City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago Read Online Free

still about 150 clerks, bookkeepers, and stenographers moving about the bank’s central court, closing the ledgers for the day, finishing up their correspondence, and locking away bonds and other securities. Bank president John Mitchell had just left the building a few minutes earlier to go home.
    The Illinois Trust, a small Greek Revival building tucked in among much higher skyscrapers in the southern Loop, was considered one of the most beautiful banks in the city, fronted by tall Corinthian columns that made it look more like a temple than a place of business. The ornate interior was just as grand. A magnificent central rotunda, rising two stories to a huge glass skylight, was surrounded on three sides by teller cages. Business with the public was conducted around the outside perimeter of these teller windows. The rotunda’s central court, directly under the skylight and overlooked by a balcony, was reserved for the bank’s internal business. Here were the telegraph stations and the stenographer pool, as well as the desks where clerks and bank officers did their work. As a security measure, this area could be entered only through one of two entrances in the perimeter of teller cages.
    As the five o’clock hour approached, activity on the floor was waning. The women in the stenographic pool were finishing up for the day, pecking out a few last lines before pulling the covers over their typewriters and getting ready to leave. Helen Berger, the stout but ever-energetic chief stenographer, was attending to last-minute details with teller Marcus Callopy. Assistant cashier F. I. Cooper had left his desk and was accompanying a messenger to the vault area with some records. 13
    A few people noticed a change in the light around them as a shadow passed over the skylight above. This was followed by a sudden flash, which made some think that a photographer was taking a picture. Cooper the cashier, standing at the entrance to the bank’s large time vault, heard a sound of breaking glass overhead and turned around to investigate. What happened next was horrifying: “The body of a man,” he later said, “so badly burned and mangled that I could not tell at first that it was a man, came hurtling through the air and fell at my very feet.” It was the body of mechanic Carl Weaver.
    That was when the entire bank seemed to detonate.
    “I thought a bomb had been exploded,” one man said. Bombings had been in the news all year, and many bank employees worried that the Illinois Trust might be a target. But it instantly became clear that this was no ordinary explosive device.
    A. W. Hiltabel was working in one of the teller cages at the south end of the room: “The first thing I heard was the breaking of the skylight,” he said. “I looked up and saw fire raining down from the roof. There seemed to be a stream of liquid fire pouring down into the room.”
    Debris was suddenly falling everywhere. A huge engine and fuel tank slammed to the marble floor in front of him. “They exploded,” Hiltabel said. “Flames shot high into the room and all over the place. I ducked under my desk.” 14
    Carl Otto and his colleague Edward Nelson were in conference at the telegraph desk when they heard the terrific explosion above them. Suddenly they found themselves showered by “an avalanche of shattered window panes and twisted iron.” Something sharp and heavy struck Nelson in the knee, throwing him to the ground. As hot sheets of flame billowed around him, he managed to crawl across the floor to an open teller cage. He scrambled up over the marble counter and out of the teller window to the lobby outside.
    Carl Otto was not so lucky. The telegrapher took a direct hit from the falling engine and was instantly, horribly, crushed.
    The initial shattering of the skylight had brought C. C. Hayford out of his office in the credit department. “I ran out and an explosion … hurled me over,” he later explained. “I got up and someone ran into