(Georgia Historical Marker at the site of the Winecoff Fire - courtesy of Chet Wallace)
Here is an excerpt from my first book that I wrote called Stories of the Winecoff Fire: A Dedication to the Memory of the 119, which was published July of 2018. The excerpt is from the first chapter, which partly gives a basic understanding of the events of what happened in the Winecoff Hotel fire, which occurred on December 7, 1946 in downtown Atlanta, Georgia. Excerpt follows.
Rozena Neal, the African-American Winecoff Hotel elevator operator on duty at the time, discovered smoke while coming down in an elevator around the fifth floor. Passing the third floor, she saw flames through the windows of the elevator and panicked, screaming: “Fire! Fire! Fire!” and sent the elevator all the way to the basement
At 3:42am, the Atlanta fire department was called. Fire crews mainly worked on the Peachtree and Ellis Street sides of the hotel. On the front side, facing Peachtree Street, firemen extended ladders as high as they would go without becoming unstable for guests to climb down. They also commandeered fire nets for people who were jumping. Atlanta Fireman Rick Roberts described the scene of screaming coming from windows above as like the cheering at a football game.
Assistant Fire Chief Fred Bowen was overcome by smoke and taken to Grady Hospital. As he lay on his hospital bed, he kept uttering “Take me back, take me back!” Later, he told a local newspaper: “I don’t know how many floors we went up. We went up so many of them because fire was all around the elevators. Some other firemen and I were carrying a hose. Some of them let go of it and the hose knocked me down the stairs. I saw so much I can’t begin to tell you how horrible it was.”
As in any building fire, many of the victims died of smoke inhalation. About thirty of them died either by jumping or falling from their hotel room windows trying to escape the smoke and flames. Fire truck ladders could only reach to the eighth floor, so people on the floors above fashioned ropes by tying bedsheets together in an attempt to climb down to a ladder on the outside of the building. In some cases, this expedient failed because the bedsheet was not strong enough to hold the climber, or the guest couldn’t hold their own weight. In other cases, fire poured out of a window above them and burned the bedsheet, dropping the person to the street below.
During the course of the fire a flashover occurred, which is when an intense amount of toxic gas builds up in an enclosed space, meeting with fire and causing an explosion. Fire poured out of the middle floor windows of the Winecoff Hotel as a result of this explosion.
Andrew Jack Burnham, a fireman who worked the Peachtree Street side of the hotel, was climbing a ladder to rescue a woman. Another woman, falling from a higher floor directly above, crashed onto his back, causing all three of them to fall three floors to the street. Jack fell on some fire hoses that were running across the water-filled street and it saved his life. Both women, it is believed, died. Jack broke his back and was in a body cast for over a year. Fortunately, no firemen were killed in the fire.
On the back side of the hotel was a 10’ 3” alley between the hotel and the adjacent Mortgage Guarantee Building. Firemen went into the alley with fire nets but not many jumpers were saved. There was so much smoke they couldn’t see people falling until too late to position the net properly. They attempted to put ladders up to windows in the alley only to have the ladders knocked down by falling bodies. In addition to bodies, they were pelted by objects from clothing to luggage tossed out of windows. Firemen changed tactics and entered the Mortgage Guarantee Building so they could extend ladders horizontally across the alley to windows in the Winecoff, forming a kind of bridge. But this was a slow process.
There is no exact count of how many firemen fought the fire, but it is believed to be about 200. Firemen were called from different areas including Atlanta, Marietta, East Point, College Park, Decatur, Avondale Estates, Druid Hills, Hapeville, Fort McPherson, the Naval Air Station, and the old Conley Depot.
Some of the bodies were collected by 22-year-old Claude Duncan, who worked as a funeral home attendant at the nearby Greenberg & Flinn funeral home on Ivy Street, now known as Peachtree Center Avenue. He lived on the top floor of the funeral home and was awakened by the sirens.
When Claude arrived at the Winecoff Hotel that tragic night he witnessed people jumping from the windows of the hotel. Claude’s younger brother, years before, was killed by a freight truck and he observed his mother retrieve his dead brother’s body and carry it directly to a nearby funeral home. He tended to the bodies from the hotel with the same care, knowing they had been living people just a few minutes before. Claude made several trips from the Winecoff Hotel to the funeral home in an ambulance that night and had to store the bodies temporarily in the garage of Greenberg & Flinn.
There were many witnesses to the fire who stood on the street watching the horror play out. E. J. “Chick” Hoach, Southern division sports editor for the Associated Press, witnessed people leaping to their deaths. “I never expect to hear anything so terrible as the screams of those people from the time they would jump until they struck the pavement”.
Many of the dead and injured were taken to nearby Grady Hospital. First aid volunteers, doctors and nurses were called early in the morning to respond. Over three hundred arrived and were on hand for days following the fire helping the injured and attending to loved ones trying to find their relatives, in many cases heartbroken when it was discovered they had perished. Lane’s Drug Store, across Peachtree Street from the hotel in the three-story Collier building, was opened as an emergency aid station.
Many relatives witnessed scenes of horror and emotion overcame them. They had traveled to Atlanta, not knowing if their loved one was dead or alive. Sometimes the car radio mentioned a body that had a certain characteristic that was recognizable. For a time, many went to the hotel first only to be directed to Grady Hospital or a nearby funeral home. Soon radio announcers requested that they go directly to the hospital because of the chaos going on at the hotel site. Many were met by nauseating sights of bodies lying on a floor or a gurney and they had to look at many bodies close-up to look for identifiable features. Some of the bodies didn’t even look deceased because the heat of the fire had turned the victim’s skin pink.
A young lady in her early twenties, Jimmy Breslin, was an employee at the Belle Isle building next to the Loew’s Grand Theater, across the street from the hotel. She worked six days a week, sometimes seven, in the regional office of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, preparing paperwork for GIs to go to school.
Jimmy woke up that Saturday and caught the bus to work, expecting it to travel down Ponce De Leon Avenue, make a left on Peachtree Street, then go south past the Winecoff Hotel to the Belle Isle building. But the bus turned south on Courtland Avenue instead, a couple of blocks before Peachtree Street. When asked, “Why are we going down Courtland instead of Peachtree?” the driver said, “a terrible thing has happened”, and told what he knew of the Winecoff fire.
The bus driver dropped off Jimmy at the corner of Courtland Avenue and old Houston Street, now called John Wesley Dobbs Avenue. She walked up Houston to the Belle Isle building at the corner of Houston and Pryor Streets. When she turned the corner and entered the building, she was shocked to see the long lobby being used as a temporary morgue to hold the victims of the fire. It was a scene Jimmy would never forget. She estimated there were about a hundred bodies lying on the floor covered with sheets. A few people were lifting the sheets to identify the bodies. Attendants had cleared a path for employees working in the building. Jimmy went down this gruesome path to her office where the VA supervisor explained what had happened only a few hours before. Employees were so upset that the supervisor dismissed them for a few hours.
Jimmy went out, clinging to fellow employees for support, and stood directly across from the hotel on Peachtree Street to see the remnants of the hotel. By that point, a crowd was at the scene, and, as Jimmy described it, people were just frozen in space. Smoke and a smoky scent wafted through the air as people stared in disbelief.
To Jimmy, the windows of the hotel seemed like a hundred eyes staring back at the witnesses on Peachtree Street. Some of the burned-out windows were open while others were intact but hid trauma learned of later by relatives of the dead. From out some of the windows, tied-together bedsheets fashioned by the desperate occupants swayed in the cold, northeasterly wind blowing at 7 mph. Some of the hastily improvised lifelines made of bedsheets looked inadequate to hold the weight of an adult. Curtains fastened to the inside of some rooms, fluttered out the windows.
Below the windows, large holes in the awning covering the second-floor terrace showed where guests, most falling to their death, had plummeted through. The night before, many of them had dined on that terrace and enjoyed the ambience of Peachtree Street below. The Winecoff Hotel sign on the corner of Ellis and Peachtree Streets showed only the lighted letters of W – I – N and the last F.
Jimmy and her fellow employees went back to work later, and when she left work around mid-afternoon there were still some bodies in the Belle Isle lobby. When she returned on Monday morning, everything looked back to normal, but the smell of smoke still hung in the air.
Firemen and other helpers who witnessed the aftermath inside the hotel noticed water cascading down the stairwell between the two elevators. Water stood about a foot deep on the floor of the lobby and flowed out into the street. Once in the street the water flowed like a flood of tears in all directions as if the building were crying over the death it caused.
The dining room on the mezzanine seemed to be untouched by fire or water. Tables and chairs stood waiting for guests who never would sit in the restaurant again. Silverware on the tables were spotless, as was the pristine white napkins. It seemed to be the only floor untouched by the holocaust.
Within most rooms, walls were so burned that the tile base behind them could be seen. The heat had shattered the mirrors. Evidence of guests’ possessions were found in every room. In one, a pair of nylons were hung across a dresser. In another, a box of children’s Christmas toys were found with the flaps open to reveal little toy soldiers covered with soot. Many possessions laid on top of bureaus and night stands, apparently with the intention of being taken when the guest escaped the hotel. They remained, but the guests were gone. Along the corridors, water ran about ankle deep. Elevators were jammed, trapped on floors, hanging at awkward angles.
Bodies were found throughout the hotel in rooms, bathrooms, and in hallways. One fireman entered a room on the alley side of the hotel to find a beautiful young woman sitting at a window with her arm resting on the windowsill with a pocketbook in her hand, waiting to be rescued. Fireman attempted to talk to her but found she was dead.
After the fire was out, ladders or boards were still found extended across the 10-foot alley between the Winecoff Hotel and the Mortgage Guarantee Building. In fact, even a year after the fire, one individual saw a board spanning the alley many floors up.
The fire was a mesmeric spectacle. Many witnesses jammed the streets around the hotel. Many cars drove past on Peachtree Street to see the burnt-out building. They caused major traffic jams and disruption of the bus and trolley lines. Police eventually had to block off the area because of the congestion. One little boy, who lived farther north on Peachtree Street with his parents, was awakened by the commotion in the early morning hours and drove his little tricycle down to where Peachtree Street was taped off. A policeman told him to go back home.
In another instance, a little girl was sitting in the back seat of her parents’ car. They were driving down Peachtree Street and passed the remnants of the hotel. Her mother, sitting in the front passenger seat, turned around and reached over to cover her daughter’s eyes from the sight of the building.
During the hours and days after the fire the victims list in newspapers was revised many times, causing confusion and inflating the number of victims. At one point, it was believed the total loss of life was 127. Funeral homes, the city morgue, and hospitals were periodically checked and the totals became difficult to tabulate because of the moving of bodies from one place to another.
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