Forgotten Fires of Chicago: The Lake Michigan Inferno and a Century of Flame

By John F Hogan, Alex A. Burkholder and Robert Hoff

Chicago's war against cinder, flame and smoke did not end with the Great Fire of 1871. That conflagration was only one engagement in a ceaseless and often unrecognized conflict, fought in the most unlikely places. In 1909, fire ripped through the dynamite room of a staging facility one and a half miles off the Lake Michigan shoreline, transforming the pipe-laying operation into a raging inferno. During the World's Columbian Exposition, thousands of fairgoers watched in horror as twelve firefighters were trapped in a blazing ice warehouse. An operagoer left a smoking bomb under his seat at the Auditorium Theater in 1917, and the newly invented smoke ejector arrived too late to save firemen and laborers cut off in a sewer in 1931. Join John Hogan and Alex Burkholder for the history of these forgotten fires and the heroes who fight them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Nov 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781625853028

John F Hogan

Chicago native John F. Hogan is a published historian and former broadcast journalist and on-air reporter (WGN-TV/Radio) who has written and produced newscasts and documentaries specializing in politics, government, the courts and the environment. As WGN-TV's environmental editor, he became the first recipient of the United States Environmental Protection Agency's Environmental Quality Award. His work also has been honored by the Associated Press. Hogan left broadcasting to become director of media relations and employee communications for Commonwealth Edison Company, one of the nation's largest electric utilities. Hogan is the author of Edison's one-hundred-year history, A Spirit Capable, as well as five other Chicago books with The History Press: Chicago Shakedown, Fire Strikes the Chicago Stock Yards, Forgotten Fires of Chicago, The 1937 Chicago Steel Strike and The Great Chicago Beer Riot. He holds a BS in journalism/communications from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and presently works as a freelance writer and public relations consultant.