Estevan Panchi
The Impact on Fire Safety from the 1946 Hotel Fires
The Winecoff Hotel and the LaSalle Hotel burned six months apart, causing a catastrophic loss of lives and damage, but they both initiated change for their states public safety standards. By comparing these fires, The project will examine the impact of the fires and their historical impact, on fire safety regulations.
The LaSalle Hotel was a twenty two story hotel in Chicago, Illinois, built in 1908. According to the Chicago Tribune, itwas seen as “the most comfortable, modern and safest hotel west of New York City”, however the hotel burned, killing sixty-one, and injuring two hundred. Six months later, the Winecoff Hotel, another “absolutely fireproof” hotel, according to its owners, burned and became the deadliest hotel fire, causing the deaths of one hundred and nineteen individuals, including the owners. Both buildings were still standing but the people had died; Two hotels catching on fire, six months from one another, made their cities more aware of the dangers of inadequate safety features in hotels.
Deadly hotel fires spark attention. There are several newspaper articles from the New York Times and the Atlanta Constitution giving first person accounts on the fire and even some articles detailing their impact on regulations. Secondary sources are also available starting from The Winecoff Fire: The Untold Story of America’s Deadliest Fire by Sam Hayes and Allen B. Goodman: A book based on the lives of the victims and the investigation on how the fire started. There are enough sources out there to go around, being able to turn into a well thought out paper detailing the fires effect in regulations.
In the proposed project, it would analyze these two tragedies on how they affected change for fire safety in public buildings. The research would mostly involve survivor reports on what interfered from their escape, while including scholarly articles, like “Why Do Chicago Buildings Not Retrofit?” by Peter Niemczak and Anna Stefańska; Showing reasons as to why fire safety wasn’t a priority before the fires. By showing different angles of the reason why it was put up that way, could explain why these fires weren’t as well adjusted as most hoped when it came to preventing fires rather than solely relying on the buildings itself being labeled as fireproof.
The project will try to compare the effects of the Winecoff Hotel Fire and the LaSalle Hotel Fire to their respective buildings. It will show that these fires played an important role when it came to shaping modern building codes. The sources stem from many different types of areas such as personal accounts of being in the building of the fire to the standards put in place that stand to this day. “I hereby declare upon my word of honor that I have neither given nor received unauthorized help on this work”