Two Copies of the Ordinance

On the Saturday before the fire, David O. R. Lowry came home and handed his wife an envelope.¹

“It may be foolish in me to think so,” he told her, according to the Indianapolis Journal, “but I brought you home a little present to-night. It might come handy, you know.”¹

Inside was an insurance policy on his own life for $2,000. He had told her he had a feeling he would die within a few days.¹

Lowry was a pipeman with the Indianapolis Fire Department. On Monday, March 17, 1890, he was one of the men inside the Bowen-Merrill Company’s store on West Washington Street when its roof came down.^2,3

The state historical marker that stands at the site today calls it the deadliest fire for firefighters in Indianapolis history.⁴ It is usually told as a story of courage, and it was one. But the record kept in the Journal’s pages for the year that followed tells a second story too, about a building that a coroner said should never have stood the way it did, and about how long the city took to do the one thing he asked.

The fire

The Bowen-Merrill Company sold books and stationery and was, the Journal said, one of the largest houses of its kind in the country, with a law-book trade that brought orders “from almost every State in the Union.”² The marker gives the store’s address as 16-18 West Washington Street.⁴

The first sign of trouble was smoke in the basement, toward the front of the building, near boxes of slates, a quantity of paper and a flue of the heating plant.² The Journal said the flue “may have caused the fire, but that is not at all certain.”² An employee named Harvey M. Johnson, who worked in the basement, found the smoke and went at it with the chemical extinguisher. The chemicals ran out, the smoke drove him upstairs, and he gave the alarm.²

Employees cleared the building. One man saved himself by climbing to the roof and crossing to the building next door.²

The Journal printed the time of the first box alarm in a way its scanned page renders as “S:08,” most likely 3:08 in the afternoon.² The Freeman, an Indianapolis weekly, said the fire was discovered at 2:30.⁵

When the firemen arrived they could not find the seat of the fire. Smoke poured equally from the basement and the first and second floors. When they forced the doors, smoke “burst forth as no human being could penetrate.”² They were driven back from the basement gratings too, and had to fight from the outside.²

Chief Dougherty turned in a third alarm, and a minute later a fourth, “calling every engine in the city to the scene.”² The marker says 86 firemen fought the blaze.⁴

By about 4:30, as the Journal’s scanned page renders the time, the fire seemed to be under control. The smoke thinned enough for firemen to go in on the first floor, and streams were soon playing throughout the building.² A feeling spread through the crowd on Washington Street “that the worst had passed.”²

The fall

At about 5:30, the Journal reported, there was “a rumble as if from far-off thunder,” then the crash of walls, floors, glass and iron.² The roof fell and carried the fourth, third, second and first floors down to the basement.²

Men were on the roof and men were on the floors. George Halderman, an assistant in the fire-alarm telegraph office, told the Journal the next day that he had been helping hold a hose line on the roof. George Glenn took his place there. Halderman walked across the roof and stepped onto the next building just as the roof “went in.”³

Halderman had climbed up the iron ladder at the rear with Andrew Cherry, chief of the fire-alarm telegraph, and the two joked about the building’s cupola. “We’re interested in that cupola,” Halderman quoted Cherry as saying. “We don’t want that to be burned down.” The alarm wires were fastened to it.³ Cherry went down with the roof. A man from the Brush Electric Company standing next to him saved himself by catching hold of the cupola.³

Another fireman told the paper that he had been on the roof until he asked if he should go below and cut holes for the streams. “I did so and that saved my life,” he said. “The roof fell without any warning whatever.”³

Crowds ran into the alley behind the building, between Meridian and Illinois streets, where the rear wall had fallen. Police tried to hold them back.² Within five minutes, police and firemen had pulled out the first man alive.² The Freeman reported that within 30 minutes 14 men had been taken from the ruins, four of them dead.⁵

Ulysses G. Glazier, 21, was a substitute in the department and the nephew of a former fire chief. He was pinned from the hips down, and it took a half hour to free him. His brother Peter was among the first to reach him. He died, the Journal said, in his brother’s arms.²

John Burkhart, 34, also a substitute, was trapped in the ruins nearly ten hours before he was rescued. He died at home the next evening.³ When he woke that morning, the Journal reported, he had asked to see the papers. His doctors would not allow it.³

The men

The relief committee that visited the families in the first days after the fire wrote down what each man left behind, and the Journal printed it.¹

Albert Hofmann left a widow and two children and a small piece of property with about $1,150 still owing on it.¹ George Faulkner left a wife and an 18-year-old son.¹ Ulysses Glazier left a widow and a 4-year-old boy, and “no means.”¹ Thomas Black was unmarried. He had a lot in Crown Hill Cemetery, about $400 in the bank and building-association shares nearly paid out.¹

Espey Stormer had been a widower for about two years. He boarded on North Illinois Street with his three children, the oldest 12.³ He had been with the department 10 or 12 years and was “known as one of the bravest men in the department.”³

Henry D. Woodruff, a pipeman with Engine No. 5, was 48 and had been in the service 13 years.³ The Journal’s two pages that morning did not agree on his family: one said he left a widow and three children, the other a widow and four.^3,1

Woodruff’s body was the last to come out. On the Thursday night after the fire, a volunteer named Victor M. Backus went into the damaged building next door with four companions to judge whether its walls would stand long enough to dig.⁶ Before he started, he went to see Webb Robertson, described by the paper as “the only man who came out of the fatal cellar alive,” and had him mark on a rough plan where Woodruff lay.⁶ Chief Dougherty, without knowing of the plan, announced the same morning that the body had to be recovered before any more buildings were torn down, and said he would go in himself.⁶

They tunneled into the ruins, the Journal wrote, “with the full knowledge that the walls on either side might fall at any instant.”⁶ At 5:35 p.m. on Friday, March 21, they lifted Woodruff’s body out.⁶

His funeral was the next afternoon. Two members of the Robert Anderson Post of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union veterans’ organization, were among the pallbearers, and five streetcars carried mourners to Crown Hill.⁷

That same Saturday, William F. Jones died. The Journal’s headline said his death “adds another to the list of victims.”⁷ On March 24 his body was taken to Union Station and on to Fillmore, Ind., for burial. The Journal noted that with his, the funerals of all the dead firemen had taken place.⁸

The count

How many died? The answer depends on the record.

The coroner’s verdict, printed on March 27, 1890, named 12 men: Andrew O. Cherry, David O. R. Lowry, George Glenn, George Faulkner, Ulysses G. Glazier, Thomas A. Black, Albert Hofmann, Espey Stormer, Henry Woodruff, Anthony Voltz, John Burkhart and William F. Jones.^9,3,1 (The names are given here as the Journal spelled them across its pages that month; the scanned verdict itself is badly damaged in places.) The citizens’ relief committee, reporting on June 1, also counted “twelve firemen killed,” with fifteen seriously and three slightly hurt.¹⁰

The historical marker, put up in 1999 by the Indiana Historical Bureau and Indianapolis Firefighters Local 416, says “thirteen deaths resulted.”⁴ Hoosier First found no thirteenth death named in the Journal pages it read from March through June 1890. The difference may come from a later death or from a different way of counting. The record checked for this story does not settle it.

The inquest

The day after the fire, the Marion County coroner, whom the Journal called Coroner Wagner, appointed three building experts, D. A. Bohlen, R. P. Daggett and John H. Stem, and asked for a stenographer.¹ “I propose to go to the bottom of this terrible affair,” he said, “and will locate the responsibility if it is possible to do so.”¹

The experts were not of one mind. In the same morning’s paper that reported his appointment, D. A. Bohlen was quoted saying that a 13-inch wall “should be amply strong for a four-story building such as the Bowen-Merrill store,” and that he regarded it “as having been as substantial as most of the business buildings here.”¹¹

At the inquest, John H. Stem said he could not give an intelligent opinion from the ruins. He had been in the building while it stood. It looked to be built the ordinary way, he said, and he did not know whether it was overloaded. He would not build one that way now.⁶ Oscar D. Bohlen, another architect, said the building had fallen in a V shape, which suggested the central supports gave way first.⁶

On March 26 the coroner heard his last witness: Silas T. Bowen, who owned the building.⁹ Bowen had been in New York buying stock when the fire started.⁹

His testimony, as the Journal printed it, is the history of a building made bigger and bigger on the same old walls.

He said he bought 18¾ feet of frontage in 1862, when the building was three stories in front.⁹ Around 1870 he bought the building to the east and built “on the walls of each side as they stood.”⁹ After a fire in 1872, he carried up another story, making it four stories in front and three in the rear. When the Merrill, Meigs firm came into the business, he built higher again “for the purpose of securing more room and to have the elevator carry up the goods.”⁹

The coroner asked whether there had ever been a question about the building’s safety. “I suppose there has been a question,” Bowen said.⁹

He described the first one. A jeweler renting part of the main floor wanted a furnace, and a stovepipe hole was cut through the cellar wall. About half of it went under one of the iron pillars. The building settled.⁹ Later there was more settling under the front pillars. An architect found that the iron pillars stood directly on the bricks, “or with a very thin piece of iron between,” and their sharp edges had worked down into the brick.⁹ Bowen said contractors raised the pillars and set thick iron plates under them. “I think it never gave a hair until the fire,” he said.⁹

Bowen said that, once, a load of paper had broken a joist and cracked a ceiling, and he had the weight moved.⁹ He said he always told his people to keep heavy stock away from the skylights and near the walls.⁹

The walls, he said, were “nine inch walls” for the first 50 feet, and the center wall under the iron pillars was the same.⁹ “I would not have built a nine-inch wall,” he said, “but the old walls were there and we were compelled to use them.”⁹ He said: “I would not have erected a building of that kind in the first place. I would have built a thicker wall.”⁹

Asked what made it fall, he said he thought the wall under the pillars “became disintegrated” and let them fall.⁹

That evening, the coroner wrote his verdict. He found that the building had been built at different times and enlarged “to accommodate an increased stock and weight,” on a foundation its original builder never intended for it.⁹ He found that the fire, while the immediate cause, “was not of itself sufficient to cause the collapse,” and that “the building was of faulty construction.”⁹

He found that the testimony was unanimous that the fire department had “acted promptly and intelligently.”⁹

And he made one recommendation: “the appointment of a competent building inspector.”⁹

What the chief wanted

Chief Dougherty had been under attack. In the days after the fire, the Journal reprinted comment from other Indiana papers accusing the Indianapolis Sentinel and News of blaming him. The Fort Wayne Gazette said the Sentinel was making “political capital against the Republican chief of the fire department.”⁶ A former member of the city fire board told the Journal: “The fault was with the building, not with the fire chief.”⁷

On March 26, the Journal asked him what could be done to prevent another calamity.¹²

“A building inspector should be appointed, one who has power to examine and condemn,” he said.¹² He explained why it could not be him. “I might even go and condemn a building, but the owners would bring in an expert or two, and so virtually I have no power at all.”¹²

He was not alone. Six days earlier the Journal had printed a reader’s letter under the heading “A Building Inspector Needed.” “The present greatest want of the city,” it began, “is a building inspector.”¹³

The fund

The public answered faster than the government did.

A citizens’ relief committee formed under Mayor Sullivan, and money came in from ward meetings, railroad men and factory pay days.^10,1,8 By April 1, the treasurer, Haughey, said the fund had passed $40,000.¹⁴ On June 1 the committee reported a total of $51,033.95, plus $111.07 given especially for the family of Anthony Voltz.¹⁰

The committee’s report is a careful document. It found that of the 12 men killed, two left no dependents.¹⁰ Nine left widows. One left no widow but three small children: Stormer’s.^10,3 Four widows, it said, “were left neither houses nor life insurance.”¹⁰

So the committee decided to buy “cheap, but comfortable homes” for those four widows, pay off the mortgages on two others, and put “all the dependent widows and orphans on an equality, as near as may be, in reference to owning permanent homes.”¹⁰ The titles would be in the widows’ names for their lives and pass to their children.¹⁰

The rest would buy annuities: $15 a month for each widow and for one dependent widowed mother, $5 a month for 19 of the 22 orphans, and $10 a month for the three children “who have neither father nor mother,” until each turned 16.¹⁰

The ordinance

A year later, the Journal went back to the building question, and the story it found is the reason this article is written.

On March 21, 1891, under the headline “An Ordinance Not Obeyed,” the paper reported that “just a year ago, right after the great Bowen-Merrill disaster,” there had been “a loud popular demand for a stringent building law right away.”¹⁵ The Indianapolis Chapter of Architects had answered it. A committee of six, Adolph Scherrer, James B. Lizius, W. Scott Moore, Charles G. Muller, Oscar D. Bohlen and Bernard Vonnegut, drafted an ordinance setting wall thicknesses for business buildings by height and depth, and requiring fire walls, solid cornices, proper support for joists and girders, and exits for theaters, halls, schools, churches and factories.¹⁵

The Council passed it “practically as it was drawn up by the architects,” the Journal said, “and it has remained a dead letter ever since.”¹⁵

The reason was simple. The ordinance had no inspector and no way to pay for one. Building permits were issued “at a purely nominal cost, and no questions asked.”¹⁵ The only way to enforce it was to indict someone who broke it, “and, as this is everybody’s business, nobody does it.”¹⁵

Then the Journal added a detail that says more than any editorial could: “So far as known, there are only two copies of this ordinance in existence. Nobody knows just what its provisions are.”¹⁵

Lizius, one of its authors, told the paper it “has not amounted to a row of pins.”¹⁵ “Public sentiment died out as the Bowen Merrill fire passed into history,” he said, “and things have been gliding along since in the same old way, with people putting up any sort of a building they please.”¹⁵

Scherrer, by then a member of the Board of Public Works, said, “In this respect Indianapolis is fifty years behind the times.”¹⁵ Sterling R. Holt, chairman of the Board of Public Safety, said: “Everybody knows that the old ordinance is violated every day.”¹⁵ He said it would be useless to appoint an inspector if the city could pay him only a few hundred dollars.¹⁵

The inspector

The record shows the change came within weeks.

By April 9, 1891, the city had appointed a building inspector, Michael Fitchey, and the Board of Public Safety was drawing up an ordinance with graded permit fees to support the office. Fitchey could not begin work, the Journal said, until the Council passed it.¹⁶

On May 20, 1891, Fitchey submitted his first list of buildings to be condemned under the new ordinance: stables on West Pearl Street, an old rag factory on West Market Street, and brick houses on Davis Street that the Journal called “very cheaply constructed in the first place, and now in badly battered condition.”¹⁷

It had been 14 months since the coroner’s verdict.

The pension

The firemen’s families had been carried by private charity. The second change the marker credits to the disaster was meant to make that unnecessary.

In early 1891 a bill was introduced in the General Assembly to let cities with paid fire departments pension disabled or aged firemen and their families.¹⁸ As the Journal described it, a pension board would be made up of the officials in charge of the department and four members of the department itself. The money would come from half the taxes paid by insurance companies, fines on members, and a small assessment on firemen’s salaries.¹⁸ Widows and dependent parents would get $5 to $25 a month, and children under 16 from $3 to $7.¹⁸

The bill nearly died early. On Feb. 9, the Marion County delegation and the Council’s fire committee met and “unanimously agreed that such a bill would be unconstitutional,” the Journal reported.¹⁹

It did not die. On March 8, 1891, the Journal’s list of bills passed included one “creating a fund for the pensioning of crippled firemen in cities that have a paid fire department.”²⁰ The state marker says the General Assembly “enabled Fireman’s Pension Funds 1891.”⁴

The marker also says the disaster “led to reorganization and city Board of Public Safety.”⁴

What they got

The Bowen-Merrill firemen are remembered for going into a burning building and not coming out. That is true. When the roof fell, they were on it and under it because the fire had seemed to be under control and the smoke had cleared enough for them to go inside.²

The coroner said the fire alone would not have brought the building down.⁹ The owner said under oath he would not have built it that way.⁹ The chief said he had no power to condemn it.¹² The architects wrote a law, and a year later almost nobody could find a copy.¹⁵

What the 12 men got, in the end, was a relief fund that bought their widows houses,¹⁰ a building inspector whose first condemnations came 14 months later,^16,17 and a pension law for the men who came after them.^20,4

Lowry’s widow, the relief committee reported, wanted to take his body home to Terre Haute.¹

How they died

The twelve firemen named in the coroner’s verdict died because the Bowen-Merrill building collapsed under them while they fought the fire on the evening of Monday, March 17, 1890.^9,2 The roof gave way and carried every floor below it down into the basement, taking men from the roof and from inside the building with it.^2,3

Some were dead when they were taken from the ruins.⁵ Others lived a little longer. Ulysses G. Glazier, pinned from the hips down, died in his brother’s arms after rescuers freed him.² John Burkhart was trapped for nearly ten hours and died at home the next evening.³ Henry D. Woodruff’s body was not recovered until Friday, March 21.⁶ William F. Jones, who had been on the roof near Anthony Voltz when it fell, “was held pinioned under the ruins for several hours.” He died at his home on North Noble Street on the morning of Saturday, March 22, “the twelfth victim,” the Journal said.⁷

The coroner found that the fire was the immediate cause, but that it “was not of itself sufficient to cause the collapse,” and that “the building was of faulty construction.”⁹ The state marker counts 13 deaths; Hoosier First did not find a thirteenth named in the Journal’s pages.⁴