A Roar Mighty as the Crack of Dawn: The Tragic Story of the Knickerbocker Theater Collapse January 28, 1922

 A large crowd of nearly 1,000 people gathered inside Washington D.C.’s glamorous and elegant Knickerbocker Theater on Saturday night January 28, 1922.

It is the city’s largest movie theater, located on the corner of 18th Street and Columbia Road right in the heart of our nation’s capital.  

The Knickerbocker Theater in addition to showing the silent film era’s latest releases, is also often used as a concert hall and public convention center.  It is renowned across the east coast for its elegant ballrooms and ornate art deco appearance. Built only five years earlier in 1917, the Knickerbocker Theater, with its flat topped roof design is considered to be the epitome of modern architectural style for movie houses the world over.

On this night, the crowd comes to see an on screen adaptation of the hit Broadway comedy Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford.  Saturday night at the Knickerbocker Theater is comedy night and the crowd for Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford is loud and boisterous.

The Knickerbocker Theater in all its 1920's splendor

By the evening of January 28, 1922 it’s been snowing for almost forty-eight consecutive hours in Washington D.C.  Over two feet of snow has fallen and more continues to fall as the crowd shuffles into the Knickerbocker Theater that night in the moments leading up to the 9:00 pm showtime of Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford.

They’ve had to walk.  

All mechanized transport throughout the city shut down over twenty-four hours ago due to the blizzard like conditions as the nation’s capital was walloped by the biggest winter storm to strike D.C. since 1899.

Before the storm is over, 28 inches of snow will fall on Washington D.C., a record for the city which remains unsurpassed by any other storm to this day.

But after over two days of wet snow and pelting ice, a very odd thing happened on Saturday night, January 28, 1922--people began to go outside.

The crowd that gathered inside the Knickerbocker Theater that night was definitely an odd thing given the weather conditions, but it was the sort of odd thing that always eventually happens in periods of prolonged, uncommon and unexpectedly bad weather events--people want to go outside and experience it for themselves.

In the days of silent movies, live music in the form of a full orchestral ensemble often accompanied the showing of films on the big screen, and at 9 pm sharp the orchestra in the Knickerbocker Theater strikes up a lively tune to signal that the show is about to begin.

There is uproarious, some might say deafening laughter, throughout the first ten minutes of the movie as slapstick gag, after slapstick gag follows quickly on the heels of one another during the opening scenes of Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford.

After the laughter subsides some of the movie goers hear a faint, but insistent hissing sound like the tearing of linen sheets and then, just after 9:10 pm as reported by witnesses in the next day’s Washington Post (1/29/1922), 

“With a roar, mighty as the crack of dawn, the massive roof of the theater broke loose from its steel moorings and crashed down on the heads of those seated in the balcony.”

Washington Post Headline the day after the collapse

It happened in seconds.  

The roof of the Knickerbocker Theater, with over 1,000 patrons seated below, collapsed under the weight of the snow.  Dozens were crushed under the piles of falling debris and killed instantly.  Hundreds more were left trapped in the wreckage, injured and suffocating beneath the broken masonry, twisted metal and thousands of pounds of wet snow and ice.

The Washington Post reported that, “Under the weight of the falling roof, the balcony gave way first.  All of the audience was terrorized.  It was as sudden as turning off an electric light.”

Joseph Wade Beal, a young violinist in the orchestra who had spent the past forty-eight hours living at the Knickerbocker Theater just so he could report to work on time, is said to have been the first to be killed when the balcony collapsed.  He had been married for less than a week.

A young couple, Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Bower, on honeymoon in Washington D.C. decided that night to brave the elements and walk to the Knickerbocker Theater after having been snowbound in their hotel room for the better part of a week.  Both were killed instantly when the roof collapsed.

Pennsylvania Congressman Andrew Jackson Barchfield, a physician who had been part of the commission that helped create the Panama Canal died in the collapse that night.

One tragic newspaper report stated that a young boy had to identify the badly crushed remains of both his parents after their mangled bodies were pulled from the rubble the following day.

The force of the collapse was so great that it pushed the doors and walls of the theater outwards and scores of bodies were blown out into the surrounding streets in the instant that the roof caved in and the concrete balcony collapsed into the orchestra pit.

Around 100 people were killed outright, with nearly 150 others severely injured.  Many had to have legs and arms hastily and crudely amputated by ax wielding firefighters and police officers just so they could be pulled from the debris alive.

The basement of a nearby church on Euclid Street, about a block away from the site of the Knickerbocker Theater, was pressed into service as an impromptu morgue as efforts continued to find survivors in the rubble and to extricate the dead.

If it hadn’t been for the quick thinking of two brave souls in the seconds immediately following the collapse of the Knickerbocker Theater then the hell on earth that took place in Washington D.C. on that fateful night of January 28, 1922 could have been even worse!

The first of these brave souls remains anonymous to history, but apparently this man had been out for “a walk in the snow” that night as he later told the operator when he witnessed the Knickerbocker Theater Collapse from across the street.

Thinking quickly, this anonymous witness grabbed a payphone and told operator Elsie Cook that he was out for a walk in the snow and just saw the Knickerbocker Theater completely collapse into dust.

Believing the anonymous man’s story, telephone operator Elsie Cook immediately notified the fire department, police department, ALL of the city’s hospitals and all branches and departments of Washington D.C.’s local government.

The quick thinking of the anonymous man who decided to pick up a payphone, and the decisive action of telephone operator Elsie Cook, enabled emergency personnel to arrive on the scene within minutes even during a blizzard and helped prepare the city’s medical facilities for an influx of hundreds of casualties.

World renowned luxurious interior of the Knickerbocker Theater

In the immediate aftermath of the collapse speculation was rampant as to who was responsible.  One rumor had it that theater employees considered removing the snow from the roof only an hour before the showing of Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford but then decided against it out of sheer laziness.

Despite investigations into the collapse by local city government, both houses of Congress and numerous lawsuits brought forth by scores of individuals and family members of those injured in the theater collapse, no concrete proof was ever brought forth to substantiate these claims of negligence on the part of theater employees.

As it turned out, investigations in the wake of the tragic collapse determined that faulty design was, in fact, to blame for the disaster.  In the wake of using concrete pillars to support the weight of the flat topped theater as was customary at the time, architects instead had opted to use metal girders that rested atop the walls of the theater to support the Knickerbocker’s flat topped roof.  Designers had done this to both speed up construction time and to keep audience views of the screen and orchestra pit unobstructed by structural support columns.

The design for which the Knickerbocker Theater was so world renowned proved, in the end, to be its undoing and led to the death of nearly 140 unsuspecting moviegoers.  After two days of continuous heavy wet snow the theater roof simply became unable to bear the weight any longer and gave out, in an instant, causing a spontaneous collapse that pushed the walls outward and crushed hundreds beneath the rush of falling debris.

Unobstructed View inside the Knickerbocker Theater

To this day the storm which dumped over two feet of snow on Washington D.C. near the end of January 1922 is remembered as “The Knickerbocker Storm” in honor of all those who lost their lives just over 100 years ago in one of our nation’s most harrowing, and unnecessary, winter weather tragedies.

In the wake of the collapse, another, smaller theater was built on  the corner of 18th Street and Columbia Road on the original site of the Knickerbocker Theater.  Then,  during the 1960’s the site was remodeled once again as part of a Washington D.C. area urban renewal project.

Today, a SunTrust bank in the shape of the original Knickerbocker Theater stands at the very spot where the tragedy occured on January 28, 1922 to honor the memory of all the victims who were killed on that snowy evening.

The Knickerbocker Theater Collapse remained the second most catastrophic peacetime building collapse in American history until June 24, 2021 when it was surpassed in death toll by the collapse of the Surfside Condominium complex in a Miami, Florida suburb.