Heavy Snow: The Knickerbocker Theatre Disaster 1922 | Plainly Difficult | Short Documentary

On January 28, 1922, During a Snow Storm the Knickerbocker Theatre's snow-covered roof collapsed during a movie showing….

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CHAPTERS:
00:00 Intro
01:00 Background
05:00 The Blizzard

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►Intro: Scheherazade (Rimsky-Korsakov)
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[PlainlyDifficult]

Thanks for watching, check out me other bits!

[mbvoelker]

It's really ridiculous for anyone to ever blame the architect when the building was built without *actually* following his plans.

[Niskirin]

The most cancerous part of this is that the architect was blamed for this when it was obvious that his designs were not actually implemented properly to save money. Absolute insanity and everybody involved in the wich hunt should have their names tarnished for all eternity ahead of us for this travesty.

[paulfagiolo]

My grandfather was a trumpet player in the band but arranged for a substitute when his wife (my grandmother) was going into labor with my father. The substitute in that seat unfortunately died and my father essentially saved his dad’s life by being born.

[Serenity_Dee]

Calling World War I "a little border dispute" is an impressive degree of understatement even for a Brit.

[eddiehimself]

Incredibly sad about the architect, who had done his job properly but his plans weren't followed and actually helped to save lives on the day, but got blamed nevertheless.

[thebears]

I love your unexplained tangents. Left me wondering what that Odeon did to you, and whether you're considering becoming an arsonist.

[jessd]

How heartbreaking for the architect, especially since he was helping with the recovery. Rip, Reginald W. Geare, history remembers you more kindly than those around did when you were alive.

I just learned that he was only 37 when he died. Absolutely tragic.

[lachbullen]

This is actually the first time I've heard a businessman taking responsibility for what happened It is sad that he did take his own life but he was distraught by these events..

[tadecker]

Simple rule for ANY AND EVERY engineering/construction venture: OVERENGINEER, AND FOLLOW THE DAMNED DESIGN PLANS!!!

EVERY SINGLE TIME something fails, it's because rules and regulations, and even designs, aren't followed in an attempt to save money.

PRO TIP: If you're sued into oblivion, you're NOT saving money. 🤷‍♂️

[defectiveaffect]

To anyone still in school or wanting to become someone who helps in building creations; THIS is why understanding math is so important. The architect understood that 8in would be enough to hold up the ceiling even under snow or water weight. The people in charge did not. By knowing some basic math, science, language and history disasters like that can very much be avoided.

[patrickdix]

Reminds me a bit of the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse. The architect's design for the walkway was changed in multiple ways by the construction company. Though thankfully the original designer wasn't blamed in that case (though the choice of design was questionable at best for parts of it).

[marks]

One of my fellow Air Force comrades lost a relative to that collapse. During one of our bull sessions after an long shift (and after a few Cokes and Rums.) he told me a bit about his family. When he was kid in the 60's he saw this photo of his family from 1921. He asked his mom and great aunt about the photo. They told him about the history of the family (and its tragedies) and the Knickerbocker Theater's role. One of the young boys in the photo died in WWII in a bomber accident in the US, one of the girls died of diphtheria several years later, and one of the older boys (15 at the time) died at the Knickerbocker Theatre in Washington DC escorting his grandma (her husband was sick with influenza) and she wanted to see the movie. It was common in those days for a male member of the family to escort a female family member (no matter her age) to an event for companionship and in this case help her walk home due to the snow. Amazingly she made it out, but he didn't while trying to help other people from under a broken roof section. It collapsed and killed him. Her grandma rarely talked about him, but his family feel it shortened her life with the guilt of her insistence to go out that night. His grandma died a few years later from heart failure (her great grandson (my friend) never met her). He showed me the same picture of that happy family in 1921.

[patriciayoung]

I remember when I was very young (1960's) I was visiting my Grandmother during the winter and when my family left to go home it was snowing very heavily and my Grandma told us not to go to the movies. At the time it seemed to me to be a very odd thing to say but as I got older I realized That this was a reference to the Knickerbocker theater collapse that people of that era would say when it snowed hard.

[Hollandsemum]

There is a geographical aspect to this as well. The latitude of DC means it rarely sees snow making it too expensive to have a lot of snow removal equipment even in the modern era, and difficult to understand the impact snow can have - remember Air Florida and the 14th Street bridge also in DC. Generally, the line where the Gulf air and Canadian air meet can fluctuate from roughly Northern VA to the Mason-Dixon line. When my family lived in Maryland we would most commonly have one big snowfall in mid February, but many rounds and types of ice from the warm Gulf air raining through the frigid Canadian air. That resulted in about equal amounts of plowing vs solely salting equipment to quickly remove the black ice. So while they had some experience with designing for snow loading in that area (I'm curious as to wheher the original 8 inch beam allowance on the wall would really have been enough for snow loading on a flat roof), the construction crew who reduced the beam length would certainly not have had much. Regardless of the vehicles they had, they would've been ill equipped to remove snow for emergency vehicles.
Unfortunately, construction not following architectural plans is not uncommon. I think they often don't realize/understand the physics & engineering involved in the architect's work leading to blind changes on site, usually without even the construction supervisor's awareness. (Study your high school physics!!.) Off the top of my head I can think of several.
1. I-35 in Minnesota in which materials for fixing a badly weakened bridge were all piled in one spot ON the bridge, with the heavy equipment parked next to it on days off.
2. A highway overpass collapse out West (don't remember which state) in which the workers decided they could use the additional surface space the saw on the other side of the concrete construction barriers and decided to move them without checking with their supervisor, let alone an engineer. The entire edge gave way and dropped on to the highway below, just as a car was passing through. The top of the car was sliced right off at the level of the trunk & hood/boot & bonnet killing the vacationing family inside
3. The Hyatt Regency collapse in which the construction supervisor foolishly approved a suggestion for changing the walkway hangers' design to make it easier on them in building it 🙄 without checking with the architect/structural engineer. The change then put the mass of each walkway squarely on each connection to the one above instead of all of the load being supported by the ceiling beams which had been designed to do that. So eventually the top walkway was no longer able to support the lower 2 with its joints. And if I recall correctly, the bolt sizes for the joints were also reduced contributing to the collapse (they will constantly move around due to the active load).
And, there actually are some fims that are just incompetent. The one that was building the pedestrian bridge in FL comes to mind. They ignored physical warning signs and let the structure sit far too long without fixing and then advancing with the engineered support areas. What frightens me about them, is that they built a bridge near my current location that was supposed to be a 40 year bridge, but within the first 5 or so had problems that the city & county decided would require yearly inspections. Then, around the 15 year mark a piece began falling apart near the top requiring replacing and full inspection. They government has been surprisingly good about finding and immediately adapting their interaction with the bridge, but what sort of idiotic firm designs a bridge built of prefab concrete blocks held together by steel straps WITHIN 5 MILES OF THE VERY SALTY ATLANTIC OCEAN?!

[dajosh]

These are always so brutally bad... Disasters back then were always 5x-10x more deadly before the regulations and safety measures we've since put in place, IN MANY CASES _BECAUSE_ of said disasters. It's nice that...at least _SOMETHING_ good comes out of the horrible suffering and loss of these tragedies.

[ysucae]

the fact that the architect took his own life is tragic. he was done dirty and people's incompetence was at fault.

seeing stories like this always remind me of one of my uncles, a bridge engineer. he has a steel(?) ring on his little finger to remember the quebec bridge collapses and how engineers holds responsibility to the lives of many. i wish they'd do something like that for everybody involved in overseeing construction work. sure, you saved money but now people are dead.

(i can't seem to find your video on that subject tho... am i imagining things? haha)

[RatPfink]

as i thought to myself, "I hope Ben's Chili Bowl never killed anybody, " it crossed my mind that you might wish to cover the 1933 Congress Hotel restaurant epidemic in Chicago. It was quite the slow motion disaster and took great effort on the part of public health agencies to unravel the cause and scope of it.

[ThePoxun]

2 inches is nothing... the metalwork involved could easily have shrunk much more than that when chilled by the snow and ice and fallen out of the support, even if the truss itself didn't fail under the weight.

[akurra]

I was reading about this the other day, thank you for covering this saddening disaster