NEW HAVEN — With hellish flames closing in, Caterina DeMartino, a 22-year-old garment worker, jumped from the jammed fire escape to save her life.Horror unfolded above her as people trapped on the metal platforms and staircases burned to death with unforgettable screams. Some memories never fade.
"I remember they were saying, 'Fire! Fire!'" said DeMartino, now 72. She followed the crowd to the fire escape, a fateful — and for some fatal — decision.
She didn't want to discuss the rest.
It's been 50 years since fire ravaged the four-story brick factory at 62 Franklin St. and claimed the lives of 15 garment workers, mostly women, but the memories of that terrible day are permanently etched in the minds of the people who were there.
The Jan. 24, 1957, fire remains, in terms of loss of life, the worst disaster in the history of New Haven. Worse, the horror unfolded before unshielded eyes.
As the inferno burned, many stood curbside, watching in disbelief as flames consumed neighbors and friends trapped on an exterior fire escape.
The fire destroyed five businesses, including S.L. Stanley Co., a steel fabrication firm on the first floor, and Andy-Tommy Dress Co. on the second. The two upper floors housed M. Baer Dress Co., The Nylco Manufacturing Co. and Beauty Craft, which made convalescent slippers, and the Jo-Al Dress Manufacturing Co. That day, there were 99 people inside.
The historic blaze helped wipe out the last of the city's garment district, making room for Interstate 91 and the Conte School, now Conte/West Hills Magnet School.
"It's not an easy thing. Those memories never leave me," said retired fire Lt. John Tiedemann, 77, who helped sift through the rubble to recover bodies. "I have a lot of memories from all the things that have happened."
The New Haven Firemen's Benevolent Association will have a memorial Mass said today for the 15 people killed in the fire. The Mass will be at 10 a.m. at St. Michael Catholic Church, 29 Wooster Place.
The Fire Escape
The first report of the fire at 62 Franklin St. came in at 2:56 p.m. While the exact cause was never determined, investigators suspected it started on the ground floor, near the elevator shaft, possibly in a large pile of fabric scraps and paper that was scheduled to be hauled off that day.
Workers in the upper floors of the building first noticed a problem when smoke began seeping through the wooden floor. Investigators said the evacuation was orderly at the beginning, as employees fatefully bypassed an interior staircase, climbed onto the exterior fire escape and waited to file down to the ground.
Minutes later, hell opened up.
Masses of people jammed onto the escape route, only to find themselves trapped amid flames and screams.
There was nowhere to go. Fleeing employees were unable to get the counterbalanced steps at the bottom of the fire escape to descend to the ground. Women crawled out onto the steps hoping their weight would dislodge the steps, but the metal section remained stuck in midair.
That's when raging fire blasted out of a window directly under the loaded fire escape, burning women alive. Witness accounts depicted a horrific scene, where screams and the smell of burning flesh permeated the winter air.
As the women screamed for help, Thomas Dobrowski, a worker at the Stanley Co., with the help of three cousins, climbed onto cars and grabbed a ladder to rescue women from the fire escape. As the others helped women down, one grabbed a hammer and knocked out a metal pin that prevented the ladder from descending, sending it crashing down.
For many it was too late.
Terribly burned women were laid side-by-side, some alive, some dead, as people frantically screamed for ambulances. Some were loaded into station wagons and rushed to hospitals.
Fire Capt. John Conlon was on Engine 12, the first on scene. Flames already were pouring from windows, and his crew began battling the blaze in the front of the building.
It wasn't until later, when the blaze was under control, that he learned how many people had died.
"I didn't realize that until quite a while after. Then they called Engine 12 to go up and try to get the (bodies) off the fire escape," said Conlon, now 82. He retired in 1974.
Five people died inside the building. Four died while trapped on the fire escape and six from the fire escape died later at the hospital from their burns.
The M. Baer Dress Co. was the hardest hit, with 11 dead, including owner Morris Baer, who ushered his employees to the fire escape and returned to the shop to make sure no one was left behind. Twenty other employees of his company suffered burns and injuries. Only five escaped unhurt.
In the aftermath, it was hard to tell how many bodies there were as they lay charred and intertwined.
Firefighter George McDermott was off-duty downtown buying furniture at the old Chamberlain's at Orange and Crown streets. The salesman told him about a big fire, so McDermott went to his firehouse, picked up his gear and went to the scene.
"The deputy, I reported in, and he said grab a couple of tarps and go up on the fire escape," said McDermott, now 81. "I was up on the top with a captain and lieutenant and we put them on tarpaulins. There were three or four bodies. We bent down. I think I might have closed my eyes, to be frank with you."
As the dead began to arrive at the hospital, families gathered to identify victims. Most were burned beyond recognition, leaving family to identify them by the jewelry.
In the days and weeks after the fire, there were questions and recriminations surrounding the fire escape and whether it malfunctioned, causing 10 people to burn to death because they couldn't reach safety.
When the building was demolished the next day, a section of the metal escape was removed from the building and mounted on the back of the Engine 9 Firehouse on Ellsworth Avenue.
"It went through test after test after test and there was no malfunction. It worked every time," said retired Fire Department Battalion Chief Ed Flynn, the department historian, who was 21 and working downtown at a bank when the fire broke out. He later served 37 years on the Fire Department.
Investigators ultimately concluded that fleeing employees, with catastrophic results, didn't know how to operate a release bar for the staircase.
"What stuck with us was that so many people got killed and it really wasn't called for," said Firefighter Oakleigh Stickle, 89, who like scores of colleagues came in off duty to fight the fire and staff firehouses. "All those people got stuck on the fire escape. If they had been trained to work that fire escape, they would have all gotten down."
A New Life Among Death
Ann Sola was ready to have her second child in the afternoon of Jan. 24, 1957.
"My mother had said, 'Make sure you call me now, when you go into labor,'" said Sola. "My husband and I tried and tried to call, but the line was busy."
She later found out why.
Her mother, Rachael Perrone, was co-owner of the Jo-Al dress company, on the top floor of the Franklin Street factory, and it was ablaze even as Sola's husband drove her to the Hospital of Saint Raphael.
"My husband knew and he wouldn't tell me."
After the birth, a doctor gave Sola the OK to get wheeled to the emergency room to see her mother and aunt.
"All the people were being brought into the ER at that time," she recalled. "It was absolute chaos. Very scary. I remember them coming in with their housedresses. They smelled of smoke. It's something I'll never forget.
Her step-uncle, Joseph Nastri, died in the blaze. His was the last body pulled from the rubble.
Nastri made it to the fire escape, but went back inside. The story in the family, Sola said, is that he returned to retrieve the purse of an employee. Witnesses at the scene said he returned to make sure all employees were out.
"The whole building was a darned firetrap to begin with," Nastri said.
She worked in the factory as a teenager.
"Today, I don't sew a stitch," she said.
Her daughter, Debbie Weeks, an Air National Guard master sergeant based in Orange, turns 50 today.
Heroes and the Dead
It was a day in which ordinary men became heroes.
It took nearly 40 years, but Dobrowski and cousins, Stanley, Frank and Walter Myjak, were recognized in 1994 with Fire Department commendations for heroism.
They had rushed to help a group of stranded women. Dobrowski, who died in September, jumped to the roof of a car beneath the fire escape and got some people to lower themselves to safety down his back. He suffered burns on his hands, tearing burning clothing off victims.
"Fire was shooting out of the window like a flamethrower. Seeing all those people burned. ... I wish I could have saved more," Dobrowski said at the 1994 ceremony.
Morris Baer, the dress shop owner, told his employees, "Just get out, girls," when smoke started to filter up through the floor. He ushered his employees safely to the fire escape, then ran back inside to make sure all were out. He, like Nastri, never came back, and died in the blaze.
A fire of this magnitude likely wouldn't happen today, with more stringent fire safety codes. Built in 1871, the old building was a tinderbox of aged wood that easily could have been ignited by the building's overburdened steam pipes, 50-year-old fire records show.
While the Franklin Street fire ranks as the worst catastrophe in city history for loss of life, there have been other deadly fires.
One of them happened just a few doors away from the tragic dress factory blaze.
In 1941, on Franklin Street, 10 men died when a fire started in a cotton-picking machine placed near a fire escape. They were cut off from escape by flames blocking exits.
In 1921, 10 people died and more than 50 were seriously injured in a blaze at the old Rialto Theater on College Street, started when some draperies blew into an incense brazier during a showing of "The Sheik," starring Rudolph Valentino. Some victims died in the stampede to the door; others perished in flames on the fire escape.
In 1910, six firemen burned to death during a fire at the New Haven County Jail. The men had been sent into an adjacent chair factory to cut off flames from the jail and were trapped by an explosion. Cut off, they pressed against bars of two windows as frantic comrades poured torrents of water on them. They died when a vat of varnish near them exploded and the ceiling collapsed.