At around 9:00pm on the 28th of May
1977 a fire began at the Beverly Hills Supper Club - a
sprawling entertainment venue and nightclub just outside Cincinnati.
Despite plenty of warning that a fire had started
many of the 3,000 guests within the building that evening
were unable to evacuate in time. The blaze ultimately claimed 165 lives,
making it the third deadliest in US history.
The Beverly Hills Supper Club was constructed in 1937
and operated as a high-class venue offering
dinner, drinks, and cabaret entertainment. Entertainers came from as far afield as
Las Vegas, Nashville, and Hollywood to perform there
and the club was never short of clientele.
So popular was it, in fact, that in the early 1970s
it began to expand. Several extensions were
cobbled onto the original structure resulting in a sprawling
and extensive entertainment complex with multiple stages,
dining rooms, and event spaces.
Though the building itself was made of material classified as non-combustible
it was lushly decorated with wooden paneling,
thick carpets, and luxurious curtains. The historical building had no sprinkler
system, nor any smoke detectors, and the ad hoc
manner in which extensions had been added meant that
some of the larger event spaces had no exits leading directly outside.
On Saturday the 28th of May 1977 the club was filled beyond capacity.
John Davidson, a popular singer at the time, was performing
in the Cabaret Room and excited patrons had filled
not only every seat but the ramps and aisles as well.
The room which had a safety limit of 600 persons
may have held as many as 1,300 that night.
Elsewhere patrons were dining at the club's gourmet eateries or attending
private gatherings in the building's many suites and event spaces.
The total number of guests inside the entire complex
was estimated to be around 3,000 -
twice the number that the club could safely accommodate.
The fire began sometime before 9:00pm in the Zebra Room - a small event space
near the main entrance that was at the time hosting a wedding reception.
The guests in the Zebra Room left early after complaining that the heating in
the room was far too high and that they could hear a lot of
strange banging or popping noises.
Little did these guests know that faulty wiring in the ceiling had started a
small smoldering fire. After the last guest
left this fire burned quietly away until 9:00pm
at which point an employee smelled smoke and opened the Zebra Room door to
investigate. Two things happened simultaneously when
that employee opened the Zebra Room door.
One was that she confirmed the presence of a fire in the building.
This led to the fire department being called and to several employees
grabbing fire extinguishers and piling into the room to try and fight the
flames.
The other thing that happened was that oxygen entered the room.
Lots of it. Enough to stoke what had been a smoldering fire
up into a healthy, all-consuming blaze.
Things moved quickly after that at 9:01pm the fire department received
their first call and set out for the supper club. They
arrived at 9:05pm, by which time
smoke was pouring from the building. Staff inside had given up hope of being
able to fight the fire and were instead moving quickly through
the complex in all directions, attempting to alert as many patrons as
they could. The club, remember, had no alarm system,
and so it was down to individual employees to order evacuations
from every room, every corridor, every auditorium.
It was 9:06pm when busboy Walter Bailey arrived at the Cabaret Room with news of
the fire. To his utter dismay supervisors were
reluctant to interrupt the warm-up act on stage.
They saw no smoke or flames, and when Walter Bailey told them of a fire at the
front of the building they probably imagined a tiny kitchen
fire, something that the staff down that end
of the building would surely deal with before it got out of hand.
They saw no reason to evacuate a room full of excited and,
more importantly, paying customers.
Faced with this indifference, Walter Bailey, a junior employee
just out of college, did something remarkable.
His act of bravery is especially noteworthy when you consider
that he suffered from intense stage fright.
Walter Bailey marched to the front of the room,
climbed up on stage, seized a microphone from a bemused performer,
and informed everyone present that there was a fire,
and they should evacuate at once. There may have been as many as 1,300
people in the Cabaret Room at that moment in time.
If every single one had instantly and calmly heeded Walter Bailey's warning
they might just possibly have been able to evacuate in time.
As it was, however, only a few hundred people started moving towards the exits.
The rest remained. They saw no smoke or flames. They felt safe where they were.
They had paid a lot of money for their tickets and did not wish for their
evening to be disrupted. For a range of reasons, while a few
hundred lucky souls evacuated, the majority of guests in the Cabaret
Room remained in their seats.
They remained there for just four minutes.
At 9:10pm the fire shorted out the power in the building,
plunging every room and corridor into darkness.
At almost the same moment the smell of smoke and burning reached the Cabaret
Room. Patrons panicked. Leaping to their feet
they pushed and shoved, stumbling in the dark,
trampling others beneath their feet. The exits to the rooms quickly became a
crush of bodies.
The situation only worsened when flames raced through the building
and blocked two of the three exits. Now hundreds of desperate people were
trying to escape through just one set of double doors.
Reports from firefighters and survivors describe
people stacked like cordwood in the doorway,
with desperate patrons hurling themselves again and again
at the opening, scrambling over bodies both dead and alive
in order to escape. When the door became completely jammed with bodies
employees and rescuers found that no amount of pulling could free them from
the crush. They were locked in. Trapped.
Worse still, some of the first people to escape from the Cabaret Room
subsequently became lost in the twisting, turning corridors of the supper club.
The multiple extensions that had been added to the building in the 1970s
had turned it into a maze.
Firefighters from every department in the county
battled bravely against the flames, but in many parts of the building
were simply forced to retreat by walls of smoke
and incredibly high temperatures. At 11:30pm, certain that the roof was
about to collapse, fire command ordered all firefighters to
evacuate the building.
This turned out to be a wise decision. At around midnight
the roof imploded, turning what remained of the building into a pile of
burning wreckage that smoldered for two whole days.
The fire resulted in 165 deaths, 162 of whom died on the scene,
and three of whom died in hospital after being rescued.
The vast majority of the dead were found in the Cabaret Room,
where bodies were found piled in massive heaps at all of the available exits.
Indeed only two of the dead were found
elsewhere in the building.
As soon as the recovery operation was complete an investigation was launched.
It discovered a range of safety violations,
including the absence of an alarm system, no
firewalls, a profusion of flammable material in the building,
no sprinklers, and no employee training.
More than anything else, though, overcrowding was to blame for the
disaster.
Witnesses gave unsettling testimony about visits to the club
in the months before the fire, complaining that the Cabaret Room
was often so crowded with bodies that waitresses couldn't reach patrons in
order to serve drinks. In these conditions a high death count
was inevitable.
In the aftermath the three top fire officials in Kentucky were suspended,
accused of conducting improper fire safety investigations.
A number of lawsuits were also launched by the families of victims.
These were combined into a single class action lawsuit,
which eventually resulted in a $10 million settlement
from the General Electric Company, who had made the faulty wiring
which caused the fire in the first instance.
The site has remained undeveloped since the fire,
although in 2020 it was acquired for the development of an entertainment complex.
This new venue will include a memorial to the deceased from the fire
and, thanks to changes in laws and regulations over time -
changes inspired by disasters such as this -
will be much safer than the Beverly Hills Supper Club ever was.