Neighborhood News: 66 years ago, Humboldt Park’s Our Lady of Angels School Fire changed school safety regulations and affected a community

December 1, 1958 was a cold and sunny Chicago day.  More than 1600 students, ages 5-13, at Humboldt Park’s Our Lady of Angels School (OLA), 909 North Avers Avenue, were awaiting the end of the day when the deadly fire started in the school’s basement and traveled up to the second floor, trapping children and teachers in their classrooms.

In the end, 92 children and three nuns lost their lives. 

The Community 

In postwar Chicago, as WTTW said in its 2003 documentary ‘Angels Too Soon,’  Chicago was a city of parishes. With nearly 2 million Catholics in the Chicago Archdiocese in the 1950s, the parish was the center of the lives of many Chicagoans. This was true of OLA– an extremely tight knit, largely Italian parish in a flourishing community on Chicago’s West Side.

Conditions leading to the fire

According to Wikipedia sources, due to a grandfather clause that did not require schools to retrofit to a new standard if they already met previous regulations, OLA was generally clean and well-maintained; nonetheless, several fire hazards existed:

• Each classroom door had a glass transom above it, which provided ventilation into the corridor but also permitted flames and smoke to enter once heat broke the glass. 
• The school had but one fire escape. 
• The building had no automatic fire alarm.
• No rate-of-rise heat detectors.
• No direct alarm connection to the fire department.
• No fire-resistant stairwells.
• No heavy-duty fire doors from the stairwells to the second-floor corridor.

While the outside of the building was made of brick, a regulation since the Great Fire of 1871, the interior was made almost entirely of combustible wooden materials—stairs, walls, floors, doors, roof, and cellulose fiber ceiling tiles. Moreover, the floors had been coated many times with both flammable varnish and petroleum-based waxes. There were four fire extinguishers in the north wing, each mounted 7 feet off the floor, out of reach for many adults and all of the children.

How did it start?

As Wikipedia sources tell it, the fire began In the basement of the older north wing between about 2:00 p.m. and 2:20 p.m. Classes were due to be dismissed at 3:00 p.m. The fire started in a cardboard trash barrel located a few feet from the northeast stairwell. 

The fire smoldered undetected for approximately 20 minutes, gradually heating the stairwell and filling it with a light gray smoke that later would become thick and black, as other combustibles became involved. At the same time, it began sending superheated air and gases into an open pipe chase very near the source of the fire. 

The fire consumed the northeast stairway, a pipe chase running from the basement to the cockloft above the second floor false ceiling had been feeding superheated gases for some minutes on a direct route to the attic. The building’s old roof had been re-coated numerous times, and the tar had become very thick. 

Eventually, as the temperature continued to rise in the enclosed space, the wood of the cockloft itself flashed over.

Rescuing the Children 

All of those who perished on the day of the fire died when smoke, heat, fire, and toxic gases cut off their means of escape through corridors and stairways. 

Many more were injured, some severely, when they jumped from second-floor windows.

But there were many acts of heroism that defied the deadly circumstances. A quick-thinking nun rolled petrified children down a stairwell. Priests from the rectory raced to the scene, grabbing frightened students and escorting them through the smoke to the doors. 

Father Joseph Ognibene and parent Sam Tortorice were able to rescue most of the students in room 209 by passing them through a courtyard window on the second floor into the annex. 

Janitor James Raymond, (later falsely accused of setting the fire) though badly injured from a deep glass cut on his arm, worked in tandem with Father Charles Hund to open a locked emergency door leading to a fire escape outside room 207. All of the students and their teacher, Sister Geraldita Ennis, were rescued from the room.

Aftermath 

The fire remains officially ‘unsolved’ to this day. In 1962, a student who was 10 years old at the time of the fire, confessed to starting it in a basement stairwell. According to Firehouse.com, a family court judge sent him to an institution in Michigan. He died in 2004.

For the tight-knit community, the damage was immediate. The grief and trauma of the tragedy took its toll on survivors and parents. Many moved out, unable to face familiar surroundings. In the days before trauma-informed therapy, survivors were told to “move on.”  Support groups have helped the survivors. 

The most positive aftermath of the Our Lady of the Angels school fire is that it  led to reforms in fire codes in schools to prevent future tragedies:

• Fire protection: Schools were required to have sprinklers and heat-activated alarms.
• Exit standards: Exit standards were revised.
• Building materials: Concrete replaced wood and plaster in schools.
• Fire code: National fire codes for schools were overhauled. 
• Schools in Chicago would have fire alarm boxes that could be pulled outside of the schools and were also connected to alarm devices in their interiors.

Alison Moran-Powers and Dean’s Team Chicago