San Francisco Glasshouse Disaster

GLASSHOUSE DISASTER

Thanksgiving Day started innocent enough on November 29, 1900, in San Francisco. Excitement was in the air as the traditional ninth annual football game between the University of California Golden Bears and the Stanford University Cardinals was scheduled in the Mission District. The San Francisco Bulletin reported, “Thanksgiving Day dawned clear and bright, and a fairer day could never have been desired by the veriest of football enthusiasts.” The city was in a holiday mood which would quickly change to shock by mid-afternoon.

The disaster appeared on the front page of the New York Times and dominated local papers. University of California Golden Bears vs. Stanford University Cardinals ticket

Years later, the day would be referred to as the “Thanksgiving Day Disaster” because of what happened during the game. The most horrific accident that one can imagine occurred, resulting in many deaths and injuries to the spectators. In what was referred to as the largest crowd to ever witness a sporting event west of the Mississippi, some 19,000 onlookers packed the stadium. At the same time, thousands more came to the stadium grounds hoping to find a ticket or be part of the excitement. Admission was $1, which prohibited many from obtaining a ticket, especially young lads who worked hard for their money or had no job. Like many enthusiastic fans, these young men were adventurous, fearless and, with a pack mentality, determined. They came hoping to catch a peek of the game or, better yet, find a perch outside the stadium that would allow them to see the distant plays and hear the roar of the crowd. This misadventure usually involved jumping over a fence, avoiding the police, and finding a roof to settle on to watch the game.

The turn of the century was an era in American sporting events before the tremendous concrete and steel stadiums named for sponsors and known throughout the country. The San Francisco sporting grounds resembled something we might now see at a big high school football game except much more significant and constructed quicker in ways that may have defied safety and stability. Like old roller coasters, wood was the primary construction material. Just three years earlier, a section of the San Francisco’s Recreation Park roof collapsed under the weight of the football crowd with only one serious injury, which seemed like a miracle.

Many of these early ballparks were erected in industrial areas alongside active factories and warehouses because large affordable land plots were available. Contractors typically would be rushed to complete the project before the scheduled events. The newest neighborhood addition to San Francisco Mission District stadium park was the nearly completed San Francisco and Pacific Glass Works, which occupied an entire block between Folsom and Harrison on 15th Street, just across the street from the stadium. The Mission District was a predominantly working-class neighborhood dense with Irish and German families.

The new glassworks had stoked up their east furnace for more than a week to reach 3,000 degrees ahead of the formal beginning of operations the coming Monday. The firing-up was in preparation for making glass, bottles, and jars. The furnace was an enormous, enclosed brick structure whose inside white-hot walls held 15 tons of seething molten glass that was only tended to by a skeleton crew. The four-story factory rooftop above offered an enticing endzone-to-endzone view of the field from above the ballpark’s northern wall. Only a fence and a few glasshouse security watchmen stood between the anxious who advanced on the glasshouse in hopes of finding a rooftop seat.

Well before the scheduled 2:30 p.m. kickoff, the factory’s shiny, corrugated iron rooftop was packed with 500 to 1,000 spectators. It “was black with people,” reported someone speaking to the San Francisco Chronicle. People on the stadium grounds watched with concern as this dangerous spectacle unfolded before them.

Twenty minutes after kickoff, the crowd was tense as Cal made its first foray deep into Stanford territory. Then a crash from the field’s north side brought play to a halt. The roof of the glassworks had collapsed like a gallows’ trap. The game came to a stop, and people looked around, trying to identify the source of the loud interruption. Then, by one account, a Berkeley fan, fearing a Stanford diversion, yelled,

The nearly completed San Francisco and Pacific Glass Works behind the stadium. The roof full of onlookers.

“It’s a job,” and all eyes returned to the ball. The game continued as if nothing had happened, the bands and cheers overwhelming the screams next door.

The first men to realize the full scope of the horror had nearly been victims themselves. Charles Yotz, an oven man at the factory, had been raking the fire when bodies began raining down, narrowly missing him. He tried to remove those who had fallen on top of the furnace with a giant poker while his partner, Clarence Jeter, ran to turn off the oil feeding the blaze inside. Officials later estimated the surface temperature of the furnace at 500 degrees. “It was a horrible experience standing there beside a hell pot and seeing human beings roast to death,” Jeter told the Examiner. “We did the best we could.” Some were lucky to grasp rafters, holding on for dear life as death amassed below. “Bodies were falling like hail,” one man said. “As I clung there, I saw the poor fellow who had been chatting with me strike the furnace. He curled up like a worm in that heat.”

The furnace was on the far side of the building, away from the field, which may have saved some lives as most spectators crowded to the other side. Unfortunately, a 50-foot drop to the floor could kill just the same, especially for those bashed and battered by others falling on them.

Rescuers were staggered by what they found as bodies were scattered all over the factory floor. There were desperate moans of the injured and the inescapable smell of burning clothing and roasted flesh. It first seemed as if hundreds must be dead. “The sight was awful,” said a fireman who’d been on the roof but escaped the fall. “We knew not which way to turn or what to do.” Practically every phone in the neighborhood was calling for help, and anything with wheels, from wagons to butcher carts, was commandeered to rush the wounded and dying to city hospitals, which were frantically trying to summon doctors back from Thanksgiving dinner.

None of this made much of a difference to the participants and spectators to the football game. Those in the high bleachers could see the flurry of ambulances outside, and some could hear police and ushers appeal to the stands for doctors. With no way to communicate through the noise, information about the terrible accident was slow to spread through the crowd and never reached the field.

The game was settled in the final minutes by a single score—the first successful field goal in the history of the “Big Game.” At the final whistle, hundreds of Stanford fans surged onto the field, carrying the star players on their shoulders and beginning a parade down Market Street to the Palace Hotel. Elsewhere, as if in another world, panicked crowds were besieging the city’s hospitals. Police blockaded doors to the Southern Pacific Hospital at nearby 14th and Mission streets to keep away the onlookers and grief-stricken survivors. The scenes within looked like something from a battlefield. “Little boys in knee-breeches were laid on the floor all along the length of the hall, some writhing with pains and calling for father and mother,” reported the San Francisco Call.

A similar frenzy happened outside the morgue as coroner’s deputies began to deliver bodies, some on makeshift stretchers made from fragments of the destroyed roof. The influx forced officials to open the city’s new morgue, still under construction.

One of the first victims was 12-year-old William Eckfeldt, whose weeping father recognized his disfigured body by his socks. Then came 17-year-old William Valencia, whose grandfather was the namesake of nearby Valencia Street. Edgar Flahavan, a student at Mission Grammar School, died in an ambulance.

While the tragedy claimed victims of a range of ages, the oldest, Mekke Van Dyk, was a 46-year-old miner. Most of the others were boys and young men, with the youngest, Lawrence Miel, having turned nine only a month earlier. Most of them lived within walking distance of the stadium grounds. Thirteen were declared dead that day, and scores were hospitalized, with further fatalities rolling in.

The city plunged into mourning. One paper wrote that anyone returning from a trip instantly knew something terrible had happened from the expression on people’s faces. The first to be buried was Hector McNeill, 14, the only son of his recently widowed mother, who’d given him money to see the game. He was a night school student who worked at a dry goods store. Then on Sunday came the public peak of sorrow—nine victims buried in a flurry of funerals that ran into one another. “From 9 o’clock in the morning until four in the afternoon, there was no time at which the funeral procession of someone of the young victims of the catastrophe might not be seen making its way toward the cemetery,” the Call wrote. The disaster appeared on the front page of the New York Times and dominated local papers.

But even San Francisco would soon move on. The city had quickly convened a grand jury to assign blame for the disaster. Factory keepers and the police insisted their men had done everything possible to keep out the crowd and denied testimony that workers had offered entrance to the roof for a fee. The jury seemed ready to hang the disaster on police incompetence. “It is very strange that the police officials did not detail enough men to the football game to keep people from crowding dangerous places,” one juror said.

Just seven days after the disaster and four days after Fred Lilly, the 21-year-old son of a wealthy New York merchant, became the 22nd fatality, the jury blamed the dead. “[T]he deceased had no business being there,” it declared in a story the Chronicle relegated to page 14. “No one can be held responsible for their deaths other than themselves.”

More than a century after it happened, the catastrophe remains the deadliest sporting disaster in American history. Yet, one is almost utterly forgotten in the records of Cal, Stanford, and San Francisco. Unlike the 1898 and 1899 Big Games, there’s no statue to the 1900 contest. There is no plaque at the site, now a University of California San Francisco building. You can barely find mention of the event in local history books. Now we collect the great and beautiful products from these early glasshouses without even thinking about the hell inside or the young men who made our bottles.

Reference to: Sudden Death: Boys Fell to Their Doom in S.F.'s Forgotten Disaster, Joe Eskenazi, San Francisco Weekly, August 2012 The Big Game Disaster of 1900, Stanford Magazine, November-December 2015

CALL FOR HISTORICAL IMAGES

The FOHBC, led by board member Michael Seeliger, has started a major new initiative to preserve our history.

We would like your assistance in locating potentially long-lost images before it is too late as they could potentially be forgotten forever. We are looking for photographs, either in black and white or color of the great collections, collectors, bottle shows and displays of yesteryear. Our goal is to gather, enhance and index this material digitally and make it available to our members and collectors for generations to come.

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We prefer images in digital format, jpg or pdf format, or original photos that we will scan and archive, or return. Please specify. The highest resolution possible. Please caption each image. If you know of anyone who may have some of these images like club historians, or old collectors, please let them know or provide contact info for these people we may have lost track of. We are also looking for older bottles books to scan and archive on our web sites. Thank you. Michael Seeliger N8211 Smith Road Brooklyn, Wisconsin 53521 mwseeliger@gmail.com 608.575.2922

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