Geysers of Fire in Cleveland—The Very Streets Erupted

This is not Europe in 1944.  It is Cleveland as authorities and volunteers search for survivors in the rubble of some of the ruins left by the East Ohio Gas Company LNG explosion.

Plenty of things and places in the world were going boom with deadly intent and effect in 1944.  Perhaps that is why except for a dwindling few survivors, the families of victims,  and the scarred heart of a city that the explosions and fires set off by a leaking above  ground storage tank containing Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) on Friday, October 20, 1944 in Cleveland, Ohio are largely forgotten. 

The East Ohio Gas Company tank farm set near the shores of Lake Erie on 61st Street.  The plant was the very first LNG facilities built in the United States and was still relatively new having been opened in 1941.

Surrounding it was one of the city’s older neighborhoods, mostly small frame houses occupied by European immigrants and second generation industrial workers.  Mixed in were factories, churches, schools, and small shops along the arterial streets.  It was mid-afternoon.  Many were gone from their homes, away at work in the plants and mills of the city humming at full war time capacity.  Children were in school.  Some women were marketing for their families’ dinner.  But there were plenty of women at home, smaller children, and retired folks.  In Jewish homes, the women were busy with the ritual cleaning to prepare for Shabbat—the Sabbath.

About 2:30 that afternoon a seam on Holding Tank #4 containing 90 million cubic feet of LNG failed leaking heavier than air vapor which sank to the ground and was pushed into the surrounding neighborhood by prevailing winds off of Lake Eerie.  It rapidly found and sank into the open catch basins along the streets of the city sewer system.  It continued to flow through the system and mixed with natural methane gas always present in the system. 

No alarm or warning was made by the Gas plant operators.

What happened next was inevitable.  Almost anything could have set it off—a cigarette flicked away through an open sewer grate, an electrical spark, the rapid build-up of pressure in some pocket.  Within minutes a tremendous blast ripped through the sewer system.  Heavy manhole covers were blown hundreds of feet in the air.  One cover was later found miles to the east in the Glenville neighborhood.  Roaring geysers of flames shot into the air.  Sections of streets collapsed.  In homes and other buildings the flames erupted through toilet, tub, sink, and Floor drains, blowing the roof off the buildings and popping the walls outward like balloons.  The intense heat literally vaporized many victims.

Stunned survivors wandered the streets, many seriously wounded as fiery debris rained down infighting more fires.  The capricious flow of the gas through the sewers meant that damage was spotty through the neighborhood, some homes left standing alone or in small islands. 

As the Fire Department struggled to respond to the enormous catastrophe the Nuns at St. Vitus School and the teachers at a nearby public school,  both of which were fortuitously by-passed by the explosion, quickly calmed and gathered their students and evacuated their buildings, preventing distraught children from rushing home.  They herded the charges to neighborhoods away from the damage.

The initial explosion shook the whole city.  Flames and smoke could be seen for miles.  Being war time, many at first believed the city had been attacked by Nazi bombers or that saboteurs had been at work at the gas plant.  As word spread, workers began to stream out of their factories and head home desperate to find their loved ones.

Fires raged through whole blocks of modest working class homes.

After several minutes and as the fires from the sewers began to subside, many residents concluded that the Fire Department had the situation in hand and returned to their intact or slightly damaged homes.  Twenty minutes after the first blast, a tank adjacent to the leaker exploded leveling the whole Gas Works and pushing new flows of fire through the sewers igniting many of the houses to which survivors had just returned.

The Fire Department struggled for more than a day to completely extinguish the last of the smoldering ruins.  Hospitals across the city and suburbs were overwhelmed with casualties, many of them gruesomely burned.  It took days to reunite scattered families. 
 

Dr. Samuel Gerber, the visibly distraught Cuyahoga County Coroner told the local press that the death toll could exceed 200 but might never be known due to the complete destruction of many bodies.

After weeks of accounting for the missing, authorities finally set the actual death toll at about 130.  The explosions had destroyed most of an area covering more than a square mile of the east side St. Clair-Superior neighborhood.  600 people were left homeless, and seventy houses, two factories, numerous cars and miles of underground infrastructure and street surfaces were destroyed.

In addition to the loss of their homes, furnishings, clothing, and other tangible property many of the families, traditionally distrustful of banks especially after the Depression, lost hoarded  cash, huge amounts of War Bonds, stock certificates, deeds, insurance policies, and other documents for which they could never be made whole.  Because of the uncertainty of these kinds of losses, total losses have been estimated at between $7,000,000 and $15,000,000, including losses at the Gas Works and other industries.

Early headlines did not yet grasp the scope of the disaster.

East Ohio Gas shelled out about $7 million to rebuild homes and repair streets.  Victims and survivors got very little compensation for their injuries, medical expenses, or the loss of loved ones.

LNG storage practices were reformed in the wake of the disaster.  New high-pressure, seamless tanks were developed.  Underground tanks for high volume storage became the norm.  But changes took years.  There were other disasters.  But none as devastating at the one that shattered an autumn afternoon in Cleveland.

The Night Jazz Went Legit

The album cover of the import record of the event gets the date wrong.

On January 18, 1944, almost forty years after Jazz burst from the streets of New Orleans and into the speakeasies and hearts of Americans, the music finally crashed through a glass ceiling into respectability as an art form with an all-star concert broadcast from the hallowed stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.

On hand playing on their own and in collaboration were Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Artie Shaw, Roy Eldridge, Jack Teagarden, Coleman Hawkins, Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Red Norvo, and a couple of girl singers—Billie  Holiday and Mildred Bailey.

The concert had its origins in the desire of a magazine to carve out a new niche among publications.  Esquire had been founded in the depth of the Depression in 1933 as a men’s magazine competing in a genre that had been dominated by “smoker” magazines along the lines of the venerable Police Gazette that mixed sports, scandal, sensationalism, titillating but safely risqué humor, and pictures of pretty girls clad a scantily as the Post Office would allow.   The new magazine was produced on slick paper with modern design elements like industry giants LIFE, LOOK, and The Saturday Evening Post.  It aimed for a more urban and upscale readership than its competitors.

In its first few years the magazine struggled to find and identity and audience.  But by the early 1940’s it had hit on a successful format built around the alluring Vargas and Petty Girl illustrations and contributions of fiction and reportage by literary heavy weights like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alberto Moravia, Andre Gide and Julian Huxley.  The magazine was becoming a hot commodity.

In the midst of World War II as war production cut back on the consumer products which were the back-bone of its advertising, the publisher and editors noted that per copy sales were still strong, especially among GI’s.  Looking forward to when those men would be coming home and when the cornucopia of consumer goods for them would come gushing to market, they looked for ways to secure continued loyalty of the reader base.

One way was to appeal to the cultural interests of the men.  What were they interested in.  The answer was on the radio every night.  Jazz and more jazz.  The Big Band Era was at its heights, but smaller combos playing traditional jazz were still popular.  Why not initiate a Reader’s Poll to pick favorite performers on all of the instruments, singers, and band leaders?

The first poll was launched with great fanfare in 1943 and the results, published in the December issue of the magazine, attracted wide attention.  And some scandal.  There had been previous jazz popularity polls.  But they had been based on feedback from record stores, which were dominated by the young, overwhelmingly white bobby soxer fans of the Big Bands.  The results had inevitable skewed to white musicians. 

But the Esquire poll sampled the more sophisticated audience of the magazines targeted demographic.  Many newspaper critics were shocked when the results were heavily skewed to Black artists. 

On the other hand many of the most hard core jazz fans clustered in the bohemian ghettoes of the big cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, found many of the honorees already passé and accused the magazine of ignoring new, cutting edge sound emerging from the small stages of smoky nightclubs.

Controversy, however, generated interest.  Publisher David Smart came up with the idea of an all-star concert featuring poll winners.  He moved with astonishing speed to set the event up.  By designating the show a benefit for the Navy League, a platform for War Bond sales, and securing the early interest of Armed Forces Radio, he wrapped the event in suitable patriotism which unlocked the doors of the Metropolitan Opera House, previously a guardian of high European culture.

Ticket sales were predictably brisk.  The New York Times reported that $650,000 was raised by ticket sales and 3,600 bonds were sold raised;

1944 Esquire All-American Jazz Concert at the Metropolitan Opera House was broadcast on NBC Blue network and around the world on Armed Forces Radio (distributed on discs) as part of the popular One Night Stand.

The legendary show centered on Armstrong and his early New Orleans style opening up to later mainstream jazz and the Big Band leaders playing together in tighter, smaller combos.  Missing almost entirely were the early strains of what would become the dominant post-war expression of jazz, bebop, only hinted at by a few licks by Coleman Hawkins.

That first show would be followed by two more in ’45 and ’46.  But it was the first one that took on legendary proportions.

Licensing issues in the United States prevented domestic release of recordings.  But when the European copyright on the Armed Forces Radio transcription disc recordings expired, the whole concert was issued on double LP album in the Czechoslovakia in 1998.  Despite the less than stellar recording quality, the set is available in this country as an import and many consider it an essential recording for anyone interested in the history and evolution of jazz.