The Cocoanut Grove on Piedmont Street was wartime Boston’s glamour spot: a prohibition-era survivor grown into a warren of dining rooms, bars, and a basement Melody Lounge, dressed as a tropical fantasy in paper palms, rattan, billowing cloth ceilings — and, that Saturday after the big Holy Cross-Boston College football upset, holding perhaps 1,000 people in premises rated for about half that.
At about 22:15 on 28 November 1942, in the dim basement lounge, a soldier unscrewed a light bulb for privacy; a sixteen-year-old busboy, Stanley Tomaszewski, striking a match to see the socket while reinstalling it, became the fire’s traditional (and officially unproven — the inquiry left the cause undetermined) point of origin. Flame caught an artificial palm, ran along the cloth ceiling, and then did something survivors described as unnatural: it raced — a fireball rolling up the single stairway and through the ground floor at running speed, snuffing lights, spitting toxic smoke whose exact chemistry (the upholstery? the refrigerant methyl chloride in the air-conditioning?) fed inquiry and folklore for decades.
The doors
The building then executed its victims. The main entrance was a single revolving door, which jammed solid with the pressure of bodies — the dead were later stacked six deep behind its glass. A second exit opened inward and was pinned shut by the crush; other doors were locked to stop bill-dodgers, hidden behind draperies, or bricked; windows were boarded for the blackout look. Some 300 escaped through a basement kitchen window and staff routes; most of the rest had perhaps ten minutes. 492 died — some seated at their tables, drinks in hand, killed by the smoke between one breath and the next — including cowboy film star Buck Jones; the toll passed the Iroquois Theatre’s and stands as America’s deadliest nightclub fire.
The owner, Barney Welansky — who had boasted of his City Hall connections and whose locked doors did the killing — was convicted of manslaughter; pardoned when dying, he said he wished he had died in the fire.
What the night bought
The reforms were immediate and national: revolving doors must be flanked by (or collapse into) conventional outward-opening exits; exit signs must be illuminated and independently powered; occupancy limits posted and enforced; flammable decorations restricted. Medicine gained as much: Boston’s two great hospitals, drilled for war casualties, turned the night into modern burn care — fluid resuscitation protocols, the abandonment of harmful tannic-acid coatings for petroleum gauze — and the new, rationed drug penicillin was famously released in quantity for the survivors, one of its first mass civilian uses, publicising the antibiotic age. The psychiatrist Erich Lindemann’s study of the bereaved founded the clinical literature of grief itself. The Grove’s site is a parking-lot-turned-condominium with a memorial plaque in the pavement — the deadliest room in American nightlife, and the reason every exit sign above every crowded room now glows.