It's kind of hard to imagine 492 people burning to death in 12 minutes in a building with a capacity of 460, but perhaps that's a telling detail. Yet on November 28, 1942 that's precisely what happened at the Cocoanut Grove club in Boston. It was 39 years after the deadliest fire in American history - Chicago's Iroquois Theatre caught fire and killed 602 people. Just two years prior to the Cocoanut Grove fire, the Rhythm Club in Natchez, Mississippi caught fire and killed 209 people.
Two orchestra leaders - singer Mickey Alpert and bandleader Jaques Renard - opened the Cocoanut Grove nightclub (named after LA's famous Cocoanut Grove inside the Ambassador Hotel) together at 17 Piedmont Street, near Boston's Theatre District in 1927 during the height of Prohibition. Initially Alpert and Renard insisted that the Cocoanut Grove abide by the law and not serve alcohol, trusting that live music would bring people literally to the club. An offer of money to open the club came from California mobster Jack Berman, who was hiding out in Boston. The problem was that Jack Berman was actually Jack Bennett, a former oil investor who had made a fortune manipulating the stock market. Financing Cocoanut Grove was an extremely good way to launder that money. Alpert and Renard refused the money, opened it themselves and, while they may have been great musicians, they were terrible businessmen. They sold Cocoanut Grove to "King" Charles Solomon for $10,000 in 1931.
Solomon - the son of Russian immigrants who settled in Boston's West End - was, how do you say, problematic. Federal agents called him "Al Capone of the East," as Solomon had a number of dirty little fingers in a number of dirty little pies. According to historians, Solomon was "at the peak of his crime renaissance, with a complete sideline of alki-cooking, morphine, heroin, cocaine, and the dandruff-like little granules which produce delirious uproar. He hogged the bail-bond market, owned a large loan-shark company at usurious rate, held full partnership in the white slave industry, a cut in a growing lottery racket and drivers and such like et ceteras built on human mischief. Solomon was so committed to bringing the finest illegal rum from Central America to Boston that he had a fleet of boats guided by secret radio stations in Long Island and New Jersey.
But! Solomon loved the theatres and nightclubs in Boston. Solomon was your typical gangster: well-dressed and with beautiful women (and vaudeville stars) on his arm. Solomon had already been indicted on January 24, 1933 when he went to the restroom at 3:30am in Boston's Cotton Club, and was promptly shot and later died at Boston City Hospital without giving up the names of the men who shot him. The Boston Globe reported, "Bullets sang the requiem of 'King' Solomon yesterday and wiped forever from his face the smile that thousands knew."
While the club itself didn't initially serve alcohol, Solomon obviously turned it into a speakeasy, a gritty gangland hangout. With Solomon dead, ownership transferred to Solomon's lawyer Barney Welansky, who turned it into a spectacle: The Cocoanut Grove was a single-level structure with an intentionally-dimly lit bar in the basement called the Melody Lounge. On the first floor was a huge bandstand, dining area, ballroom, with several separate bars scattered around the premises. There was even a retractable roof in the dining room to allow for viewing of the moon and dancing under the stars, tiki torches and tropical themes dominating the decor to make it seem like a scene out of Casablanca. It was such a successful nightclub that it expanded several times, with basically no thought given to the design or the safety of the "upgrades." Welansky made Alpert - known as "the second Al Jolson" - Cocoanut Grove's emcee to appeal to tourists and soldiers waiting to deploy to Europe, but underneath it all, Cocoanut Grove was still a mob hangout. The bookkeeper for the Grove was Rose Gnecco Ponzi, ex-wife of Charles Ponzi, whose financial shenanigans in 1920 were so audacious that the Ponzi Scheme is named after him.
Out of fear of employees taking unauthorized breaks and customers skipping their tab, the exits were nailed shut. The only way in and out was through a revolving door on Piedmont Street. Employees at the Cocoanut Grove included underage workers, unlicensed workers to make repairs, cutting corners on the supplies in order to increase profits. Those pretty palm trees were actually made of highly flammable material. The electrician hired to wire the building didn't have a license. When asked about the flimsy and unsafe "upgrades" Welansky simply replied that he was too close to Boston mayor Maurice Tobin to have to worry about getting shut down.
In early November 1942, Welansky bought a three-story building next to the Grove and turned it into the Broadway Lounge. The expansion brought the Cocoanut Grove complex to over 9,700 square feet just on the ground floor. On November 20, 1942 Boston Fire Prevention Lieutenant Frank Linney pronounced Cocoanut Grove "good" as far as fire prevention goes.
One of the employees Welansky hired was 16-year old Stanley Tomaszewski, "one of the swellest kids" according to one of his teachers at Roxbury Memorial High School for Boys. He was a starter on the football team who worked nine-hour shifts as a busboy for $2.47 + tips. He used the money to help his janitor father, sick mother, and to buy War Bonds. At about 10:15pm on Saturday, November 28, 1942 - fifteen minutes after the main show was supposed to start - Tomaszewski was at work helping to bus the tables of the almost-1000-strong/way-over-capacity crowd. A couple was seated in the downstairs basement and, wanting a little more intimacy, unscrewed a nearby lightbulb. The bartender told Tomaszewski to screw it back in, which he did, though whether he simply screwed it in or lit a match/lighter to see is unknown. What is known, however, is that the palm tree burst into flames, catching a satin canopy hanging from the ceiling on fire, as well, creating "a shimmering blue flame."
Waiters tried to put the fires out with seltzer water, to no avail. According to investigators, the fire spread at a rate of 400 feet per minute, racing up the stairwell out of the Melody Lounge and into the ballroom, upon which the fire burst into a giant ball of flame. For many occupants of Cocoanut Grove the first sign that something was amiss was when a screaming woman with her hair on fire.
Firefighters were nearby putting out a car fire when they saw smoke rising from the Cocoanut Grove. A Boston police officer yelled as he drove past Ladder 15's firehouse, "It's the Cocoanut Grove and it's going like hell!" As the fire spread, the people inside Cocoanut Grove realized the exits were all locked and so en masse made for the revolving door at the front of the club, partially and temporarily blocked by a 5'4" Grove employee in a gray suit demanding that they pay before they leave. It was at the revolving door that firefighters discovered piles of human bodies, apparently eight-feet high, unable to get out of the nightclub.
Abandoned cars made it difficult for fire and rescue personnel to reach the front of the club. It was 28 degrees at the time of the fire, with the temperature dropping steadily. The water used to douse the flames froze the firehoses to the ground. Soldiers and sailors streamed in to help. One firefighter said some victims had breathed in flames so hot that, even when they got outside, the first breath of frigid air made them drop "like stones."
Those lucky enough to make it out were taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, which was soon overwhelmed by the number of victims - for an hour and fifteen minutes a new patient was admitted every 11 seconds. Doctors were so desperate to save lives that they tried new methods of treatment such as administering plasma, and using penicillin, which had only been discovered 14 years earlier. A week earlier Massachusetts General Hospital had run a mock emergency drill to prepare for a theoretical German Luftwaffe attack, and as a result had plenty of gauze and saline available. 300-350 people survived the fire, 166 were hospitalized, and 491 were killed inside Cocoanut Grove in 12 minutes - one more death was added on January 9, 1943, a survivor who committed suicide. More people died from smoke inhalation than from burns.
It could have been worse: earlier on the 28th Boston College played Holy Cross at Fenway Park. The expectation was that Boston College would beat the absolute dog piss out of Holy Cross. After all, Boston College was 8-0 and had outscored their opponents 249-19. Holy Cross was 4-4-1, one of those wins was a 60-0 romp against the Fort Totten Redlegs, which wasn't a college at all, but instead a football team comprised of soldiers preparing for World War 2 based in Queens. Expecting an easy victory (influenced, perhaps, by Holy Cross being 26-point underdogs), Boston College had already booked a party at the Cocoanut Grove that night to celebrate their impending bid to the 1943 Sugar Bowl. The program for the game featured the captains from both Boston College and Holy Cross - the Boston College co-captains were Fred Naumetz and Mike Holovak. Their numbers: 55 and 12, respectively. Anyway, that get together at Cocoanut Grove was canceled when Boston College got whooped, ironically, 55-12 by Holy Cross (Bill Simmons just got a semi and has no idea why). The biggest college football upset until 1982 likely saved a whole bunch of lives. Mike Holovak later went on to work for the Houston Oilers in 1981, served as the Oilers' general manager from 1989 to 1993, and retired from the Tennessee Titans in 1999.*
Western movie star Buck Jones had a cold. He had been traveling the country on a War Bond tour and attended the Boston College-Holy Cross game with Mayor Tobin, and Buck Jones just wanted to go back to his hotel. But movie agents wanted Jones to go to a dinner in his honor at Cocoanut Grove, and so he went. He died of his injuries in the fire on November 30. Clifford Johnson, a 20-year old member of the Coast Guard, helped people get out despite suffering severe burns over 50% of his body. He spent 21 months in the hospital and went through "hundreds of surgeries." He was released from the hospital, married his nurse, and...died in a vehicle fire in Missouri in 1956.
Once the literal smoke cleared, investigators set out the next day to find the cause of the fire. Tomaszewski, the 16-year old busboy, wasn't done any favors when the Boston Herald ran a front-page headline screaming, "Bus Boy Fixing Light With Match Set Fire," but he was later cleared when the official cause of the fire was "of unknown origin." Tomaszewski had to stay at the Kenmore Hotel for weeks, guarded by police for his own safety.
History has shown that the main cause was Welansky himself for his cost-and-corner-cutting measures. Welansky and nine Cocoanut Grove employees were indicted. Mayor Maurice Tobin narrowly avoided indictment, himself. But only Welansky - who was actually at Massachusetts General Hospital recovering from a heart attack on the night of the fire - was charged and found guilty, of manslaughter. He was sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison but 3.5 years into his sentence, in the late stages of cancer, was pardoned by Tobin who at this point was governor of Massachusetts. Welansky died nine weeks later, telling reporters before he died that he "wished he had died in the fire." Governor Tobin went on to be Harry Truman's Secretary of Labor.
After the investigation was concluded, officials reclassified restaurants and nightclubs as "places of public assembly," thus requiring more stringent safety measures to be in place, things we take for granted now, like automatic fire sprinklers, all exit doors swinging outward, emergency lighting, and illuminated exit signs. Revolving doors were still allowed, but had to either be collapsible or have conventional doors swinging outward on either side of the revolving door. The Portland Press-Herald wrote that the Cocoanut Grove fire was "a perfectly stupid way to learn elementary public safety."
Stanley Tomaszewski graduated from Boston College, got married and had three kids, and had a long career as a federal auditor. He died in 1994 at the age of 68. Today, 17 Piedmont Street is the site of eight luxury condominiums and a small plaque commemorates the victims of the 5th-worst loss of life in US History behind 9/11, Pearl Harbor, the sinking of the Titanic, and the Iroquois fire in Chicago.
*The Houston connection with Holovak is courtesy of @Texophilia.
