December 5, 1876: The Brooklyn Theatre Fire

Before the fire

December 5, 1876: A fire breaks out at the Brooklyn Theatre, killing at least 278 people.

The City of Brooklyn was founded in 1854, the result of a merger of several towns, and it would remain a city separate from the City of New York until 1898, the result of a consolidation referendum the year before that also included The Bronx, Queens and Staten Island.

The Brooklyn Theatre opened in 1871, near the corner of Washington Street and Johnson Street, 3 blocks north of the City Hall that would be renamed Borough Hall in 1898. On December 5, 1876, it was staging The Two Orphans, an 1874 play by French authors Adolphe d'Ennery and Eugène Cormon, set during the French Revolution. Two years earlier, it had made a star out of actress Kate Claxton, who was appearing in it again at the Brooklyn.

Over 1,000 people, a full house, were in attendance. At about 11:20 PM, just as the 5th and final act of the play was set to begin, a fire was discovered. Its cause has never been definitively determined. Most of the fatalities were in the highest tier of the theatre, the "family circle." It was accessible by only one stairway, making escape difficult.

After the fire

The fire was the deadliest public building fire in American history up to that point. It has been exceeded by the 1903 Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago, the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston, and in one other fire that did not involve a theater: The 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

In Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery, a large memorial stands over the graves of over 100 unidentified victims.

The intersection of Washington and Johnson Streets no longer exists. Johnson Street does, but Washington Street has been replaced by Cadman Plaza, and the site of the Brooklyn Theatre is now a park adjacent to the Kings County Supreme Court building, across from the Cadman Plaza Post Office. A statue of the Theatre's contemporary, the Brooklyn-based minister Henry Ward Beecher, is adjacent.

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December 5, 1876 was a Tuesday. The only professional team sport in America at the time was baseball, which was out of season. So there were no scores on this historic day.