The Ohio Democrat. (Logan, O. [Ohio]) 1886-1906, 1892-02-13
FATAL FLAMES.
Hotel Royal, New York. Burns to
the Ground.
There We're Over Two Hundred People In
Itat the Time Only Five Hodies Re
covered, nnd n Hundred Per-
sons Not Accounted For.


New YORK, Feb. g. Sunday morning
at $40 the guests of the Hotel Royal
were awakened to tho horrors of flame
and smoke. So sudden and fierce was
the fire, which started in the elevator
shaft, and then rushed through the
building, that the unfortunate men,
women and children, found themselves
surrounded by flames and smothered
with smoke before they had time to
even realize their danger.
The Hotel Royal was an old
building whose timbcrs were dry
as bones. Every condition essential to
speedy destruction-poor construction,
abundance of fuel ripe for burning
made the fire more of a hnsh than n
flame Within few seconds of the
alarm that came with the fierce shriett-
ing of an elevated road engine, the
whole house was in an uproar. Guests
rushed wildly about in their night
close seeking some means of escape.
The stairs were ablaZe. A few people
were wise enough to throw out the
ropes that were in every room, by
which they slid to the street.
Before the fireman had arrived, guests,
mad with fear, were leaping to death
on the sidewalk, while others hung from
the windows crying for help.
Above the roar of the flames
rose the shrieks of the dying,
and their apeals to God and man for
help. When the firemen appeared they
proved themselves utterly careless OF
their own lives in daring efforts
to save others. There was a
bright side to the awful calamity
in the heroic acts of fireman and citi.
Zens who succeeded in saving many OF
the imperiled guests The engineer on
the elevated road who slowed up his
train and aroused the sleeping guests "a
sense of their peril by the frantic
footing of the whsle; the fremen and
citizens, who, with walls topping about
them, and smoke and flames beating in
their faces, returned again and again
to the rescue, all deserved the praise
they have most modestly received.
1t is impossible TO even guess at the
number OF those who died In the doomed
hotel. Estimates vary frSn six to one
hundred The police believe tAat about
thirty people pcrished. There were IT'S
guests in the place whom the flames
broke out There were also between
thirty and thirty-fivs employees in the
hotel, making tetA OF about 9l0.
Only fve bodies were rso0versd-two
women and three men. None of these
were taken from the ruins They were
the untortunatcs who leeped from the
windows TO the street.
II was surprising to persons who did
not know the character of the transient
patrons of the Hotel Royal, how many
OF the saved did not want their names
mentioned in connection with the affair.
OF the names on the register, of the
hotel, probably one-half were women.
There were more John Smith and
wife," John Brown and wife" entries
than you usually find on a hotel regis
ter. This assumption of fictitious names
and the care taken by certain Of the res
cued to keep secret the fact that they
were in the hotel, will make 1t very
difficult to ascertain definitely the
number of the dead until the ruins are
thoroughly cleared. There might be
thirty or fifty persons unaccounted for,
and yet not one of them would neces-
sarily have been lost in the fire Work
to recover the bodies has been diligent
and intelligent yet none have as yet
been recovered. The brick walls fall
ing inward have buried the dead under
tons of debris, and made their recovery
slow and chances of indentification few.