The Cocoanut Grove was a nightclub, but in censorious Boston, they liked to tell themselves they did not have nightclubs in their city, so it was technically a restaurant/supper club that November night in 1942 on Piedmont Street. It had been quite the hopping place during the Prohibition era, when it sold absolutely no liquor whatsoever, no siree, and after a slump in business during the Depression era, it was swinging again in the early 40s, packed every night.
The Grove had a basement bar, along with the kitchen and food storage area, and the main floor had a large dining room and several bars under a retractable roof that allowed for dancing beneath the stars in warm weather. It was the place to be in Beantown, all right.The Boston College football team played Holy Cross that Saturday afternoon, 11/28/42 at Fenway Park, and everything was set for them to defeat HC and get a Sugar Bowl invitation for New Year's Day. All they had to do was win the game, and they were heavily favored. They even had booked the Grove for a victory party that night. But the game didn't go as planned (sound familiar, Alabama fans?) and BC lost, 55-12. They cancelled their nightclub reservations. As it turned out, Boston College wound up losing to Alabama in the less-prestigious Orange Bowl that January 1.
A big Hollywood cowboy movie star named Buck Jones was touring the nation in support of War Bonds that day. He did not feel so well, and tried to beg off when invited to dinner at the Cocoanut Grove, but was persuaded to go.
The popular account of what happened that night is that a patron, snuggling up with his date in a corner of the basement bar, had unscrewed an overhead light bulb to make the area darker. A busboy was sent over to investigate the darkness and lit a match to see which bulb was out. The match lit a fake palm tree on fire and the highly-flammable decorations all over the bar went up like, well, like paper decorations.
As the fire spread, the crowd tried to exit through THE ONLY means of egress, a four-foot-wide staircase to the street level. Meanwhile, the superheated fireball raced up the stairs with them, and dozens were trampled and/or burned to death as hundreds tried to escape through the revolving door exit, which predictably jammed as death overtook the nightclub.
The final death toll was 492 souls lost, with another 166 injured. Buck Jones was burned and was one of hundreds taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he died two days later. The owner of the Grove, Barney Welansky, had suffered a heart attack two days before the fire and was, in fact, a patient upstairs at MGH as all those others were brought to the hospital.
We often tell the story of the dashed hopes and plans of the BC Football team, and then we like to tell ourselves that the Cocoanut Grove fire changed the course of the way we build, regulate and maintain mass-occupancy structures. There were changes in building codes, and changes in emergency medical care for burn victims, as direct results of the Cocoanut Grove fire.
We thought we had learned the lessons the first time.
And then came 2003, and the band Great White was performing, also in New England, at the Station Nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island. For whatever dunderheaded reason, the group's manager thought it would be a good idea to SET OFF FIREWORKS INSIDE A BUILDING, which set the foam ceiling insulation ablaze in a fire that claimed the lives of 100 persons and injured approximately 200 others.
Many of the same factors and errors that occurred at the Cocoanut Grove played into the Station fire 61 years ago.
You might remember the band Great White. Their big hit was called "Once Bitten, Twice Shy."
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