The Knickerbocker Theater Collapse: DC’s Deadliest Disaster, January 28, 1922

It was a few minutes after nine o’clock on Saturday night, January 28, 1922. A silent comedy called Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford was on the screen. The Knickerbocker Theater at 18th Street and Columbia Road NW was packed, standing room only, with patrons who had pushed through the worst snowstorm Washington had seen in a generation just to get to the show.

Witnesses said there was no warning. No creak. No groan from the timbers. Just a single loud crack and then the entire roof came down on the audience, dragging the concrete balcony with it.

Ninety-eight people were killed. One hundred thirty-three were injured. It remains the deadliest disaster in the history of Washington, DC.

The storm

The blizzard had started late on Friday, January 27, and ran for roughly twenty-eight hours. By the time the snow stopped, the city had recorded about 28 inches, the worst single storm Washington had logged since 1899.

It paralyzed the District. Streetcars stalled. Cars were buried where they sat. Anyone who had to be out walked through drifts that came up to the knee, then the thigh.

The storm was eventually dubbed the Knickerbocker Storm, not because of what it did to traffic but because of what it did to the roof at 18th and Columbia. It is one of the few weather events in American history named for a building it brought down.

The theater

The Knickerbocker opened on October 13, 1917, the new flagship of Harry Crandall’s growing movie-house chain. Crandall was the dominant exhibitor in DC by then. He owned the Metropolitan downtown and would soon build the Tivoli up the hill in Columbia Heights.

The Knickerbocker was meant to be his showpiece in the residential blocks north of Dupont Circle, in what is now Adams Morgan. He hired architect Reginald Geare to design it.

A Washington Post article from October 7, 1917, previewed the opening:

The structure, wholly unlike anything of the kind yet built in Washington, is absolutely fireproof throughout and the walls are of Indiana limestone and Pompeian art brick. The auditorium is in the shape of an elongated triangle.

The stage sat at the peak of the triangle. The floor sloped so no seat had an obstructed view. There were 1,700 seats, plus a mezzanine, private boxes, and a Japanese tearoom on the second floor.

The interior was finished in ivory, gold, and pale blue. Streets of Washington author John DeFerrari has noted that the Knickerbocker even had a mechanical ventilation system, an unusual feature in a movie house at the time.

Opening night drew a buffet dinner, a parade of movie stars, and a premiere of Betsy Ross with Alice Brady, the film’s lead, in attendance. For the next four years the theater ran a packed schedule and the Knickerbocker became the place to see a film in upper Northwest.

The collapse

The night of the disaster the theater stayed open through the storm. Crandall later said he had considered closing, but the second show of the evening was already underway and the house was full. The Post reported standing room only.

A coal mine manager from West Virginia named W. H. Morris, sixty-three, was in the eighth row when he heard something that did not belong in a movie palace. He told the Associated Press the next day:

I was in the eighth row from the front when I heard a crack, a sort of ripping sound, exactly like that which the slate roof of a coal mine makes when it is going to let go. It was more instinct than anything else which brought me to my feet with one thought flashing through my mind: I can beat that fall to the outside.

He did. Most did not.

The roof came down onto the balcony. The balcony, loaded with the same snow weight plus a full house of seated patrons, came down onto the orchestra section.

A Post dispatch printed two days later described the wreckage as “two layers of death, as in a cake.” Another correspondent compared the scene to “the havoc in France or Belgium or England” during the First World War. The roof was simply gone, “as if a giant’s knife had just cut the top off and left no vestige of it.”

A survivor who had just stepped inside told a reporter that “a hearty peal of laughter preceded the falling in of the roof.” The audience had been mid-laugh at the comedy when the building came down on them.

Rescue and toll

The first responders were neighbors. People living in the rowhouses on Columbia Road ran to the wreckage, climbed in, and started pulling.

Army Major George S. Patton, then stationed in Washington, was called over to help coordinate the rescue. By Sunday morning the response had grown to a force of more than six hundred soldiers and Marines. Walter Reed sent ambulances and supplies. A small candy store on the corner became a triage station.

Across the street, a Christian Science church became the morgue. The Associated Press described the scene there the next day:

Recovered from the wreck and horror of the ruined Knickerbocker Theater, a pitiful stream of mangled bodies, dead and living, flowed all last night and today in the lower rooms of a Christian Science Church a few hundred yards away. At the first word of the disaster, the place was thrown open to those stricken folk and the hundreds of others who came to search for their dead or injured.

Rescuers worked through the night and into Sunday afternoon. Priests gave absolution to the dying still trapped in the rubble.

At one point reporters watched a man named Scott Montgomery, pinned for twelve hours with his legs nearly severed by a steel girder, beg rescuers to help his date Veronica Murphy first. He insisted he was fine. Murphy had been dead beside him the whole time, her arm still around him. Montgomery died shortly after he was pulled out.

A five-year-old girl was found alive, sitting between the bodies of two women who had instinctively shielded her with their own. Two more children, four and six years old, were pulled out the next morning, ten hours after the collapse, apparently uninjured.

The initial death toll reported by the Post the morning after was 22. By the evening papers it was 90. By Monday morning the AP wire put it at 107. As duplicate names were sorted out over the following days, the final count settled at 98 dead and 133 injured.

The list of the dead read like a cross-section of official Washington. Former Pennsylvania congressman Andrew Jackson Barchfeld was killed alongside his daughter-in-law, Helena Meyers Barchfeld.

Chauncey C. Brainerd, the Washington correspondent for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, died with his wife. Louis W. Strayer of the Pittsburgh Dispatch was killed too.

A violinist in the theater’s orchestra who had been married five days earlier died in the rubble. So did a young honeymooning couple who had come to the show together.

One of the victims was a National Geographic Society clerk named Agnes Mellon, who had walked into the lobby with her boyfriend James Hoffman just as the roof gave way. Hoffman was blown back into the lobby and landed without a scratch. Mellon was buried in the seats.

Her brother Charles Leo could not recognize her face when he reached the church morgue. He identified her by the khaki knickerbockers she had worn to the theater.

One Knickerbocker survivor, L. E. Donaldson, walked out of the wreckage that night and then walked away from another DC disaster seven years later, the 1929 boiler blast at the McCrory’s on Seventh Street. The city did not give him many quiet decades.

Aftermath

By Sunday afternoon DC’s Board of Commissioners had ordered every theater in the city closed until inspectors could climb the roofs and certify them safe. Senator Arthur Capper announced that he would introduce a resolution in the Senate calling for an investigation not just of the Knickerbocker but of every large building put up in Washington since the start of the war.

The inquiries piled up. The DC coroner, both houses of Congress, the District government, and the courts all opened parallel investigations. The conclusion, eventually, was that the building had been doomed by design.

Engineering News-Record later determined that the wall pocket holding one critical roof beam had gradually shifted out of position, allowing the beam to slip free under the snow load. An earlier theory had been that the contractor had set the steel beams only two inches into the walls instead of the eight inches Geare had specified.

The lawsuits dragged on and ultimately failed. The courts could not agree on who was liable.

Reginald Geare was effectively finished as an architect. He was arrested for drunk driving in 1926 and died by suicide in 1927.

Harry Crandall held on longer. He kept running his theaters through the rise of the studio system, sold what was left of his chain as the big distributors squeezed him out, and died by suicide in 1937. He left a note asking reporters not to be too hard on him.

The shell of the Knickerbocker did not stay rubble for long. In 1923 a new theater opened on the same lot, the Ambassador, built into the bones of the old building.

It ran films for four decades. By the late 1960s it was a fading neighborhood house. Three young promoters rented it out, renamed it the Psychedelic Power and Light Company, and booked Canned Heat, John Lee Hooker, Vanilla Fudge, and a five-night stand by a young Jimi Hendrix.

The Ambassador closed for good not long after and was torn down in 1969.

The corner today is a former SunTrust bank with a small plaza out front. There is no plaque. Residents of Adams Morgan have, for years, asked the city for a marker.

The building that stands there now was deliberately designed in the silhouette of a movie theater, a quiet nod from the architect to what used to be there. If you walk past it you would not know that ninety-eight people died on that corner in the middle of a comedy.