[11] Shook and Palmer were already enjoying success with their Union Square Theatre Company in New York and went on to transplant a number of their productions to the Brooklyn house.

They led onto Flood's Alley, a small street running along the east side of the building that bisected the block from Johnson to Myrtle Avenue.

[32] The passageway started from the gallery, passed through a curtain partition, then descended southward down a short flight of stairs to a platform set against the south wall.

The passage then turned left, westward again, descended a third flight of stairs down to a short, street-level hallway that led onto Washington Street (see Floor Plan 2).

On the night of the fire, it contained drops and borders for The Two Orphans and the scenery for Julius Caesar was stacked on the stage, awaiting pickup.

Some attendees in the parquet circle heard what sounded like a brawl behind the curtain, shouting and machinery working, noise carrying above the orchestra's playing.

The canvas was partially detached from the frame and, Thorpe thought, possibly slipped past the wire mesh border lamp guard and ignited.

Deciding that the fire would be well under way by the time the hose was in place, he opted to extinguish the flame by immediately available means.

[37] He directed carpenters Hamilton Weaver and William Van Sicken to extinguish the flame, which they attempted by beating the fire with long stage poles.

Claxton recalled peering up through the flimsy canvas and seeing "sparks falling and little tongues of the fire licking the edges of the drops and borders that hung in the flies.

[25] But as Brooklyn Police Fire Marshal Patrick Keady noted later in his Special Report, instead of the orderly procession that had originally informed Jackson's evacuation estimates, everyone attempted to sally the stairs at once.

As they emerged from the dress circle stairs into the lobby, they encountered a stream of other patrons on their right rushing from the parquet and wheeling toward the Washington Street exit.

After Thomas Rocheford had opened the Flood's Alley exit, they collided with an opposing stream working toward that door, which was situated beneath the flight of stairs descending from the dress circle.

The crush developing from these cross-currents soon brought the pace on the dress circle stairs to a halt, inducing a frenzied panic when people further up pressed downward, unaware of the jam below.

[64] The men began untangling the people, struggling to reinstate forward motion and using billy clubs on those who attempted to rush or push.

[26] At six feet eight inches (2.03 m), it was wider than most gallery passages of that era,[22][68] but with smoke accumulating under the ceiling and the family circle located in the highest reaches of the theatre, there was an urgency for everyone to leave.

To Officer G. A. Wessman, working to clear the crush in the dress circle, the smoke appeared as "a kind of dark blue [with] a most peculiar smell; no human being could live in it for two minutes."

Fortunately, Vine was now nearer the Washington Street entrance, where Cain and his fellow police officers were slowly reinstating some kind of rough order.

[45][72] Inside the lobby, Sweeny, District Engineer Farley and his firemen, Cain, and the other police officers eventually cleared the dress circle stairs to work their way up to the doors, where there was the connecting doorway to the family gallery stairway.

[74] Thomas Nevins, Chief Engineer of the Brooklyn Fire Department, arrived at the theatre around 11:26 p.m.; he decided immediately that the building was lost and his job was one of confinement.

Dieter Hotel, on the corner of Washington and Johnson streets, was lower than the theatre, its broad flat roof was an inviting target for flaming debris.

Nevins had called in the second and third alarms while on the way to the fire; when the additional equipment arrived, he deployed the engines around the block to keep adjoining buildings free of sparks and burning debris.

Sitting quietly in Captain Smith's office, she would suddenly mourn for some lost article of clothing, her seal skin sacque or jewelry.

With many bodies partially dismembered and scattered about by the gallery's collapse, and with faces burned beyond recognition, it was difficult to determine how many people were in a given pile of limbs, heads and trunks.

[citation needed] The King's County coroner, Henry C. Simms, convened a jury on the disaster which heard testimony through December and January 1877.

In delivering the verdict, the jury reported that death occurred mainly through suffocation in the dense smoke that prevailed in the gallery, likely in the few minutes after Charles Vine dropped from the family circle to the balcony below.

He had been forcibly struck by the lack of use of water in any form of conveyance, though a two and a half inch (6.4 cm) pipe serviced the hydrant near the stage.

Many witnesses reported that Conway had insisted on filled water buckets to be positioned in various places back stage or in the rigging loft and kept the fire hose maintained.

[60] By the early 20th century, cumulative New York City building code changes and additions required a solid brick proscenium wall, extending from the cellar to the roof, to minimize the risk of a stage fire spreading into the auditorium.

[8] Mid-20th century urban renewal subsumed Washington Street, Flood's Alley, and the site of the fire, giving rise to Cadman Plaza.