The Knickerbocker at 100: DC's Perfect Storm
This week marks the 100th anniversary of DC’s infamous “Knickerbocker Storm”. Our friend & colleague Larry Clark at Federal City Private Tours, shares the story in a special piece for the Historic America Journal.
Washington, DC; January 28, 1922
Ever since “That Night,” the well-documented tragedy at Ford’s Theatre has been seared into America’s consciousness. But just 57 years later - 100 years ago this month - another DC theater found a peculiar place in local history. The site of a very different kind of heartbreak, The Knickerbocker Theater - located at 2454 18th Street, NW, at the southwest corner of Columbia Road, in the heart of the Adams-Morgan neighborhood, became the site of an often forgotten piece of DC history.
Harry Crandall’s Knickerbocker Theater was DC’s premier, ultra modern movie palace.
By the 1920s, early screen icons like Charlie Chaplin, Clara Bow and Rudolph Valentino had captured public attention and catapulted motion pictures into a nation-wide phenomenon. The public’s insatiable appetite for Hollywood escapism was clearly no passing fad. This led to another facet of the growing entertainment industry: the golden age of the movie palace. Big cities and small towns all across the nation built these grand, state-of- the-art theaters, many of which survive to this day.
The Knickerbocker’s opulent foyer
The prototype movie palace was typically a large capacity, ornately decorated entertainment center built between the 1910s and the 1940s. These magnificent movie houses would also give birth to some enduring terms, like silver screen or flick. The term trailer also comes from this era because previews were shown after the end of the film, thus, “trailing” the feature.
Harry Crandall owned several theaters in Washington, DC, including the Metropolitan & the Tivoli. He hired a promising local architect, Reginald Geare, to design what would be DC’s most lavish movie palace yet: the 1,700 seat Knickerbocker Theater. Opening its doors in the fall of 1917, the Knickerbocker was the largest and most opulent of all Crandall’s theaters, and quickly became the toast of the Capital City.
On Friday, January 27, 1922, a heavy snowfall began over the entire Mid-Atlantic region, with Washington, DC at its center. The storm continued for more than thirty hours and left DC paralyzed under 28-32 inches of snow in the worst winter storm since 1889. Despite such treacherous conditions, the Knickerbocker would be open for business the following evening.
The featured film that Saturday night was called Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, a 1921 silent comedy, starring Sam Hardy and Doris Kenyon. It is believed there were between 700 and 1,000 patrons in the 1,700 seat theater, a conspicuously good night for the theater, despite the dreadful weather conditions.
As the 70-minute film concluded, the organist continued to play, adding to the enjoyment of the audience. Just after 9 pm, patrons noticed an unexpected, yet distinct creaking, followed by a grinding cracking coming from above. In an instant, this ominous warning gave way to a rolling, ear-splitting and groaning roar. The theater’s flat roof was buckling under the crushing weight of the rapidly accumulating snow! The roof collapsed onto the concrete balcony, causing both to cave in and immediately pancake onto the orchestra section, trapping hundreds below. Along with literal tons of snow and debris, hysteria quickly swept over the crowd.
In short order, a crowd of over 3,000 gathered quickly outside the theater, most wanting to offer help in whatever way they could. However, the lack of an organized rescue effort created further chaos that hampered the actual first responders’ attempts to aid the victims still trapped. Two hours later, a company of US Marines arrived from their famous 8th & I Barracks and order was quickly restored.
Despite the significant military presence, along with the police, firefighters and civilians, exhausted rescuers still had not been able to remove enough debris to reach those who had been seated in the orchestra section by 2:30 pm the following day. Neighboring homes and businesses would be used to stage triage – a process developed in France during World War I to determine the priority of patients' treatment, based on the severity of their condition. Tragically, 98 people died in the calamity including former US Representative Andrew Jackson Barchfeld (R-PA). Another 136 people were injured under the rubble. A nearby church was used as a morgue.
In the wake of the Great Boston Molasses Flood in 1919, structural safety was headline news. Several investigations would be conducted to determine the cause of the shocking devastation: The DC city government as well as the US House of Representatives and US Senate all attempted to get to the bottom of the accident. Eye-witness accounts indicated that theater employees had debated on removing the snow from the roof, but management ultimately settled the issue, deciding that such a labor-intensive effort would not be necessary.
The consensus of various investigations concluded that the collapse was most likely the result of faulty design, blaming the use of arch girders rather than stone pillars to support the roof. However, another investigation determined that the contractor had inserted the steel support beams only 2 inches into the walls rather than the 8 inches that the architect Geare had specified. Although there were numerous lawsuits resulting from the catastrophe, no court of inquiry was able to definitively resolve just who was at fault. While Geare and Crandall would be charged with manslaughter, they were ultimately found not guilty of any wrongdoing. However, both were haunted by the events of January 28, 1922 for the rest of their lives.
In 1923, the year after the collapse, Harry Crandall had a new theater built in the same location, retaining the façade of the old Knickerbocker. The Ambassador Theater, as it was called, would struggle in the 1950s and 60s with the advent of television. The Ambassador would briefly become Ground Zero for the DC Psychedelic Music scene in 1967. The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Hollies, Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, The Youngbloods, Canned Heat and Johnny Lee Hooker all played there. The Ambassador Theater was torn down during the 1960s urban renewal project, and the site is now the location of a bank.
Reginald Geare’s architecture career metaphorically collapsed in the wake of the Knickerbocker disaster and he sadly committed suicide in 1927. Harry Crandall, the most infamous theater owner in Washington, DC since John Ford, unfortunately would take his life ten years later, leaving a note pleading for reporters to not be “too hard on him”.
With the unpredictable winter so far in 2022, we look back 100 years to a crippling winter storm, scientifically, a Category 5 Extratropical Cyclone Blizzard, with over a 500 mile footprint, reaching from North Carolina to Pennsylvania, dumping an astounding 28”-32” of snow and ice in 30 hours, leading to one of the greatest natural disasters in US History, claiming almost 100 lives. This forgotten incident is now known simply as the Knickerbocker Storm.