100 years ago in The Record
Wednesday, June 6, 1917
The coroner’s inquest into last April’s fatal collapse of the Mohican grocery store ends by blaming the disaster on insufficient support for the upper floors in the middle of the River Street building.
The Mohican caught fire on the night of April 17. The building collapsed around 3 a.m. the following morning, killing firemen William Bailey Jr., Albert De Courville and John J. Hoar. More than a dozen others were injured.
Rensselaer County Coroner Thurman A. Hull releases the findings of the inquest today. He notes that the building’s structural integrity was weakened by a 1903 renovation that removed a party wall that had divided the ground floor into two floors. The wall was replaced by a series of 6” iron posts that rested on a cellar wall of stone and mortar.
“The wall underneath those posts crumbled and buckled,” Hull explains, “This left the posts without support and, of course, the building collapsed in the middle. It may be that the intense heat in the cellar aided in causing the crumbling of the cellar wall.”
Fires were burning in the cellar and on the top floor of the building at the time of the collapse, but not on the floors in between. Investigators believe the fire started on the top floor and spread to the cellar via an elevator shaft. A heavy volume of water from firehoses soaked the paper and flour stored on the top floor, adding to the stress on the support posts.
While the collapse was blamed initially on the explosion of a basemen ammonia tank, the inquest determined that the tank leaked but did not explode.
Hull recommends that contractors use iron girders to reinforce supporting walls whenever they replace party walls with posts, as was done at the Mohican.
TROOP X VS KU KLUX
To a 21st century reader the headline might describe a race riot, but the story in today’s Record merely reports hijinks in the headquarters company of the Troy-based Second New York Infantry regiment, currently encamped “somewhere in New York State.”
The company is divided into two “organizations.” Troop X was created when the regiment was on borderpatrol duty in Texas, while the Ku Klux probably came into existence because some soldiers thought the hooded horsemen in “The Birth of A Nation” looked cool.
Whatever the background, our embedded reporter writes that two groups held a private battle yesterday, Troop X’s objective being to shave the mustache off Sgt. Paul Florian, A Ku Klux man. With the help of the “Wolves,” the regimental muleskinners, Troop X captures and barbers Florian with “much eclat and ceremony.”