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 that

was breaking no law at all. Our Lady of the Angels was a Catholic parish school running kindergarten

through eighth grade at 909 North Avers Avenue, with roughly 1,600 children enrolled. The fire started in

a cardboard trash barrel at the foot of a basement stairwell sometime between two and two-twenty in the

afternoon, and it burned for about twenty minutes before anyone upstairs knew. There were no heat detectors

to 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. Pulling

one rang a bell inside the building and nothing else. All of that was legal, because a grandfather clause

in Chicago's fire code exempted schools built before 1949 and the wing that burned went up in 1910. A city

inspector had walked through eight weeks earlier and signed off on everything. He was not wrong.

Timeline of Events

1903, 1910, and 1951: Our Lady of the Angels is built in pieces. The north wing, the one that burns, goes

up in 1910.

December 1, 1958, between about 2:00 and 2:20 PM: A fire starts in a trash barrel at the foot of the

northeast basement stairwell.

December 1, 1958, shortly after: A basement window shatters, oxygen rushes in, and the varnished wooden

staircase catches. With no fire door at the second-floor landing, the stairwell funnels smoke and flame

into the north wing.

December 1, 1958, about 2:25 PM: Three eighth-grade girls carrying wastebaskets hit a wall of smoke and

run 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 3

nuns.

1960: A new school opens on the same ground at 3814 West Iowa Street, with sprinklers throughout.

Historical Significance

More than three hundred children were on the second floor, twenty-five feet above the pavement, with the

corridor gone. In one fourth-grade room of fifty-seven, twenty-eight children and their teacher died. In

a room at the far end of the hall that flame never reached, twenty-six children and their teacher died

of smoke and heated gas. In another, a nun had her students pack their textbooks into the gap under the

door, and it held long enough. The National Fire Protection Association came to Chicago and blamed the

city and the archdiocese for letting fire traps operate legally. Percy Bugbee, who ran the association

then, said there were no new lessons in this fire, only old ones that had gone unheeded. Within a year

roughly 16,500 older school buildings were brought up to modern codes. Chicago and Illinois rewrote theirs

outright: alarms wired to the fire department, sprinklers, fire doors, enclosed stairwells, class-size

limits, lockers instead of coats on a hallway hook. Nobody was ever charged. The official cause is still

undetermined.

Sources

National Fire Protection Association investigation report, 1958

Chicago Fire Department records

Cook County and Archdiocese of Chicago accounts of the December 1, 1958 fire

Contemporary Chicago newspaper coverage

If you liked this: Episode 206, Bath, Michigan. Another school tragedy that forced the country to rewrite

the 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 at

mythsandmalice.com/hometown-history

Episode 215 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy