The Winecoff Hotel on Fire

Author’s note: This was originally published a few years ago.

It was winter in 1946 and a relieved America was still celebrating its victory in World War II. The Cold War had just started. A showdown between the Truman Administration and the defiant labor leader of the coal miners, John L. Lewis, who was ignoring a federal anti-strike injunction, was getting the headlines. Movies advertised included a Hedy Lamarr drama entitled The Strange Woman and a light-hearted comedy called Three Little Girls in Blue that was proclaimed to be “in Technicolor, too!” Bob Hope had made a recent appearance on a Georgia Tech radio program known as Phil Baker’s “Take It or Leave It.” Atlantans were gearing up for Christmas, many of them undoubtedly buying presents on the “time-payment plans” that were then being aggressively marketed.

In the wee hours of December 7, the fifth anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, disaster struck Atlanta, Georgia. A fire swept through the respected Winecoff Hotel where 280 people were sleeping. The fire lasted at least two hours and twenty-two minutes; it killed 119 people — 19 of them Georgia high school students attending a YMCA Youth Assembly in Atlanta — and injured many others. Most victims died by suffocation as the flames closed in but many were killed by injuries sustained when they made desperate leaps from the building. Firefighters rushed to the scene but their ladders could go no higher than the eighth floor and their nets could not withstand jumps of more than seventy feet. At the time the Winecoff Hotel fire occurred it was the worst hotel fire in the history of the world and it remains, to this day, the worst hotel fire in the history of the United States.

In a terrible historical irony like that of the “unsinkable” Titanic, the Winecoff Hotel had boasted that it was “fireproof” because of its concrete and steel construction and brick exterior. As is so often the case in such catastrophes, human hubris played a decisive role in that of the Winecoff Hotel fire. Because of the belief that the Winecoff was fireproof, it had not been equipped with either fire escapes or sprinklers and such safety measures were not legally mandatory at the time it was built.

There was one respect in which the allegedly fireproof hotel lived up to its name: the superstructure of the building itself survived, standing as a burned-out hulk after the blaze, while people caught within it died.

In the investigations that followed the fire, two major theories emerged as to how it was set. One held that it was an accident, caused when a heavily drinking smoker dozed off with a lit cigarette. Another called the fire arson. However, the fire’s origin was never definitely established.

The Winecoff Hotel fire launched a thoroughgoing overhaul of fire safety practices, not only in Atlanta, but throughout the country. President Harry Truman called a President’s Conference on fire prevention within a year of the tragedy.

According to the Atlanta Fire Department’s Public Information Officer Jolene Freeman, many changes have been made that would make a similar disaster unlikely to happen again. “The major change,” Ms. Freeman says, “was the enclosing of stairwells to allow a safe escape route.” Other mechanisms that would prevent another such inferno from striking a building in the city include, Ms. Freeman elaborates, “the use of alarm systems, the use of smoke detectors, the 1989 Fire Code which requires buildings to have sprinkler systems and the strict enforcement of Fire Codes.” Nets are no longer used in rescues; they were outlawed because of the high rate of injuries associated with them. Moreover, the Atlanta Fire Department today could rapidly bring in a larger firefighter force than it could in 1946 because of the Georgia Mutual Aid Agreement. The Georgia Mutual Aid is a pool of fire personnel and equipment that supports fire departments in an emergency when their resources are depleted.

For several years after the fire, the hull of the building stood unused. Then, in 1951, it was re-opened by new owners as the Peachtree on Peachtree Hotel — complete with sprinklers, fire escapes and fire doors. It did not appear to be “jinxed” and soon turned a profit. In 1967, it was sold to the Georgia Baptist Convention who turned it into a retirement home called the Peachtree on Peachtree Inn. However, that eventually folded. Now the building is unused and stands grimly in the midst of the lively activity and bustling businesses of Atlanta’s downtown. There is a plaque beside it honoring the firefighters who battled the flame of the Winecoff Hotel fire together with the victims of it.