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and, apparently, deleted most of them if not all. But I'll reprint it here, since I wrote it. :)
***
Sky of Fire
Fifty years after the Winecoff Hotel inferno,
survivors recall a night in hell
Ed Kiker Williams was looking forward to the trip to Atlanta -- not for the Christmas shopping, but for the drive itself.
"We didn't see too many new cars in Cordele in 1946," says Williams, "and my aunt had just bought a new Buick. It was a big thrill for me because I was going to be able to drive it to Atlanta."
Williams' aunt, Dorothy Smith, lived in nearby Fitzgerald. She had planned a shopping excursion to the capitol city with her sister, Boisclair Williams. She arrived in Cordele on Friday morning, Dec. 6, 1946, along with her children Fred, Dotsy and Mary. Ed, 17, and his sister Clair brought the total to seven travelers headed north on Highway 41 toward Perry.
"My sister wanted to see the movie Song of the South," recalls Williams, who still lives in Cordele. "I had been to Atlanta once or twice; it was a big city and I was a country boy. There were more people downtown than there are now, and we were right down where it was busy."
Reid and Cary Horne also planned to stay in Atlanta that night. The Hornes were Williams' cousins and also lived in Cordele, but were unaware of the Smiths' and Williams' presence in the city, even when they all checked into the same hotel.
Their parallel course would end there, however, for they would soon meet different fates at that hotel. This Saturday, Dec. 7, marks the 50-year anniversary of the Winecoff Hotel fire, which claimed 119 lives and is still considered the deadliest hotel fire in the nation's history.
The 15-floor Winecoff was a striking edifice, heralded in a 1913 advertisement as "Atlanta's Newest and Finest." Even 33 years later, the city's tallest hotel easily stood out among surrounding downtown buildings -- and not just because of its height. The hotel was encased in a brick shell, which allowed the owners to advertise the building as "fireproof."
The Winecoff had no sprinklers -- or fire escapes. Building codes in effect when the hotel was built required fire escapes only on buildings whose base measured 5,000 square feet or more; the lot at the corner of Peachtree and Ellis streets where the Winecoff stands is just shy of that figure.
The city revised the codes in 1943, following a rash of downtown fires in the '30s. All buildings -- including those like the Winecoff, which were already standing -- were to have sprinklers and escape stairwells. The city attorney, however, decided against making the codes retroactive for existing structures. (Even in the wake of the Winecoff inferno, business-friendly Atlanta policymakers would resist forcing expensive renovations on downtown landlords.)
In the aftermath of World War II, Atlanta was a city on the edge of great change and prosperity. Soldiers returning from Europe and the Pacific flooded the city of 300,000 and, some years before the booming expansion of the metro area's sprawling suburbs, demand for living space downtown was high.
The Winecoff had no vacancies on Dec. 6, 1946. Many of the rooms were occupied by discharged veterans or by permanent or semi-permanent residents. Among them were William Fleming Winecoff, the hotel's builder, and his wife, Grace.
Winecoff, 76, had come to Atlanta before the turn of the century, and had played a part in the development of the Ansley Park area. The couple had lived rent-free on the 10th floor for 30 years, enjoying the view from a hotel that boasted "every room an outside room" -- the same rooms from which scores of people would leap or fall to their deaths.
Winecoff would be among the 119 fatalities when the sun rose on Saturday morning.
Fire!
"I awakened and heard a scream," says Cary Horne, now 80. "My husband had to be at the doctor early the next morning, so we'd gone to bed early and I woke right up. I'm a fresh-air freak, and had opened the window before going to bed. When I woke up and looked outside, I said, 'Reid, the hotel's on fire.' He said, 'No it's not. Come back to bed.' Then he got up and saw how it was on the floors below us."
By the time the Hornes awakened, the fire -- though still young -- had already overtaken much of the hotel. In addition to its other structural oversights, the Winecoff's winding, central staircase had no fire doors to isolate each floor. On the top floor, also the top of the staircase, the Hornes' room was essentially the terminus of a chimney.
"Reid opened the hall door and it was all we could do to close it again," says Horne. "They told us later that the temperature outside our door was several thousand degrees. We started running water in the lavatory, wetting blankets and stuffing them under the door."
The room next to them was in worse shape. "That room must have been a smokestack," she recalls. "We put our hands on the wall between the rooms, and it was just as hot as it could be."
Reid Horne looked out the window overlooking Peachtree Street again, northward toward Davison's, where Macy's is now. Because of the wind, there was less smoke enveloping that end of the building. Horne also saw, just below the windows on the 15th floor, an 8-inch ledge running the length of the building.
Cary Horne remembers their escape. "There was a man in the room below us, and he grabbed my ankles while Reid held my hands," letting her down the side of the building. "My husband was a big man -- 6 foot 3 -- and when he came down he had to hold on to the window and the bricks, because the other man could not have held him if he had lost his grip."
Once in the room, where they discovered burn holes in their clothes from the sparks rising through the night air, they went straight back out the window to the ledge. Clinging to the stuccoed building about 100 feet above the street, they inched their way to the northeast corner and climbed back inside.
On the other side of the Winecoff, a short, 10-foot-wide alley runs between the building and its neighbor, the Mortgage Guarantee Building (now called the Carnegie Building), whose roof was just below the Winecoff's 15th floor. This view greeted Ed Williams and his mother and sister from the windows of room 1520.
"Mother woke up and said she thought someone had thrown a smoke bomb. We opened the door, and smoke just boiled in the room. We closed the door and the transom, but there was so much smoke that pretty soon we couldn't see the lights." Boisclair Williams called out to her sister, down the hall in 1530, "Stay in your room!"
The Williamses went to the double windows seeking fresh air. Ed Williams recalls, "After a while there was no more talking. Then I realized that neither my mother nor my sister were there." Boisclair and Clair had passed out from the smoke. "I felt around for them and got them back in the window. We were there for a long time, maybe 45 minutes or an hour."
He was soon driven to climb out the window and sit on the sill. "I held on to that window for I don't know how long," before falling. The next thing he remembers is a voice saying, "A boy just hit this ladder."
Williams had fallen directly onto a ladder stretched from the roof next door. He bounced once and landed on it again, suffering only a broken heel and a split scalp.
By the time he was carried to the street, his mother, sister, aunt and cousins were dead.
The Hornes, meanwhile, had continued their odyssey, climbing back up to the 16th floor on a sheet rope. "There were a lot of sheets in that room," recalls Cary Horne. "The rope must have gone all the way to the sixth or seventh floor." They decided to descend once again, hoping to reach the rescue ladders whose maximum length was 85 feet.
Another member of the party in the corner room, Gladys Mitchell, went first, followed by Cary Horne. They had made it to the 12th floor, each one alternating on the rope, when a young girl named Anne Smith climbed out the top window. Horne, resting while Mitchell was on the rope, looked up in time to see her fall.
"It seemed like she barely touched the sheets. She hit my left hand and then knocked the other woman off the rope."
The impact of Anne Smith's body on the pavement below was audible to Reid Horne on the Winecoff's top level. Gladys Mitchell's arm became entangled in a cable supporting the hotel's marquee; the heavy coat she wore saved her life, its bulk keeping the cable from tearing off her arm.
Once the exhausted remaining members of the corner room retrieved Cary Horne from her perch below, they had to wait to be rescued. It was 6:30 a.m., half an hour after the flames were finally extinguished, before firemen reached them and led them down the dark, soaked staircase to the sidewalk.
Aftermath
The cause of the Winecoff Hotel fire has never been conclusively determined. Following several investigations -- which seemed as intent on clearing the building's owners of any wrongdoing as finding the cause of the catastrophe -- the fire was ruled an accident, caused by a cigarette dropped onto a rollaway bed. The bed in question, however, was not completely burned, even though temperatures during the fire are thought to have reached 1,500 degrees in places.
Evidence collected following the conflagration, including the fact that the flames spread very quickly before being discovered, points toward arson.
In their 1993 book The Winecoff Fire: The Untold Story of America's Deadliest Hotel Fire, Sam Heys and Allen Goodwin point the finger at Roy McCullough, a career criminal who had likely played a part in a shady poker game in the hotel the night of the fire. Although questioned about his activities that night, McCullough was not charged in the blaze and died in 1964 while serving a life sentence for other crimes.
In 1993, several living survivors of the fire and families of several more were reunited in Atlanta. Ed Williams was approached by a man who said, "I've been wanting to see you. You probably saved my life." This was probably Richard Hamil, who was 9 at the time and staying with his father in the hotel. They were rescued from room 1522, next door to the Williamses. The firemen who liberated them had gone, at Williams' request, to try to save his mother and sister.
"There were only five or six survivors at the reunion," says Williams. "Mostly it was the families of survivors. A lot of people didn't feel like talking about the fire for many years." Williams himself has been willing to speak of the fire only in the last two decades.
History claimed the story of that night in other ways, as well. The building itself went through a series of owners, becoming the Peachtree on Peachtree Hotel in the 1950s, then a retirement home in 1967. By the '80s, it was all but abandoned, its demolition planned. But financing for the project fell through, and the Winecoff, now dilapidated, was auctioned in 1990.
During the summer of 1996, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the building was being purchased, to be renovated for residential and commercial use. Calls placed to both the real estate agent and mortgage company involved in the sale went unreturned, and there is no sign of new construction at 174-178 Peachtree Street.
The Winecoff's tragic history is now all but forgotten. The alley is full of trash and fenced with barbed wire, and the fire escape -- belatedly added to the building's south face in the '50s -- is rusting away. So tall for its time, the old hotel now seems lost in a downtown of giants.
Just a few minutes away, as one looks back toward the city from the I-75/85 connector, an effort to pick out the Winecoff is futile. It has already disappeared.
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