A North Side factory burned more than a century ago; the losses continue to echo

This story about a Pittsburgh family’s long, long heartache begins with wisps of smoke rising from the edges of a third-floor factory in the Brown Building on the city’s North Side. The room was filled with tables and machines – workstations where about 30 young women assembled cardboard boxes. A supervisor saw the smoke but was unconcerned. She figured the smoke originated from production work at an electroplating and stove company that occupied the floor below. 

It was a few minutes past 1 p.m. The women had just returned from the day’s lunch break and were settling into their tasks for the afternoon. They had a lot of work to do. With Christmas nearing, Pittsburgh’s department stores needed containers for their goods. Kaufmann’s, Joseph Horne, Rosenbaum, Boggs & Buhl — all the department stores would be placing orders. Candy stores, hat shops, and stationery sellers needed boxes, too. Box company managers ordered extra supplies to keep up with the demand.

One of the young women rose from her station and, curious, walked toward a window. Something outside had caught her attention. A co-worker turned to Margaret Steigerwald, 17, and said, “There must be a parade or something.” Several others got up and walked to the window to check it out for themselves. One of the women cried out, “The building is on fire!”

***

The Union Paper Box Co. fire on Oct. 25, 1915, revealed much about Pittsburgh at the time. Government officials proved incompetent, building owners flouted the law, business operators acted carelessly, and those with the least power — the workers — paid the price. No one was looking out for them. Before the smoke cleared, officials started pointing fingers. It was always somebody else’s fault. Then the district attorney stepped in to answer the question: What did the people of wealth and power in Pittsburgh truly value? We shudder today at the answer.

Remnants of that city remain. Many, like the four-story building on Sandusky Street, look a bit different. They’ve been improved and updated, although the underlying structures are mostly the same as they’ve always been. For others, the decades have not been kind. 

***

At the cry of “Fire!” a number of the young women in the box factory fled to the back of the building to access a metal fire escape that led to an alley below.

That’s when William C. Kimbel, manager of the company, burst into the room. The women there included his sister-in-law Cecelia Joos, 19. All were in a panic. Smoke was by now filling the room. Kimbel told the women to get their coats and hats from a nearby cloakroom and prepare to leave.

“There is a fire,” he said, “but it is not dangerous, so don’t get excited.”

Steigerwald and Joos and the others rushed to get their wraps. Shouts filled the room. Kimbel opened the stairway door to prepare an exit and was met by a burst of flame that singed his hair. The fire had advanced very quickly. Kimbel called out to the women to follow him, and somehow he and half a dozen workers made their way to the fourth floor.

Once on the top floor, the women screamed that they were trapped. Accounts of the chaotic and panicked moments in the factory are often unclear and sometimes contradictory, but several people inside and outside of the building recall the screams.

Kimbel opened a window and jumped 20 feet or so to the roof of a building below. He called out to the women to jump, and, one by one, they did.

Several other women remained at the back of the third floor and waited there. Minutes passed. Perhaps the women were waiting for further instructions. Smoke became thicker, making it difficult to breathe. Some women screamed. Gertrude Niedt felt she would soon die. She was 25 and had worked at the factory longer than almost anyone else, about 11 years. She had hoped that the fire department would come with ladders to rescue, but that hope was fading.

***

The box factory occupied the top two floors of the four-story Brown Building on Sandusky Street, a block from what is now The Andy Warhol Museum. Twenty piles of hay and shavings packed a feed store on the first floor. Around 1 o’clock in the afternoon, John Clark arrived at the rear of the store to feed his horse, which he kept stabled at the building. He saw flames on one of those hay piles and notified workers in the feed store office, then rushed back to the stable to save his horse.

A horse shoer named John Rapp, working down the street, noticed smoke and hurried to the nearest fire alarm box, about 40 feet from the building. At the North Side alarm office, Thomas Brady picked up a ringing phone. A voice cried,  “There’s a fire! There’s a fire on Sandusky Street.” The time was 1:10.

The blaze spread rapidly. Large doors opened on the front and back of the building allowed a westerly wind to blow through, fanning the flames. The fire burned its way through the stairway and a wood elevator shaft and swept upward.

Lamont Clark, 22,  a feed store employee, was in a third-floor storeroom getting supplies when he noticed the smoke. Like the women before him, he tried the stairway, but a wave of heat and smoke knocked him backward and down. He crawled to the elevator shaft, but it roared like a furnace. While on the floor, he bumped into one of his co-workers, W.C. Lickert. The two broke down a door and entered a room where several women huddled around a window.

Lickert rushed through the clutch of women, broke the window and jumped. Clark thought Lickert had deserted him, then he heard Lickert calling out. Clark went to the window and saw his co-worker, about 7 feet below, on the roof of a two-story building. He hollered at Clark to push the women out the window and he would catch them.

Clark and Lickert helped six women escape. All had to push away from the ledge in order to clear a 4-foot gap between the buildings. A seventh woman failed to clear the gap and fell the entire three floors, to the narrow alley below. The heat inside became intolerable.

Firefighters were now outside, pouring water into the building from Sandusky Street. Two women had not yet jumped, Clark recalled, when portions of the upper floors collapsed. Clark then leaped to safety.

The rumble of collapsing floors alarmed the crowd that had gathered on Sandusky. Those standing nearest the building hurriedly backed away, fearing the structure would collapse.

Smoke pouring from the building was clearly visible from Downtown streets and office buildings and throughout the North Side. Newspapers estimated that thousands of spectators gathered to watch as firefighters clamored to the scene, unfurled hoses and poured water onto the burning structure.

Great black and gray clouds billowed from windows on the first three floors. On occasion, wind created gaps in in the smoke, giving spectators momentary glimpses the building. Many people later claimed to have seen desperate figures in third-floor windows before smoke again obscured the view. Witnesses heard screams, the thud of falling women landing in a nearby alley, the shouts of firefighters, the fire’s rumble and crackle. Many wept; a few collapsed.

A few of the workers trapped inside tried to use the fire escape. Mary Gatewood saw them. From the rear doorway of her home on Vulcan Way she watched flames shoot from the building and leap across the alley, igniting a fence.  She watched young women step out onto the fire escape and advance a few steps. Flames from below drove them back inside. The fire escape proved worthless. Its iron steps passed in front of windows now spewing flames. Heat eventually warped the steps nearest the street, curling them upward. The women’s screams unnerved Gatewood. She couldn’t stand it. Distraught, she fled back inside her house.

Some of the workers began their escape by wrapping paper around their hands before stepping on a window ledge and grabbing a telephone line and then, while hanging, sliding down and away from the building. Then they let go.

At least three men reported catching women as they fell. One was a civil engineer named Thomas Blackburn. He climbed into a hay wagon pulled near the building on Cajou Way, an alley on the building’s northeast side, and urged women on the third floor to jump to him. He managed to break the fall of a few before one woman landed feet first on his face, breaking his nose and knocking him unconscious. Two other men leaned out a second story window and caught women lowering themselves from third floor windows. From the second floor, those women jumped into nets held by firefighters below.

One worker remained on the fourth floor. He was Peter Vallone, an Italian immigrant and one of only a few men employed by the company. Vallone operated cutting machinery in a fourth-floor room. Kimbel hollered at him to jump, but Vallone replied, “I can’t, I can’t.” Kimbel and a few other men found a ladder, but it was too short and reached a few feet below the window. Vallone refused to climb onto it. A wave of smoke then obscured the window and Vallone fell back.

Kimbel made his way onto the street. Another company manager saw him and said, “My God, Bill, you’re still alive!” Kimbel collapsed and was carried to a nearby fruit store. Twelve women and Vallone remained inside the burning building. Among those trapped was Kimbel’s sister-in-law Cecelia Joos. 

***

Shortly before 2 p.m., with the building still smoldering, firefighters climbed a ladder and entered a third-floor window. They groped their way through the smoke while water from hoses trained on the building continued to rain down. They found two bodies near the useless fire escape in the back. Then they came across a small dressing room near the center of the building. Nine bodies crowded together there, some piled on top of others. The youngest victim, Carolina Farrara, was 15; the oldest, Vallone, was 36. The fire claimed two sisters, Ottilia and Laura Breining. Ottilia was 20, Laura, 24. In all, 13 people perished.

Firefighters began lowering bodies down a ladder placed against the front of the building. The crowd gasped when a wrap fell away from one victim, exposing her face. Pittsburgh Mayor Joseph G. Armstrong, who’d hustled from Grant Street to the scene, instructed recovery crews to wrap the bodies in blankets before bringing them down.

Once George Joos learned his sister’s workplace was on fire, he hurried to the scene. Standing on Sandusky Street, he carefully watched as bodies were carried to waiting vehicles. Somehow he recognized Cecelia Joos, sister to him and to Kimbel’s wife, Anna, and one of Phillip and Catherine Joos’ nine children.

***

Later that day, family members entered the Allegheny County Morgue to identify the victims. Detectives were stunned when 14-year-old Ada Breining arrived to point out her two older sisters. Elizabeth Rauch identified the body of her daughter Marcella, 17, burned on the face and arms. Joseph Joos showed up to make a positive identification of his sister Cecelia.

Grief that night lay heavy on households throughout Pittsburgh. Press reporter Gertrude Gordon visited the homes of a few families who’d lost daughters. She found Ida Baker in a small house behind Federal Street, a mile from the box factory. Hours earlier, Ida, a single mother, had identified her 20-year-old daughter Florence’s body. Now frail and unnerved, Ida sat in her kitchen, lighted by a dim lamp sitting on a table, and talked of a birthday party she’d planned. Florence would have turned 21 in a few days. It was too much for the neighbors who’d come to comfort her. They quietly wept.

Ida’s brother said he’d witnessed the fire from a roof across from the Brown Building. He told Ida he saw Florence in a window. He called out for her to open the window and jump, “but she couldn’t get the window open, and he saw her die there,” Gertrude Gordon wrote.

On Lautner Street in Troy Hill, she visited Mary Miller, a single mother with six children. One, Myrtle, worked at the box factory. Mary was hopeful she’d survived. “We haven’t heard anything yet, but we think she is all right,” the mother said.

Gertrude Gordon knew the truth.

“I hadn’t the heart to give them the bad news which would come soon enough, and I left without telling them,” she wrote.

She did not visit the Fineview home of Cecelia Joos. What was the situation there? A daughter had died, yet a son-in-law had survived. Certainly there was grief, perhaps mixed with a bit of relief.

This had been a difficult year for the family. In May, mother Catherine had died from complications of a rare type of hernia. Among those grieving the loss of both a mother and sister was the youngest Joos child, 17-year-old Clara.

***

The deaths of 12 working women stunned the city and outraged residents. Someone had to pay. Authorities quickly moved to place blame. 

One day after the fire, Allegheny County Coroner Samuel Jamison issued arrest warrants for Union Paper Box Co. officials, including Kimbel, as well as the owners of the Brown Building. Jamison said the building was a firetrap that was never meant to house a factory. All the officials showed up at the coroner’s office and posted bond.

Jamison’s action relieved Armstrong, Pittsburgh’s mayor and a former coroner. (He served during the 1909 McKees Rocks Pressed Steel Car strike, which claimed at least a dozen lives.) Armstrong ordered the department of public safety to conduct a probe.

Much of the hose used on Sandusky Street by the city’s fire department proved useless. Large sections burst or leaked so badly they failed to provide enough fire pressure to fight the blaze. The hoses were cheap – they’d been purchased in 1909 for 60 cents per foot – and failed to meet professional standards. City Council had failed to approve the purchase of new hose at $1.10 per foot, and as a result the fire department was short several thousand feet.

The county fire marshal suspected the fire started when someone tossed a lighted cigarette on a bale of hay near the building’s elevator shaft. Detectives declared they’d find the careless smoker, he said.

***

Funerals for the victims began on Wednesday. Hundreds of mourners gathered at Troy Hill’s Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church and spilled into the street for the Breining sisters’ double funeral. The crowd spilled into the street. Only a few friends and family followed the casket of the youngest victim, Carolina Farrara, to a North Side Catholic cemetery. Her mother was too distraught to attend the funeral.

At Cecelia Joos’ funeral, people packed St. Mary Catholic Church, which served the North Side’s German population. Hundreds more gathered outside, on Lockhart Street. The church is now an event space called The Grand Hall at the Priory.

Kimbel, who’d posted bail the night before, sat with his wife, Anna, and her family. Newspapers couldn’t decide whether to declare him a hero or villain. He’d helped rescue several women but had been arrested. On two occasions during the service, Kimbel nearly broke down but gathered himself. His control weakened and then collapsed at Mount Mary’s Cemetery, when Cecelia’s casket was lowered into a grave. Kimbel sobbed and then fell to the ground in a faint.

His brother-in-law Joseph Joos, who had identified his sister’s body at the morgue two days before, was unable to revive Kimbel, so he picked him up and carried him to an ambulance. There, Kimbel regained consciousness. “His eyes were wild, and he talked in a rambling manner,” Joseph Joos said.

Once home, Joos said, Kimbel “shouted orders like a raving maniac,” described horrific scenes inside the building during the fire, repeated warnings he’d given the trapped workers and told imaginary accusers he’d done everything he could to save lives. This went on for hours, until a physician medicated Kimbel.

***

A coroner’s jury in December condemned state, county and city officials whose job it was to make certain such buildings were safe. The Brown Building was approved for use as an office and warehouse, but not as a factory. It lacked proper fire escapes and steel fire doors, and mandated fire drills never took place.

Months then passed. Newspapers stopped writing about the fire and the investigations. In the end, nothing came of the charges against Union Paper Box Co. officials or the Brown Building owners. In April 1916, District Attorney R.H. Jackson announced he considered it futile to present the case to a grand jury.

“We have been busy looking up the law on such cases ever since the records were turned over to us by the coroner,” Jackson said. “We cannot find any authority to present the matter to the grand jury to indict a corporation or an estate.”

The fire did result in some reforms. Pittsburgh City Council passed new building codes, and the state of Pennsylvania stepped up its enforcement of factory safety laws. In the summer of 1916, Pittsburgh opened its first fire school to train its firefighters.

Two years after the Sandusky Street tragedy, police arrested a 45-year-old North Side man named Joseph F. Dean on charges that he caused the fire. Dean, an African American, matched the description of a man who’d departed the feed store before the fire. Newspapers described him as a former convict. Records show a man fitting his name and age serving time in the Allegheny County Workhouse for vagrancy in 1900.

After his arrest, Dean’s name disappeared from the news, as does the Union Paper Box Co. The firm was dissolved in 1918 and rechartered as the Sterling Paper Box Co. William Kimbel, named as president, hired his sister-in-law Clara, youngest of the Joos children. Within a few years, she became a supervisor, married and gave birth to a daughter.

It would be pleasant enough to end this tragic story here, with family treasuring Cecelia’s memory but moving on. The true Joos story is more complicated. There would be other losses and plenty of dysfunction. Clara’s grandson, Gordon Baker, 63, can see the threads connecting them all to the events of Oct. 25, 1915.

We can start with Clara. How did she deal with the death of her older sister? Clara married a man named Samuel Ferguson and, in 1922, gave birth to a daughter, Dolores. The marriage failed. Clara struggled as a single mother. She was abusive to her daughter, often sending her to live with relatives. Dolores bounced from one house to another, an unwanted child. This created a rift between mother and daughter that never truly healed, Baker said.

For a while, Dolores lived in Fineview with her aunt Annie and uncle William Kimbel (“Uncle Bill” to family members). The Kimbel’s daughter Dorie was about the same age as Dolores, and the two played dress-up. Dolores would later recall these as happy times.

For a while, Dolores grew close to her uncle Mike Joos. He is something of a mystery. Records show Mike as a single man working as a metal polisher. By the early 1930s, Mike was nearing age 60 and living in a small room at the Joos family home on Mountford Avenue, just around the corner from the Kimbel home on Marsonia Street, in Fineview. Dolores visited him regularly. She was 10 and saw Mike as a sad and lonely man with white hair and a long white beard. She felt sorry for him.

During one such visit in February 1932, Michael told Dolores not to visit the next night. He wouldn’t be there.

The following evening, a Saturday, Michael put on a coat and hat and walked 10 minutes from Mountford Avenue to a ballfield at the foot of Meadville Street. The ballfield looks down on Pittsburgh’s Point. It’s a beautiful view.

The next morning, a city firefighter passing through the park on his way to work found Mike dead of a bullet wound to his right temple. A revolver and empty cartridge lay beside him. Authorities found eyeglasses in one of Michael’s pockets. They traced them to an optician who was able to identify the owner as Michael.

***

Joseph Joos, who identified his sister’s body at the Allegheny County Morgue and stood by his brother-in-law William Kimbel in the days after the fire, became a Pittsburgh city firefighter. This decision may have been motivated by the fate of Cecelia, Gordon Baker said.

In 1926, Joseph and a colleague received praise for rescuing five people from the second and third floors of a burning building on East Ohio Street. Both firefighters were injured during the rescue but recovered.

Seven months later, on a cold January evening, Joseph Joos and five of his colleagues from Engine Co. 42 climbed aboard a fire truck and roared down East Street in response to a report of an automobile blaze. Joos was riding on the back of the vehicle. 

As the truck passed Royal Street, close to the newly finished St. Boniface Catholic Church, it approached a pile of dirt left in the dark road by workers repairing a sewer line. A warning lamp that would have alerted the driver was no longer visible – it had been knocked down earlier by a passing automobile. The truck launched into the air upon striking the pile, hurling the firefighters into the air, then crashed down, eventually landing upside down. One firefighter, George Dollhopf, struck an iron pole. He died of his injuries.

Joseph Joos lay in the road, his skull crushed. A passing motorist drove him to Presbyterian Hospital, but he died en route. He was survived by his wife, Abbie, and 7-year-old son, Paul.

***

Baker has childhood memories of looking at family photo albums with his mother, Dolores. He never got to know what his grandfather Samuel Ferguson looked like. Clara had used a pencil to jab holes in places where Ferguson’s face appeared. Such was Clara Joos’ anger and bitterness.

“She was confrontational her whole life,” Baker said. “I can remember her making really angry faces. She was a very impatient lady. She was a hard worker, very driven, but anybody who did her wrong in any way, shape or form, she was done with them.” 

Baker said his mother shared this same trait. He struggles with it himself.

“If you cross me, you treat me wrong, you offend me in some way, then you’re done,” he said. “That never happened with my dad’s family. They got together for reunions; they went on picnics together. I can find family pictures of that whole family getting together.”

He sees this as an echo of Cecelia’s death, still reverberating generations later. An unexpected loss can do that, he said. Baker experienced this himself with the passing of his brother Barry Glenn Baker in 1993. Barry 34, had battled cancer for more than a year.

“Your heart takes a beating,” he said, “and impressions, thoughts, actions and reactions change. A single nightmare can repeat itself night after night for years on end, waking you in a cold sweat.  Depression and anxiety can easily take hold. Your goals, your dreams, your zest for life falls apart.”

Gordon said one relative, William Kimbel, the family’s “Uncle Bill,” seems to stand out as having survived the losses and turmoil the family death with over the years.

Newspapers and officials lauded Kimbel as a hero for his role in saving lives, then condemned him for saving himself. In the hours after the fire, he traveled to the morgue to help identify the bodies of his dead workers, his sister-in-law among them. Mothers there collapsed after viewing the remains of their daughters. The next night he received a warrant for his arrest. One day later, he collapsed at Cecelia’s funeral.

The Joos family did not blame Kimbel for Cecelia’s death — a remarkable display of understanding and forgiveness in a moment of terrible grief. On the day of Cecelia’s funeral, newspapers published Joseph Joos’ lengthy statement about Kimbel: “I know that he did everything he could to save the girls,” it read, in part. “He was most oppressed by the criticism of persons whom he thought believed he would let his own sister-in-law perish and save himself. He did not leave the building until he had saved several girls and the flames had licked his clothing as high as his knees.”

Kimbel went on to a successful career, serving as executive secretary of a box company until his retirement. He and Annie provided happiness and a stable environment during difficult times for their niece Dolores, Baker’s mother.

“He was a quality man,” Baker said. “And is one of my angels today.”

Sources: The Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh Post and Pittsburgh Gazette-Times, accessed through newspapers.com; Quarterly of the National Fire Protection Association, July 1916; Allegheny County coroner’s reports, accessed through Archives & Special Collections at the University of Pittsburgh Library System; birth and death certificates, census reports and other records accessed through ancestry.com; Women and the Trades, Pittsburgh 1907-1908, The Russell Sage Foundation’s study, The Pittsburgh Survey.