Deathtrap: Boston's Pickwick Club Disaster

By John E. Keefe

The holiday eve festivities in the dingy, second floor speakeasy showed no signs of abating as the clock neared three that Fourth of July morning in 1925. The orchestra had just finished a lively ragtime number, and doz

• Language: English
• Publisher: Menotomy Publishing
• Release date: Feb 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9798987730027

Book preview

The small, five-piece orchestra had played just a few notes of the up-tempo and easily recognized Twelfth Street Rag when couples began to make their way toward the dance floor from every corner of the crowded room. The women, in their knee-length shift dresses, looked somewhat more fashionable than their partners. Most of the men had left their jackets draped over the back of their chairs, and were approaching the floor in their shirtsleeves. The tune the orchestra had begun playing was a perfect match for what was then the most popular dance craze in the country—the Charleston.

Once again, John Owen and Mae Lawson made no attempt to get up from their chairs. Owen had decided to sit this one out, just like he sat out the last one, and the one before that. The thirty-one-year-old Back Bay man didn’t care much for dancing— especially the fast, modern steps—and in the summer of 1925 there wasn’t much call for anything else.

I’m kind of clumsy, so I didn’t dance much, Owen told a reporter the next day.

Mae Lawson, on the other hand, loved to dance, and someone in the room noticed her disappointment. People were still converging on the dance floor when a stranger approached the table.

Would you mind if I ask the young lady to dance? he asked Owen.

Not at all, go right ahead, Owen replied.

The couple were on their first date that night. Twenty-nine- year-old Mae Lawson was a newcomer to the Boston area, and lived with her younger sister in Brookline. Mrs. Lawson had recently separated from her husband, Owen said later. They hadn’t been married very long, and she was brokenhearted. I knew she liked to dance, and I urged her to accompany me to the club. We got there shortly after midnight.

If Owen was trying to impress Mrs. Lawson, he took quite a chance when he brought her to the Pickwick Club. It was still one of Boston’s more popular speakeasies, but the regulars who came every night were a far cry from the in-crowd it attracted when it first opened eighteen months earlier. The club’s location, in what had formerly been the elegant Café Dreyfus on Beach Street, doubtlessly played a part in drawing some of those original visitors.

In its heyday, the Dreyfus ranked up there with the finest restaurants in the city, and was the unquestionable centerpiece of the five-story Hotel Dreyfus. The Boston American called it one of the most ornate eating places in the country. The Dreyfus had begun to lose some of its allure by the time the United States entered the First World War, and it closed a few years later when the owner decided to call it quits and shut down the entire hotel. The old building then remained more or less vacant for almost four years until the Pickwick Club moved into the ground floor.

It didn’t take long for the Pickwick to become one of the best- known nightspots in the city. It was a place where truck drivers, hairdressers, and grocery store owners could rub elbows with bankers, executives, politicians, athletes, and people in show business. The Boston Sunday Globe described the club’s clientele as, Men without collars, men in evening dress, heavily painted women, middle-aged couples from the country, school-marms, and flappers.

The good times rolled on for several months, and then things began to change. Regular customers couldn’t help but notice that the well-known and the well-to-do weren’t stopping by nearly as often as they once had, and a louder, rougher element had begun to fill the void. What’s more, the club’s open and flagrant violations of the Volstead Act—the law that enforced the ban on the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages—hadn’t gone unnoticed. Federal Prohibition agents raided the club in January, and the Boston Police conducted another raid a few weeks later. As if those problems weren’t enough, the club’s owners received some unexpected and very unwelcome news when their one-year lease came up for renewal. A group of local businessmen had decided to open a new restaurant, and they began by scouting several downtown streets in search of a suitable locale. The Pickwick Club’s prime, ground floor site suited them to a T. It didn’t matter that someone else already leased the space. The three men were part of the inner circle at city hall, and they had no intention of taking no for an answer. That left the Pickwick Club’s officers with only two choices, and neither one was very attractive. They could relocate the club upstairs to the former banquet hall on the second floor, or they could move somewhere else. Although they weren’t happy about it, they agreed to move upstairs.

The change did nothing to bolster the club’s reputation. If anything, it tarnished it further. The old banquet room, with its plain, dated décor, paled in comparison with the swanky ground floor café. It wasn’t long before the last few upper-class customers stopped coming. One newspaper even said the Pickwick Club was turning into something of an underworld social center. Arguments, confrontations, and even fistfights became an almost nightly occurrence. Some of them escalated into brawls so large the club’s bouncers had to seek help from the police. That holiday eve was no exception. The Boston Police were there twice during the three hours that Owen and Mrs. Lawson were inside.

It was pretty wild in there—horns, and rattles, and firecrackers too. People had been lighting and throwing them all night, Owen told a reporter.

Thanks to its state charter, the club was exempt from Boston’s stringent closing laws, and could have remained open all night, but manager Jimmy Glennon always closed at four. The orchestra, conducted by his younger brother Billy, stopped playing an hour earlier. Neither of the Glennon brothers objected if a customer wanted to get up and croon a song or two with the orchestra. Quite the opposite, they encouraged it, and on any given night several singers were likely to stop by. Patrons who came that Fourth of July eve enjoyed a special treat. A seven-piece Hawaiian orchestra made up of recently discharged sailors played for a while. Like the other guest entertainers, they didn’t receive any compensation for their performance. The Hawaiians, with their mandolins, guitar, violin, and banjo, played to a different beat than the regular orchestra, and while some of the dancers had trouble keeping step, everyone enjoyed the music. The ex-sailors left right after midnight because one of them had to go to work the next morning. The Pickwick Club orchestra then took over.

Several singers stopped by the club that night, and they took turns entertaining the patrons with popular tunes like Sweet Georgia Brown, If You Knew Suzie, and Yes Sir, That’s My Baby. At one point four of them got up and joined in a vocal rendition of another popular song called West of the Great Divide. It was almost ten minutes to three when they stepped down and returned to their seats. The orchestra still had time to play two more numbers. The last dance was always something mellow, but for the second-last, Billy Glennon chose a fast number. Although the crowd had gradually begun to thin, somewhere around 125 people were still inside, seated around the club’s forty-plus tables, and many of them were eager for one last chance to do the Charleston. The small, fifteen-by-thirty-five- foot, linoleum-covered dance floor quickly filled.

Anna McKee was the club’s coatroom attendant that night. The widowed mother of three spoke with a reporter who came to her Dorchester home the next day. It was really crowded, she told him, and it was really hot. None of the men on the dance floor had their jackets on. They brought in extra tables last night because the crowd was so large. They even put tables in front of the bar.

Joe Downey played trumpet with the Pickwick Club orchestra. He said he had never seen so many couples on the dance floor. Most people knew the song and liked to dance to it, and the dance space was packed, he added.

Owen’s table was on the far side of the smoke-filled room— almost up against the outside wall, and separated from the door by the jam-packed dance floor. He was still sitting there when the pulsating music finally ended. A few of the dancers started to make their way back to their seats, but most of them remained on the floor, applauding while they waited for the last dance. Owen wasn’t surprised to see that Mrs. Lawson and her partner were among them.

Billy Glennon had just begun to look through his sheet music for a suitable piece when the tiny red, yellow, and green light bulbs that dotted the ceiling grew noticeably dim. Earl Davis, the club’s busboy, was a few feet away and he felt something trickle onto his hand. His first thought was that one of the toilets on the third floor had overflowed, but when he looked up, the ceiling was bone dry. Some kind of dusty powder was drifting down. Billy, there’s sand coming down from the ceiling, he said. Glennon glanced up just in time to see a big piece of plaster fall. A moment later the lights began to flicker just as a loud crack like the snap of a bullwhip resounded throughout the room. Thirty- one-year-old Arthur McNeil of Jamaica Plain thought someone had fired a revolver. To Owen, it sounded like a very loud firecracker.

Cambridge cab driver Tom Garvey was just inside the door, waiting for a fare, when the lights went dim. I looked over at the corner and I saw everyone jump up, he told a reporter from the Boston Globe. I thought it was a fight at first, but all of a sudden there was a big noise and the lights went out. The next thing I knew I was lying down with things pressing into my back and sides. Someone’s foot was on my shoulder. I tried to get up on my hands and knees, but something heavy was on top of me, and I was choking on the dust and dirt. A lot of things went through my head. I could hear people fighting to get out when someone grabbed hold of me. Garvey escaped with only minor injuries.

Clifford Cusick of Dorchester was standing near Garvey, just inside the door, when the floor began to sag. I fell onto my hands and knees, he told a reporter, and I grabbed hold of a table leg in front of me and pulled myself along. The floor seemed to be cracking, piece by piece. There was a jam of people on the stairs, under me and on top of me, all fighting to get out. Clifford suffered a broken arm while fleeing the building.

Anna McKee also thought a fight had broken out, but then the wall started to crumble, and pieces of the ceiling began to rain down. The plaster and dust swept across the room like a wave, headed right toward the people on the dance floor. Just then, the lights went out, and the room became pitch black. McKee began to panic. Her hand brushed against a man’s shirtsleeve in the darkness, and she screamed for help. She could barely hear her own voice over the deafening roar, and she was afraid he hadn’t heard her, but he grabbed hold of her hand and pulled her toward the stairway. She remembered being aware that the hem of her dress caught on something as she rushed down the stairs and had started to tear, but she had no recollection of how she received the injuries that left her arms and legs covered with scrapes and bruises. Anna McKee never learned the name of the man who pulled her to safety.

John Owen spoke afterward about what happened right after the loud, explosive noise: A second later the room was filled with shrieks, and the floor on one side started to give way, and the dancing couples were thrown into a gaping wound in the floor. I turned around just in time to see Mrs. Lawson and her partner disappear through the floor. There was screaming as a whole bunch of dancers were suddenly just swallowed up.

Owen said he jumped up just as the lights went out and started for the door, but he lost his balance and began to slide toward the hole. It looked like a black pit and I couldn’t see the bottom. I tried to crawl back, but there was nothing to grab hold of. It was too steep and I kept slipping, he recalled. Owen slid feet first into the cavernous hole, and fell almost twenty feet in total darkness before he landed on something solid. Bricks and furniture and pieces of wood continued to crash down all around him, and a large piece of flooring landed on his leg. He tried to lift it, but it was much too heavy. It seemed like I was trapped there for hours until the police rescued me, he said.

Pickwick Club coat room attendant Anna McKee, speaking with reporters at her Dorchester home several hours after the collapse.

©Bettmann / Contributor, Getty Images

Used with permission

John Owen suffered only a few bruises and a twisted knee; Mae Lawson wasn’t that lucky. Firefighters found her body buried deep in the rubble almost twenty hours after the collapse. The fate of the unidentified man who asked her to dance remains unknown.

Catherine Walker didn’t even get to her feet before the floor gave way. The twenty-five-year-old Roxbury woman was sitting at a table near Owen, chatting with some friends while they watched the crowd on the dance floor. She told a Boston Sunday Advertiser reporter: Suddenly, without any warning, the wall of the building fell in, bringing me down with it. I felt like I was falling down, down, down into a bottomless pit. Then something heavy, I think it was a falling timber, caught one of my feet and pinned me beneath it.

Patrons like Owen and Walker had no chance of escape. The former banquet room had only one doorway, and it was just too far away.

Mary Peterson of Charlestown told a reporter from the Boston American: Everybody ran for the exit at once. The floor fell down in a slanting way and I could see girls and men slide to their death. There was one table with five people, and they just dropped into the hole—the table, the chairs, and the food. Peterson joined the panic-stricken crowd that made a mad dash for the stairs. She remembered that someone gave her a hard shove on the way down. The next thing she remembered was being outside on the sidewalk.

Trumpet player Joe Downey later recalled: The walls shook and rattled, and then the whole ceiling crashed down upon us while the floor slipped away from beneath our feet. I thought it was an earthquake. Those in the center of the floor got it worse. I saw a couple torn apart. The man was struggling to pull his partner back to safety, but she was carried down by the debris.

Nineteen-year-old John McLaughlin had no intention of going to the Pickwick Club that night. He and his friend Eddie Whalen were on their way home from a midnight bonfire in South Boston when someone in their group suggested they stop at the Pickwick Club. McLaughlin tried to beg off. He had to work the next morning even though it was a holiday, and he told his friends he thought he would call it a night and go home, but they insisted he come in for just one drink. McLaughlin didn’t want to be a spoilsport, and he agreed. The group had only been in the club for about fifteen minutes when the loud crack thundered throughout the building just as it began to shake.

John and I grabbed hold of each other for support, Whalen told a reporter, but then the floor started to give way and we couldn’t hold on. John slipped and fell. I watched him slide down into the hole in the floor and disappear. I couldn’t do anything to save him.

Jimmy Corso had traveled to Boston from his home in West Haven, Connecticut to spend the holiday weekend with friends. A visit to the Pickwick Club was one of the top items on their to-do list. While I was watching the dancers, Corso recalled, the wall began to fall in one corner. It just seemed to slip down. I ran for the door, but I couldn’t reach it before the floor gave way. I slid down into the cellar with five other fellows and a pile of wreckage on top of me. I could hear firemen chopping their way through the wreckage, but they sounded a long way off. It seemed like they were taking centuries to reach us. It took three hours before rescue workers were able to reach the Connecticut man. He was hospitalized with multiple contusions and abrasions.

A twenty-four-year-old chemist from Everett was trapped close by. Richard Lovejoy told a reporter he heard a cracking sound and saw the floor begin to lift right in front of him. I started for the door, but before I got there the floor caved in and I went down with it. Lovejoy tumbled into the hole head first, and he was pinned in that position for three hours with another man’s foot pressing down on his head. Every once in a while, I would see some light which indicated rescuers were getting close, but then the light would disappear. I kept yelling continually, he recalled. Firemen reached him shortly after they extricated Corso. He was taken to Boston City Hospital with a dislocated right shoulder.

Frank Castelone was the man whose foot rested on Lovejoy’s head. He credited Lovejoy with saving his life. I would have suffocated if it weren’t for him. Castelone said he saw the wall give way, and he yelled a warning to the people on the dance floor. As I ran, the floor gave way beneath me, and I slid down on top of Lovejoy. He said Lovejoy was able to reach out and grab hold of a stick. He poked an air hole in the wreckage for me. When the hole filled up, he made a new one. Castelone was hospitalized with a fractured skull.

Leo Romano made a dive for the wall when the floor began to sag. The thirty-three-year-old West End grocer later recalled: Beams and other things were falling all around us, but somehow, we didn’t get hit. We stood still and found ourselves in sort of a cave under the rafters. Sal Jefferson was right behind us, but a beam fell and pinned him down. We were able to lift it off and get him out. Someone on the street raised a plank to us and we used it to slide down. Jimmy Corso and Frank Castelone were with us, but they couldn’t reach the wall and they went down with the dance floor.

Sadie Belan was near the edge of the dance floor when it began to collapse. I heard a rumbling noise and then the ceiling crashed down on our heads, the thirty-year-old Dorchester woman recalled. Some man grabbed me and pushed me toward the doorway. I was caught in the jam at the door and swept downstairs. Belan escaped with only a few bruises. A reporter who caught up with her at home the next day said she was still quite upset about the loss of her pocketbook and her fur wrap.

Rocco Scarparto had vivid memories of the thunder-like rumble that nearly drowned out Anna McKee’s cries. The heavyset East Boston man was the second-floor doorman at the club that night. It sounded like every building in the neighborhood was being pulled apart, he told a reporter.

The hysterical screams of the terrified people tumbling into the deep, black hole troubled Ethel Conlon the most. I couldn’t get them out of my mind for days, she said. They were just awful.

Max Gartz was dead tired when he and his girlfriend arrived at the club about twenty minutes to three that morning. They had been at a party in Revere, and stopped in for a drink on their way home. Gartz found a table just inside the doorway, only a short distance from the stairs. He placed his hat on a chair, ordered a beer, and then looked at his watch. It was exactly 2:45. The orchestra was playing, and the dance floor was packed. He thought there might have been about 150 people in the club. His girlfriend wanted to dance, but Gartz said no. He told her he was just too tired. That decision almost certainly saved their lives. The waitress had just brought his beer when he heard a loud crash and saw the floor begin to quiver and shake. He too thought an earthquake had struck. Gartz and his girlfriend ran for the door, and managed to escape down the stairs in the darkness. Like several other survivors, he was sure that he was the last one to make it out to the street.

Virginia Vara was there with her husband that night. She reached out and immediately grabbed hold of his hand when the loud crack thundered throughout the room. The two West Enders ran for the door, but the lights went out before they reached it. People were pushing and shoving, and she lost her grip on her husband’s hand.

Frank, she screamed in panic.

I’m all right. Keep going, he shouted back.

Virginia Vara was one of the last, if not the very last, person to escape through the doorway that night. Her husband was just a bit too far behind. She made it down the stairs to safety; twenty- five-year-old Frank Vara plummeted to his death amidst a thunderous avalanche of debris.

The holiday revelers who packed the Pickwick Club that Friday night hadn’t the slightest inkling that the old building was unsafe. The sight of a trapdoor almost right alongside the dance floor must have puzzled the first-time visitors. Some of them no doubt noticed that the large room had only one doorway, but that was not unusual at the time. The City of Boston didn’t adopt its first building code until 1871, but the regulations only applied to new construction and major renovations.