Great Chelsea Fire of 1973 to be remembered Saturday
Blaze consumed 18 city blocks
The fire broke out on a quiet Sunday afternoon amid a dry October, in an industrial section of Chelsea that was largely deserted on the weekend, and soon grew into a massive windwhipped blaze that engulfed 18 city blocks and left hundreds unemployed or homeless.
Fifty years later, locals still have vivid memories of the Great Chelsea Fire of Oct. 14, 1973, which left multiple firefighters with minor injuries but caused no deaths, and they will gather Saturday to mark the fire’s semicentennial at Chelsea Station Restaurant, a former firehouse.
Paul Koolloian was 12 years old then, and a self-described “firehouse buff ” who spent his free time hanging around a Chelsea fire station, but that afternoon he was skating with friends at the local rink.
“I remember coming home and my mother and father actually grabbing all sorts of clothes and stuff and loading up the trunk of the car, and we actually drove around the city for the majority of the night,” said Koolloian, a supervisor in Chelsea’s Office of Emergency Management who has been researching the 1973 fire for decades and helped plan Saturday’s event.
Jennifer Hassell, executive director of the Chelsea Chamber of Commerce, was born and raised in the city, but she was a baby in 1973 and has no memory of the fire. Her mother was pregnant then with her sister, born exactly two weeks later, she said.
“So imagine a very young mom with a 1-year-old and pregnant, about to give birth to her second daughter,” said Hassell, who also helped organize this weekend’s remembrance. “I mean, it was scary for her. She had just relocated here from Brooklyn, New York.”
Her mother’s strongest impression looking back, Hassell said, was “how the citizens of the community kind of rallied around her to make sure she was OK, to get her to a safe place.”
Residents will celebrate the community’s cohesion and resilience at Saturday’s event, which will run from noon to 4 p.m. and will also remember an earlier fire in the same section of Chelsea that killed 19 people in 1908, and a fire just months after the 1973 conflagration that began at the American Barrel Company on Carter Street and destroyed five city blocks on May 22, 1974.
Steve Staffier, director of Chelsea’s Office of Emergency Management, said city officials began planning a remembrance of the 1973 fire about six months ago, and their research led them to include the city’s other major fires.
“We almost couldn’t help it,” Staffier said. “As we started putting together ideas with the committee and finding memorabilia, pictures and videos and audio, and talking to people, we’d find 1908 stuff, and we weren’t going to restrict it.”
The 1973 fire, sometimes called the Chelsea Conflagration, broke out on Summer Street in the afternoon and burned for some time before it was reported at 3:56 p.m., according to a documentary film made by the Quincy-based National Fire Protection Association.
Five minutes after it was reported, the wind-driven blaze jumped across Summer Street, then the flames leapt across Maple Street at 4:12 p.m., and three minutes later the fire had spread two blocks farther, according to the NFPA.
At 4:20 p.m., Fire Chief Herbert C. Fothergill declared the fire a “conflagration,” which the National Fire Sprinkler Association defines as “a large disastrous and destructive fire that threatens human life, animal life, health, and/or property.”
The Globe reported in 1973 that the “inferno” had destroyed at least a fifth of Chelsea and cut a path about a mile long and a half-mile wide from Second to Fifth streets through the neighborhood that had been known as the “Rag Shop District” — an industrial area full of combustible materials that had been dominated by salvaged goods dealers starting in the late 19th century — and into some adjacent lowincome residential areas.
The fire, which raged out of control for about seven hours and kept burning into the next afternoon, was the first in the nation that was so severe that victims were eligible for federal disaster relief, the Globe reported.
About 50 firefighters were treated for minor injuries at a street medical unit, a handful were taken to a hospital, and a woman tripped over a firehose and broke her leg, but no serious injuries or deaths were reported.
Roughly 1,500 firefighters from at least 60 area departments, including some from New Hampshire and Rhode Island, worked to put out the flames, while about 1,000 police officers directed traffic, controlled crowds, and patrolled evacuated areas for looters, officials told the Globe then.
The blaze, whipped by winds that gusted up to nearly 50 miles per hour, forced thousands to evacuate their homes, and traffic reportedly overwhelmed neighboring communities as State Police closed Chelsea to all outside traffic at 5 p.m.
Seen from the Tobin Bridge, “the blaze looked ... like a rolling wall of fire, with one building after another bursting into flames in quick succession,” the Globe reported. “The heavy, black smoke from the blaze could be seen from 50 miles away and attracted thousands of spectators.”
In the aftermath, officials estimated that the conflagration destroyed 800 buildings across 18 city blocks, including 62 businesses, leaving at least 250 families homeless and 600 people without jobs, the Globe reported.
Nat Whittemore, 85, was a cameraman for WBZ-TV when he helped cover the Chelsea fire, which he said was one of the most memorable of many thousands he recorded in his career.
He filmed “at least 100 [fires] a month, and I worked for 51 years as a news photographer for Channel Four,” said Whittemore, who was inducted into the Massachusetts Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2016.
On that Sunday in 1973, Whittemore loaded his silent 16mm film camera into his car along with his wife, Nancy, who also worked for WBZ, and their 6-month-old son, and they set out on Route 128.
Whittemore found a safe place to leave the car and his family, and he recorded the fire scene for several hours while his wife updated the newsroom by two-way radio and paid $10 each to sailors who had wandered over from the Chelsea Naval Hospital to hand-deliver Whittemore’s film to WBZ.
Some of that film, along with more shot by Whittemore’s colleagues, has been edited into a documentary that will be shown Saturday.