NFPA Journal - November/December 2017 - 112

Looking Back

FIRE INCIDENTS AND
OTHER NOTABLE EVENTS
FROM SAFETY HISTORY

Two families lived in the condemned Moonglow
Hotel. Thirteen of the 16 victims were children
under the age of 12.

TURNING
POINT

THE MOONGLOW HOTEL FIRE
OF 1957-NIAGARA FALLS,
NEW YORK
By Angelo Verzoni
t was the fire that forever
changed the city of Niagara Falls.
Early on the morning of
November 16, 1957, a blaze
engulfed the run-down and condemned Moonglow Hotel, which had served as
a makeshift home for two large families. The
fire killed 16 members of the families-13 of
the victims were under the age of 12-and two
single men who lived at the property.
Firefighters and other witnesses described
how quickly and intensely the building
burned. "The place was all aglow," Nolen Curtis,
a Niagara Falls firefighter at the time, told The
Niagara Gazette in 2007. "You couldn't even get
near the place it was such an inferno."
"I could see kids jumping out of the windows
and getting killed," Charles Mixon, who was
a child living next door at the time, told the
newspaper, adding that the rapid fire spread
didn't surprise him. "It was a deathtrap waiting
to happen. It caught fire like paper."
The youngest survivor, four-year-old Annie
Reid, miraculously lived after her sister threw
her from a second-story window. Now Annie
Chivers, she wrote a memoir of the fire, Out of
the Fire: Life from the Ashes, in 2013. "The pain
of that event still brings tears to my eyes," she
writes. "I am jolted out of a sound sleep at times
from the sensation of falling from a second-story
window. I still see those flames lighting up the
pre-dawn sky when I close my eyes..."

112 | NFPA JOURNAL * N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 7

THE NFPA LIBRARY AND ARCHIVE holds a rich collection of books, reports, and photographs that
document important moments in fire history. To provide better electronic access for researchers and
to preserve our unique archival holdings, work has begun to digitize the files of the Fire Record Department, the original NFPA department responsible for collecting and analyzing information and compiling
statistics about key fires and other events. The incidents featured in "Looking Back" are drawn from
this collection and will eventually be part of NFPA's online archive. For information, visit nfpa.org/library.

G. BUTLER

The cause of the blaze was never released, but two days after the fire, the
Associated Press reported that investigators initially said it was triggered by
an explosion in an oil furnace. AP also said investigators were slated to give
lie-detector tests to several people and present all evidence to a grand jury.
The property reportedly lacked heat, forcing tenants to use kerosene heaters; windows were nailed shut, and the hallways were crowded with debris.
In March 1958, the landlord was convicted of first-degree manslaughter for
"culpable negligence in maintaining the building in violation of multiple
housing laws," according to The Buffalo News, and served about 18 months in
prison, Chivers told the newspaper in June. She said she planned to go back
to Niagara Falls in November to mark the 60th anniversary of the fire.
Local historian William Bradberry, who grew up playing with the Ewing
and Reid children and was nine when the fire struck, called the event a
"turning point" for the city in an interview with The Buffalo News. Like
countless other African-Americans, the families had moved north from
the Deep South in search of a better life-which, for many, proved elusive.
"People could no longer deny reality," he said. "It was after the fire that the
housing authority began to take seriously the need to do slum clearance." It
seemed to work. To this day, there has never been another fire in Niagara
Falls as deadly as the Moonglow Hotel fire.

http://www.nfpa.org/library

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - November/December 2017