The Windsor Hotel Fire

March 17, 1899: the last St. Patrick's Day of the 19th Century

The Windsor Hotel

On March 17, 1899, the parade marched up Fifth Avenue in New York City, as it still does today. In 1899, fickle March produced a beautiful day for the occasion. 

The parade was led by the Fighting 69th, as had been the tradition since 1851. In the line of march were New York City firefighters, police officers, county societies, the Ancient Order of Hibernian, marching bands, and pipe and drum bands. 

At approximately 3 pm, the parade passed by the elegant, expansive Windsor Hotel at 575 Fifth Avenue, between 46 and 47th. 

The Windsor Hotel opened in 1873, a time when hotels offered both guest rooms and apartments. Both overnighters and residents would have been quite wealthy. The Windsor, the epitome of the grand hotels of the era, took up an entire city block. It was seven stories high and had 500 rooms. 

A New York Times article published in August of 1873 spoke rapturously of the hotel's 52-foot wide,140-foot deep main hall; the barber-shop [sic], which cost $10,000 to build; the various breakfast rooms and dining rooms for private parties, and, as well, its children's dining rooms, where children ate, tended by their servants. The hotel had 139 bathrooms. Each room had a fireplace, with elevators for passengers and elevators solely for baggage. Parlors on each floor "look out onto the avenue." The article also boasted about the Windsor's fire safety system.

The NY Times, August 13, 1873

Many of the hotel's guests and residents stood in the windows waving as they watched the St. Patrick's Day Parade pass by. The sidewalk below was packed with spectators. 

In the second-story parlor, a person who has never been named lit a cigar or cigarette and tossed the match out an open window. At that exact moment, the wind blew, and the curtain billowed. Curtain and lit match collided. At night, the hotel had employees patrolling the hallways on fire watch, but not during the day. Though the fire was spotted almost immediately, an employee's effort to put it out proved futile. The flames quickly swallowed the hotel's ornate woodwork and turned the elevator shafts into chimneys. 

Guests began screaming for help, and the parade halted. Black smoke streamed out of the windows. Police officers who had been on parade duty were suddenly working to control a panicking crowd. Firemen who had been marching dashed toward the burning building even though they wore only their dress uniforms and had no equipment. Police officers tried to stop the firemen from entering the hotel, and blows were exchanged between the two groups.

The fire escapes proved too hot to use. Guests tried to escape the smoke and flames using ropes, which the hotel supplied precisely for this kind of emergency–but many broke, dropping people to their deaths. Others were overcome by smoke and began jumping. A jumper landed on a man on the sidewalk, and both were killed. A woman holding a baby screamed for help from an upper-story window, and then, when none came, she tossed the baby out the window and jumped after. Both died. The Fire Department arrived on the scene, delayed by difficulty reaching the hotel because of the parade crowd.

The Windsor is not tall by today's New York standards, but in 1899, the fire department ladders only reached the fourth floor. Firemen used 'scaling ladders' to reach the upper floors. These were portable ladders that firemen hooked over windowsills above them, allowing them to climb higher and reach victims on upper floors. 

The men who had been marching in the parade used the emergency hoses in the lobby to beat back the flames and keep the way clear for the responding companies. Firemen acted with their usual heroism and no doubt saved lives that day, but the fire had too great a headstart. Within an hour of the tossed match, the building collapsed.

Abner McKinley, brother of President McKinley, was staying in the hotel that day. He was out for a walk when the fire broke out, and he rushed in and rescued his wife and daughter. 

Isabelle Leland, 52, and Helen Leland, 21, wife and daughter of the hotel's owner, were both killed. 

Partial list of the confirmed dead: The World, March 18, 1899

The list of the missing was also long, in the days following the fire. Some believed to be in the hotel turned out not to be, and were removed but, sadly, many would eventually be be presumed dead, even though their remains could not be identified. Most estimates say 90 people were killed.

Thirty-one unidentified victims are buried in Mt. Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. A memorial was dedicated to them in October 2014. 

I had never heard of the Windsor Hotel fire until I was researching my novel, Ashes of Fiery Weather, about a Brooklyn, New York, family of firefighters. The facts I have cited here can be sourced from the newspaper articles mentioned and from Terry Golway's book So That Others Might Live: A History of New York's Bravest, The FDNY from 1700 to the Present. 

In the novel, two Brooklyn girls go into the city to see the big parade. Here is an excerpt. Research becomes fiction.

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Ashes of Fiery Weather

March 17, 1899, the last St. Patrick’s Day of the century, was a beautiful day, until the fire.

 Mary Clark and I were fourteen. We stood shoulder to shoulder in the crowd lining Fifth Avenue. Her older brothers had ridden with us on the trolley over the Brooklyn Bridge. They were twenty and seventeen and supposed to be our chaperones for the day, but after they secured us a spot in front of the Windsor Hotel and told us to stay put, they left with the promise that they’d be back in three hours. Mary said they were off to drink. They might be back or we might be going home ourselves.

 We wore green ribbons in our hair and Mary had a green bow around her waist.

On my blouse I had a sprig of fresh shamrock with a green ribbon that said Erin go Bragh in gold letters. A pipe and drum band passed by playing “The Wearing of the Green.”

The windows of the Windsor Hotel framed the guests who were watching the parade.They were smiling and pointing, as though they were on a ship leaving port. On one of the higher floors a woman held a baby wrapped in a white blanket. She made its little hand wave to the assembly of firemen in their finery.

My father was marching in the Brooklyn parade. He didn’t see the point of my going all the way across the river for a St. Patrick’s Day parade, but my mother said I should get out of Brooklyn once in a while. Mary thought she saw her uncle and began hopping up and down, calling to him.

There was one long scream first, and then in the next second, a dozen. Our heads all turned, the entire crowd at once, to see the [[dele: the]] black smoke pouring from the hotel windows. The firemen in the parade were already running toward the hotel.

I opened my mouth but nothing came out. Mary seized my arm. Men and women started streaming out of the building, and those higher up threw fire ropes out the windows and climbed down, some of them holding children.

 The police shouted at the crowd to move back. The cops tried to stop the firemen from running in. The firemen shoved back and threw punches.

The hotel guests began to jump. The thump, thump, thump of bodies hitting the sidewalk sounded like the drum in the pipe band. Birds dropped from the cloud of smoke, and this was as frightening as the fire. To see a bird stop in flight, and fall.

One shriek rose above the other screams. I looked away from the sky and back at the blazing hotel. I sighed and clapped my hands once as a white bird flew from a high window. Then I saw the flutter was not wings but a blanket falling away. The mother leaped from the ledge after the baby.

In the newspaper the next day, they would be listed as “unknown woman, unknown child.” Why, the newspaper reporter asked, had the mother not jumped with her child in her arms? They might have died together. My father said in disgust that clearly she hoped that if the child were released alone, someone below would catch him. But I believe she thought her child would become a bird. She hadn’t known the sparrows were dying too.

St. Patrick’s night, kneeling at my bedroom window, I looked out at the firehouse. A light was on in the kitchen. Someone was always awake. Tonight many of the men would be up, talking about the Windsor, discussing the collapse, the search for the bodies that would start again at dawn, the luck of the men who’d gotten to fight the fire.

I said the rosary and then stayed on my knees. The nuns at school spoke of a God who never stopped plotting ways to catch us sinning and to punish us for those sins. According to them, we were always disgracing Christ, who’d died for us. For my father, God was like fire. He rarely spoke about his job at home, but once he said that fire has a mind but no eyes or ears. It kills blindly. My mother’s God was indifferent to everyone, except for the Irish, whom He hated.

But that St. Patrick’s night, I understood what none of them did. God was the baby, saved from one death and handed another. But God was also the baby in flight, the moment when it was not child but bird, not falling but flying. That was God. Everything beautiful, everything sad.