Around 12:45 am, members of the Shoe City Club noticed smoke coming from the building and notified its caretaker, Horace Spencer.
The fire started in the basement, but around 1:20 am it spread into the balcony, which led Chief Frank F. Dickinson to order a general alarm.
[3] According to investigators, the heat of the fire distorted steel trusses above the ceiling, which pushed the brick walls of the theater back and caused the roof to collapse.
A small anthracite coal memorial built by a firefighter from Scranton, Pennsylvania, was placed in Brockton City Hall.
In 2008, a 10-foot-tall (3.0 m) bronze statue of a firefighter kneeling in grief, with the names of the 13 men killed in the fire engraved on a base, was placed in City Hall Plaza.