Kelly, aged twenty-two, was taken out of the theater
early Wednesday morning. As it was being placed in an undertaker’s wagon a
young man standing by glanced at the corpse, and after saying, “My God, that’s
Father Kelly’s brother,” fainted away. The body was afterward identified by
Father Kelly himself, who is the pastor of the Church of the Visitation, and
one of the best-loved and most eloquent priests in Brooklyn.

Coroner's Report

The King's County coroner, Henry C. Simms, convened a jury on the disaster
which heard testimony through December and January 1877. When it was published
at the end of January 1877, it was especially harsh on the theatrical managers,
Sheridan Shook and A. M. Palmer. The jury held Shook and Palmer responsible for
failing to take adequate precautions against fire, failing to train stage hands
in either fire prevention or the management of incipient fires, failing to
establish clear chains of command in the theatre's management, permitting the
stage to become cluttered with properties and failing to maintain in good
working order firefighting equipment and emergency exits that had originally
been installed. The jury found lesser fault with the design of the building,
observing that the five-year-old structure had better exits than many other
public buildings in the city. Fault was found with the stairways leading to the
family circle and the auditorium, which lacked a firewall between the audience
and the stage. In delivering the verdict, the jury reported that death occurred
mainly through suffocation in the dense smoke that prevailed in the gallery.

Fire Marshall's Report

Police Fire Marshall Patrick
Keady
interviewed
sixty two people directly connected with the fire in the week following the
blaze and delivered his report on December 18, 1876. He had been forcibly
struck by the lack of use of water in any form of conveyance, though a two and
a half inch pipe serviced the hydrant near the stage.

He was also forcibly struck by a certain laxness in the management of
theatre by Shook and Palmer, especially in comparison to Sara Conway's
management prior to her death. Many witnesses reported that Conway had insisted
on filled water buckets to be positioned in various places back stage or in the
rigging loft and kept the fire hose maintained. In contrast, Mike Sweeny could
recall using the hose only once, and was not certain of its condition on the
day of the fire; many of his colleagues thought the hose leaked and was up in
the painter's gallery in the roof above the stage.

Postscript

In 1879,
Haverly's
Theatre was erected on the same
site but was razed eleven years later to make way for new offices of The
Brooklyn Daily Eagle. After the Eagle closed, in the mid-20th century, the
entire block was subsumed by the urban renewal project which gave rise to
Cadman Plaza. The approximate location of the theater is north of the New York
Supreme Court Building in a tree-covered area.