The woman did not survive but the child did; her fall was cushioned by the body of her godmother, who hit the ground first. The young godmother, frozen in flight, knows exactly what is happening—her arms are extended as if they could possibly break her fall—the baby, upright but looking down in disbelief as the disassembling fire escape cascades alongside them, a collage of iron fragments racing them to earth, potted plants in accompaniment. Smoke can be seen creeping and curling like fog over the edge of the rooftop.
I had first seen the photograph—really a series of photographs: the photographer was using his motor drive—while in college, in a class called “Media and Memory” or something very like it. It fulfilled my second history requirement. I lazily chose it instead of the seeming demands of “The World Wars” (too many countries) or “From Revolution to Emancipation” (where I felt my public television consumption had neatly sorted that subject). “Media and Memory” was a collection of still photos, videos, and films augmented by writings about how reportage affects history and remembrance. It was a requirement for journalism students.
I wasn’t a journalism student, though. I was an art major; my college was an art school. It was one of the many colleges in downtown Chicago that are just steps from the lakefront. Some of them are world-famous while others cannot be located on any reputable higher education map. The classroom where I saw the photograph was at the top of a turn-of-the-century skyscraper, gray stone and red brick, ribboned on two sides by wrought iron fire escapes, on which we students would often sit whenever the temperature rose above forty degrees, and smoke. Our warm breath augmented our smoky exhalations and we would watch our ashes flutter and disintegrate as they fell, one hundred sixty feet to the alley below us. One of my fire- escape fellows was a product design student from the suburbs. He had a sandy pageboy haircut and his father designed furniture-store lamps that mimicked their betters just differently enough to sidestep charges of theft from more reputable designers. Another was a film student who had a habit of talking over people and quoting obscure passages from books of which he had only read the introduction, but that was enough for us to consider him an intellectual. And I was a drama student who had aspirations of being a Broadway actor. None of us ever realized our youthful ambitions. I later saw pageboy, hair cut high and tight, working as a security guard for an armored truck company. He was wearing an enormous gun on his hip as he collected a sack of cash at the Jewel-Osco grocery store in Bridgeport. The cineaste was true to his boastful prediction and did have a career in film, proudly displaying his name in the title sequences of filmic treasures named Risqué Jizzness and Pump Friction. After scores of failed auditions, I set my sights on something more achievable. I became a firefighter.
It was years later that I recalled—and inhabited—that famous photograph, when my firehouse, sixty city blocks and a decade from that classroom, responded to a fire just north of Lehman and Kenyon, only a short walk but several income levels from the lakefront. The apartment building was a cast concrete four-plus-one; its yellow façade featured angular rosettes between swooping pilasters and stood atop an unwalled underground garage that revealed the building’s supporting concrete pylons, between which the residents could park their cars and scar their fenders. The early Sixties building, which would not have looked out of place in Las Vegas, was wedged between two imperiously elegant 1920s high-rises, and was seriously involved when we arrived alongside fire companies from both West Central and Hamlin Square—southwest and northwest of my firehouse in Loughburgh—and an extra ambulance from directly south by Beeman Field. More than thirty personnel were present, but not everyone was prepared for the challenge. Monaghan, one of our engine men, had been busy at the beer locker—a double-wide that could accommodate a thirty-two-gallon Rubbermaid trash barrel which was stocked each morning with Old Style and ice—and could barely hang onto the back of the engine (which we were no longer allowed to do anyway). He was held back from the action, put in the jump seat behind the cab, and left there while the rest of the members of Engine 37 moved inside and our Truck 66 aimed its ladder toward the top the building.
The photograph won a Pulitzer Prize. In July of 1975 there had been a fire in a Victorian rowhouse on Boston’s Marlboro Street. The photographer, Stanley Forman of the Boston Herald, took several pictures of the failed rescue attempt, but the prize-winning photo was of the moment of lost hope. By the time Forman arrived, the Boston Fire Department had already extended an aerial ladder. A young woman and her goddaughter were trapped on a top-floor fire escape, but a firefighter was reaching down from the ladder, trying to lift them to safety. Just when rescue seemed imminent, however, the fire escape collapsed, pulling away from the brick wall, its iron fragments plunging five floors alongside potted plants and two human bodies, aged nineteen and two. That was the moment of the famous photograph, but seconds later Forman had to turn away. He didn’t want to see the impact.
The prize-winning photograph is not the most horrific. It is the most elegantly composed. There are several other photographs in the sequence, and they are terrifying. First is the hopeful image of firefighter Robert O’Neil on the fire escape with the two girls. He had come down from the roof to help them onto the rescue ladder that was reaching upward, carefully positioned as smoke clouds over them and flames rise. In the next photo, O’Neil reaches toward the ladder, which is now just above his head. An aerial ladder is not a precision instrument, and the subtle adjustments the operator makes at the base of the ladder are substantially, dangerously multiplied at the other end. O’Neil has his arm around the shoulder of the nineteen-year-old Diana Bryant and she, in turn, has her arm around her goddaughter, Tiare Jones, as they wait until, in the next photo, the ladder is finally within reach. The firefighter begins to grab hold of it so that he’ll be able climb up and then reach down to lift the girls. He strenuously pulls himself up, his turnout gear cumbersome and heavy, but it is just at this moment that the fire escape gives way. Was it the removal of his weight from the fire escape that caused an imbalance which sent the girls tumbling? It is suddenly at a forty-five degree angle, its railing separating as Diana reaches toward but cannot hang onto the firefighter, while her goddaughter Tiare is coursing toward the edge of the canted platform, flower pots cascading over the edge. Then the fire escape flies completely apart. O’Neil struggles to maintain his grip on the aerial ladder. As the girls drop, Diane is nearly parallel to the ground but her face can be seen looking downward, recognizing the distant ground below as it expands to meet her. Then the moment—the moment of the Pulitzer Prize, of the World Press Photo of the Year—with Diana, head down now, face hidden, arms outstretched as if she hopes to break her fall. Her goddaughter, arms and legs splayed, appears to be looking right at us. She is screaming.
The fire we responded to was on the two lower floors and climbing. The men of Engine 37 (they were all men, in those days) had gone in at the front, where the hallway was glowing yellow-white. Apartments on either side of the entrance showed the same wavy illumination. Several apartments were involved, and the residents, forced back by flames from the front and smoke from the rear exits, had retreated to the upper floors; the building did not have an exterior fire escape. The coincidence of flames blocking both the front and rear suggested arson: a man, a worthless and disgruntled suitor, perhaps, so disgruntled that he would not only incinerate the woman who had spurned him but all of her family and neighbors as well, concluding confidently that she was truly to blame, that she was asking for this, that he was justified… But that was something for the arson investigators and the police. We had other, more pressing considerations. The residents were now on the roof and pleading for help—screaming, weeping, cursing, praying.
Truck 66 was an ancient heap of junk, a noisy and rusty double-clutcher equipped with a fairly limited and ratchety aerial ladder. The next firehouse south housed Truck 74. Now, that was a fire truck. It was as shiny as a showroom Cadillac, like an oversized toy or a piece of hard candy, glossy and luminous. It had moved into the alley behind the building. Its smoothly rotating aerial ladder had risen toward the upper floors of the building, allowing the men of Truck 66 access to the top of the building, to clear the occupants and vent the roof. The adult tenants would climb down the ladder, one by one, but first was the baby. The moment I reached the top of the ladder I saw the child and recalled the famous photo of the baby in the air. The ladder, extended to rest upon the coping of the building’s roof, placed me within the reach of a distraught mother, who pleadingly handed her child to me. The girl already had tears streaming down her cheeks, but when the mother trustingly transferred her daughter to me, the child let out a piercing scream and pushed her hands against my chest. She fought to stay with her mother, clasping and screaming, and I had to grasp her firmly to keep her from wriggling away—more firmly than I thought I should grab a child, but it was nearly fifty feet to the ground. Climbing backward, I had to hold on tight. Four stories below was the sloping asphalt apron leading to the building’s parking lot. I could not expel the Marlboro Street photo from my head. Don’t drop the baby. Don’t drop the baby. Don’t drop the baby. I repeated that in my head. Don’t drop the baby. But while I chanted this incantation, the Marlboro Street photo was suddenly replaced by another image, just as it had been years before in that college classroom slide presentation, of another woman who died from a fall.
Her name was Evelyn McHale.
Her death remains perplexing. In 1947, after calmly leaving her fiancé’s home in Easton, Pennsylvania, she traveled to New York City, arriving at Penn Station at ten a.m. By ten-thirty she had purchased a ticket to the observation deck at the Empire State Building. Upon reaching the eighty-sixth floor, she jumped.
But it was not her suicide that has made her fable of secret torment memorable; it is the photograph of her afterward, taken by an amateur photographer who only ever published that sole image. Its haunting permanence is not the unrelenting horror that can be seen in the Marlboro Street photo, doom suspended in mid-air. It was McHale’s landing that immortalized her. She landed, exteriorly intact, on top of a United Nations limousine, crumpling the roof with her impact. The black glossy steel enfolded her, gathering like an oversized orchid, and beyond the minor rumpling of her stockings she appeared to be merely resting, her smart suit unsoiled, her hands delicately poised in white gloves. In the May 12 issue of Life magazine, she was awarded a full page, like a fashion model.
I kept my grip on the screaming child, her cries a high-pitched wailing fear of this dark-skinned stranger in a black helmet and coat, striped with wide bands of reflective yellow. As we moved downward, she grabbed each rung of the ladder with a fierce, uncanny strength. She could see the chaos below, of trucks and flashing lights and onlookers. People in the apartment buildings across the alley were on their back porches viewing the spectacle as if from opera boxes. I didn’t look down except to catch quick glimpses of the beams of the ladder, on every step keeping the outside of my boots in contact with the inside of the beams. I could see the scramble of adults pouring off the roof and onto the ladder, my colleague above helping them swiftly but carefully, each person a weighty parcel. I felt the weight of each new passenger and so did the child. She was surprisingly, disconcertingly strong, holding onto the ladder in terror of falling and of losing her mother. I in turn squeezed her tighter, intensifying her screams, wondering how a four-year-old could have so much strength. She grabbed my face and screamed into it, her tiny fingernails digging into my nose and lips. I responded by holding her still more firmly, pressing her face hard against my chest, stifling her cries.
When I reached the bottom and finally felt my feet on the turntable, I eased my tenacious hold on the formerly screaming, now subdued girl. She was silent, and as she looked up at me there was terror in her eyes. Her nose trickled blood from both nostrils. Then suddenly she was whisked from my arms and handed down to another firefighter, who in turn handed her off to a stranger. I watched the girl being passed along a chain of neighbors until she reached an older woman, a grandmother perhaps, who enveloped the girl in a desperate embrace.
I didn’t know it then, but that would be my last big fire. We all received commendations. Because the rescue made the ten o’clock news, the Director for Media Affairs, ever eager for positive public relations, came by the firehouse to personally shake our hands and gather more background on the heroes of Kenyon Avenue. After learning that I actually had a college degree (unlike the former Fire Commissioner, who had lied on his CV and been forced to resign), he suggested a transfer to his office, which had an education unit downtown at the Fire Academy. It would not offer the lush firehouse hours—twenty-four hours on, forty-eight hours off—but neither would it require any predawn outdoor work in an icy Chicago January. Also, civilian clothes. The transfer was speedily approved. By the end of the month I was working on video production and graphic design, voiceovers and location photography—that last skill greatly informed by the two photographs.
It was without regret that I left the firefighting to the other members of Engine House 37 and said goodbye to the drinking, the sex workers, the action films and pornos, and most of all the unending tedium, punctuated only very rarely by the misery of strangers. I have forgotten nearly all of the names of my colleagues there; they were all considerably older than me and have probably since retired. Similarly foggy are the art students on the fire escape. But I vividly recall the fire escape itself, with its icy wrought iron and its hypnotic view into the concrete canyon. Yet that memory is commingled with the girl who was hoping to survive but knew she would be denied, the woman who calmly and diligently planned her embrace of death, and the baby I nearly smothered because I was terrified of having her slip from my hands.
Max King Cap, artist and former firefighter, has written for The Racial Imaginary, Shenandoah, Tahoma, and Hair Trigger. He lives in Los Angeles.
