It’s getting harder every year to find people who remember when the former site of the Berwick Hotel was anything other than a pit at the corner of Center and Wales streets.
Saturday marks the 50th anniversary of one of the deadliest fires in Rutland’s history. It destroyed not just the Berwick, but the neighboring Mercury building, Tiki Lounge and Paul’s Cleaners.
Five people were killed, and the historic building was reduced to rubble on one of the coldest nights in living memory. A half-century later, the scar on downtown’s cityscape remains visible.
Crown jewel
The four-story Berwick Hotel was among the largest buildings in Rutland when it was constructed in 1868. It had two additions built in the late 1800s.
Early in the 20th century, it was a popular stop for New Yorkers on automobile tours of New England. Presidents Taft, Coolidge and both Roosevelts stayed there, as did Harvey Firestone, Henry Ford and John Philip Sousa.
The building was home to multiple businesses in addition to the hotel.
“Cinderella Sweets was downstairs,” said Ray Mooney, a lifelong Rutlander, who runs the “You Know You’re from Rutland, Vt.” Facebook page, and was one of the firefighters on hand the night of the blaze. “Next to them was the Berwick Newsstand, where I bought a lot of comics over the years.”
In 1930, the chief of the New York City Fire Department visited Rutland. Decades later, long-serving Rutland Fire Chief Albert Koltonski recalled standing in front of the Berwick with him and wondering aloud how he would fight a fire there. The New York chief described the number of crews he would call in and where he would station them, to which Koltonski said he replied that Rutland was a much smaller city than New York.
Michael Rosenberg, who was the Herald’s City Hall reporter, said by his era, the Berwick was one of several once-grand downtown hotels whose heydays were behind them.
“They were crown jewels, but by 1973 they were much in decline,” he said. “It wasn’t a tourist hotel. It was being renovated. It wasn’t the kind of place where if you were coming for a ski weekend, that’s where you’d stay. It was more, if you were coming for a couple weeks for a construction job, you could stay there.”
The Berwick was, however, under renovation. In 1971, then-alderman and future mayor Gilbert Godnick bought the hotel in partnership with his brother Edward Godnick and James Cibotti. They renamed it the Town House — though it didn’t have the name long enough for locals to stop calling it The Berwick — and started work on a planned total of $750,000 in upgrades, or roughly $5.5 million in today’s money.
“I think the owners and the mayor envisioned great things for it,” Rosenberg said. “It was a renaissance, but they never got the chance.”
General alarm
John Sabataso had just seen a fire wreck his family’s restaurant, The Palms, the previous November. They would rebuild, but in the meantime, he was working at the Holiday Inn.
The night of Jan. 6, a Saturday, he was coming back from dinner with his wife in Manchester, and they decided to stop by the Town House for a drink. Sabataso, a drummer, wound up sitting in with a jazz trio that was playing.
“It was Rutland’s newest nightclub,” he said. “There was a beautiful, beautiful ballroom they had there. … I was sitting there playing, and the manager comes downstairs. He comes over to the bandstand — the look on his face was very, very serious. He said, ‘I want you guys to keep playing. We’ve got a fire upstairs, and we’ve got to get everybody out of the building.’”
Sabataso said he set down his drumsticks and went over to his wife, who could tell something was wrong. They agreed they had to get out. He said the crowd, which was large, had the same idea and the ballroom emptied in an orderly fashion.
Sabataso was hazy on what time all this happened, but he was adamant it was well before the call went to the fire department at midnight.
“It should have come earlier,” he said. “The guy came down the stairs much closer to 11 o’clock than 12 — maybe even a little earlier.”
Other accounts describe a passerby seeing the smoke, pulling an alarm at the entrance and notifying the bartender, who ordered everyone out.
In a deposition given later in a lawsuit stemming from the fire, 69-year-old Berwick resident Charles “Reggie” Butler said he was reading the newspaper when a “tap” on his door and a “light voice” informed him of the fire.
Butler said that he left his room expecting to come back in a short while, but the seeming lack of urgency in the person who notified him was contrasted when he got into the hall and smelled smoke.
When he found a fire escape sealed off, Butler testified that he went back to his room, kicked out the window and sat on the sill. He escaped by jumping into a net brought by firefighters. Other survivors described Homer McJarrett running from room to room on the third floor, breaking down doors and pulling sleeping tenants from their beds.
The fire was officially called in shortly after midnight and the department’s whistle — known locally as the “10-of-9 whistle” for when it is tested each day — froze.
“There was one loud blast until it ran out of air,” Mooney said. “People thought it was a disaster signal.”
Mooney had been a substitute with the Rutland City Fire Department since 1966 and had been appointed a full-time member in 1969. He was off duty the night of the Berwick fire, but heard the whistle, jumped out of bed and turned on his police scanner in time to hear everyone getting called in for mutual aid.
He said the fire was visible from his bedroom window.
Present-day Rutland City Fire Chief William Lovett, then the 11-year-old son of a city firefighter, said he saw not just the glow but flames from his bedroom window on Pearl Street.
“I remember sitting there and watching until I fell asleep,” Lovett said. “I’d never seen anything like it.”
It also was visible from Rosenberg’s window on Crescent Street.
“The first thing you did was look out the window and said, ‘This must be big,’” he said. “It was. … You could see it from everywhere.”
Mayor William Foley was coming back from then-governor Thomas Salmon’s inaugural ball that night, and later told Rosenberg he could see the light of the fire from the top of Sherburne Pass.
Rosenberg had become the City Hall reporter about a year earlier, returning to the Herald after getting off of active duty with the National Guard, but he was also one of the few reporters at the time who did not live outside the city.
“I was the first one to get there,” he said. It was really as simple as that. … I had good teachers at the Herald, starting from when I was in high school. Instinctively, I just ran down there. You just go and start to cover it.”
Nick Marro was there with a camera, and the two quickly fell into an unspoken division of labor.
“It was sort of by default,” Rosenberg said. “He took the pictures; I wrote the story.”
Learning how close the fire was to the Herald’s Wales Street offices gave Rosenberg more than just journalistic concerns. Six company cars were parked there. He and sports editor David Morse took turns getting them out.
“It was really an inferno,” he said. “It’s the kind of thing you see in the movies.”
Doing battle
Mooney said he and another firefighter, Charlie Taylor, arrived at the fire station to find all the trucks already were gone. They quickly hoofed it downhill to the scene.
“When I got down there, Reggie Butler had just jumped in the net,” he said. “He was on the fourth floor. I remember Tommy LaFond and a bunch of other guys were holding the net. I’m not sure if he broke his wrist — he hurt his hand.”
Sabataso and a number of other onlookers had gathered across the street in front of Kong Chow to watch. He said he saw a woman he recognized hanging out of a third-floor window. She and her husband, whom Sabataso had been working with at the Holiday Inn, were residents, and he had a prosthetic leg.
“She said, ‘My husband just went to try to find us a way out.’” he said. “She never saw him again. … I said, ‘You got to get a truck there right away.’ They had that basket they could catch people. She was kind of heavy-set, so she didn’t want to jump.”
Even once a ladder was in place and firefighters climbed up to help her, Sabataso said the woman kept saying she wanted to wait for her husband, insisting he was coming. He said they eventually coaxed her down.
Published accounts listed Harold Fuller among the dead and Dorothy Fuller as taken to the hospital.
Lovett said firefighters rounded up volunteers from the bar across Center Street — back then known as Carrie Nation’s — to hold the nets. He said they caught several people, though on the last man who had to jump the group had to move and stumbled.
“He bounced off the old Aldous ambulance and broke his arm, but he survived,” Lovett said. “We were always told that was the last reported life-net rescue in New England.”
Michael Esposito, one of the bystanders who jumped in to help hold the net, said a falling man landed on him.
“I looked up and remember seeing a black spot,” he said. “What I saw was probably his body coming through the smoke. He hit me on the shoulder and went into the net … knocked me right out. … It was all so quick. Everybody was running around and trying to help wherever they could.”
Not everyone who didn’t get out right away had to jump. Firefighters described entering the building and leading eight people from the third floor to safety.
Mooney said he and another firefighter used a ladder to get a hose onto the roof of the Herald building.
“I remember watching the sparks,” he said. “The sparks were going on to the old Burke’s Garage.”
Witnesses described embers reaching as far as the Bardwell House, two blocks away.
At some point, Mooney’s crew wound up in one of the basements and saw fire in the rafters. He said they moved away just before the building collapsed.
“I was looking in the street,” he said. “All I could see was rafters, bricks, sewer line. The pressure of the collapse blew us back.”
Firefighters fought not just the fire, but the cold. Contemporary accounts said the temperatures approached -20 degrees Fahrenheit.
“I don’t think it went above zero the whole time,” Mooney said. “We had to use torches because couplings were frozen. We had to chop hoses out of the ice. Engine One’s pump froze to the ground.”
At least one volunteer helping the firefighters was soaked when a hose burst and had to be treated for frostbite.
“I remember going to the station afterwards,” Lovett said. “The whole back garage was full of frozen hoses. They had to chop them out of the ice, drag them up the hill and try to thaw them out.”
In the Berwick Barber Shop, Mooney said owner Joseph Celentano asked firefighters to chop his cash register out of the ice.
The firewall at Wilson’s Sports — where the Hop’N Moose is today — kept the fire from spreading down Center Street. Owner Emerson Wallace opened the shop and let firefighters grab whatever cold-weather gear they needed.
The longest day
Firefighters came from as far away as Brattleboro and Springfield — and they were needed more than anyone realized beforehand.
“We got sent back up to the station to eat, and we had a house fire in Mendon,” Mooney said.
Not only did Sherburne (now Killington) Clarendon, Rutland City and Rutland Town crews have to rush up to Mendon, where Gladys Baker’s one-floor frame house was gutted, but firefighters also had to deal with an oil burner flare-up on Clematis Avenue that day.
“We were on duty until Monday night at 6 p.m.,” Mooney said. “That’s when we were released. They sent us to bed in shifts. They were giving us four hours. … They had army cots they set up. I’m sleeping so hard, I don’t realize there’s a guy next to me. I got up and fell over him, scared the crap out of both of us.”
Lovett said his mother and other department wives brought food to the station. Mooney said firefighters also went to eat in shifts at the Rutland Restaurant and Midway Diner.
“(Edward) ‘Cheesebox’ Lubinski was the cook,” he said. “He was razzing us, saying ‘Why aren’t you guys at the fire?’”
A firewall on the Rutland Herald side saved that building.
“We didn’t have any heat in the newsroom for a few days,” Rosenberg said. “We were all working with coats on. We weren’t as dependent on electricity — we all had manual typewriters. … I really can’t remember too much about writing the story because I worked 48 hours straight.”
One thing he does remember is that an editor — he never learned who — changed a key word. He had described the smoke rising from the fire as “glowering,” intending to convey a sense of dread. On the page, the word became “glowing.”
“I hated that because glowing has positive connotations,” he said.
On the plus side, Rosenberg said the newspaper paid a $50 bonus to every employee who was on the scene.
“Dad came home, I think, the second or third day,” Lovett recalled. “He had hurt his back. That was back when doctors made house calls, so Dr. Brislin came over. That was the first time I was aware of how potentially dangerous the job was.”
The aftermath
Photos taken of the Berwick site after the fire could easily be mistaken for something out of Berlin at the end of World War II.
Ice from the estimated 500,000 gallons of water used fighting the fire surrounded the site. Flare-ups within the site continued for days. The city’s chief assessor put total property loss at $325,400 — more than $2 million today — but that did not include partial damage to buildings and equipment surrounding the fire.
Five people who lived at the Berwick — Joseph Turmel, Jacqueline LaRose, Anna McGuirk, Albert Haughton and Harold Fuller — were missing and presumed dead. Shortly after the fire, Lovett said, a memorial service was held at the intersection of Wales and Center streets.
“The guys were still in their fire gear,” he said. “They did it under where the traffic light was before it got knocked down.”
Gov. Salmon declared a state of emergency. Rosenberg was then called up when the local National Guard unit was activated to search the rubble for bodies.
“There was no forensics or anything,” he said. “They just said, ‘Let’s mobilize the Rutland National Guard company to go down there and see if they can find anything and we’ll give it a burial.’ Those guys were out there with big green household garbage bags. You’d pick something up and say, ‘What do you think this is? Part of the building or part of a person?’”
The cause remains unknown.
Koltonski, in a deposition for one of the ensuing lawsuits, said he always suspected it was arson due to how quickly the fire spread. Mooney said his own theory was that it started from salamander heaters used to dry construction materials. Investigators noted thin walls, no internal sprinkler system and a fire escape on the northwest wing that had been closed off.
A number of orders from a state inspection prior to the fire had yet to be carried out.
The first reported lawsuit related to the fire was filed in 1974 by Alice McGuirk, sister of Anna McGuirk, arguing the owners had been negligent and seeking $50,000. By 1977, Rutland County civil court had 16 lawsuits related to the fire. All were settled out of court — 12 of them at once in a mass settlement for undisclosed amounts early in 1978.
Before the settlement was reached, the owners gave testimony, denying claims that exits had been sealed off and said there were no salamanders in use in the building.
Empty space
The Berwick became known as “the pit.”
The Rutland Herald bought the property soon after the fire, “temporarily” using the property as parking but always planning for some sort of development that never came.
One plan that started to take shape in 2007 and seemed to be picking up momentum in 2010 involved a multi-use development backed by the Housing Trust of Rutland County and the Rutland Free Library.
“We were looking at doing the library on the first floor and housing on the upper floors,” said Elisabeth Kulas, executive director of the Housing Trust. “That was the initial plan.”
Community College of Vermont started looking for a new space around the same time, and Kulas approached them, but they decided instead to build the facility that now sits at the other end of the block.
When CCV didn’t bite, Kulas said, the plan fell apart.
“I think one of the challenges was, we were one of the ones that did the initial brownfields work with the planning commission,” she said. “The reality with brownfields — they scare people off.”
Contaminants in the site include fuel oil and dry-cleaning chemicals from businesses that occupied the building at different times.
“There’s some precautions, some actions you have to take,” Kulas said. “The development plan is going to govern the contaminant response and that’s a hard thing for partners to navigate.”
When developer Joe Giancola bought the property in 2017, he subsequently backed out of the purchase, claiming he had been unaware of the contamination issues.
DEW Construction had fairly detailed plans to put a 150-room Marriott on the site, but financing for that fell apart at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The property’s newest owner, Belden Construction, has begun lining up support for a “boutique hotel” and housing at the site, but the company said last month it was too early in the process to discuss any details.
Whatever happens, Rosenberg said that when he visits friends in Rutland, he is shocked that the site remains a hole in the ground half a century later.
“That’s like a wound, he said. “It was part of the backdrop for all of us. I still have one of the bricks at home. I don’t know what to do with it.”
gordon.dritschilo @rutlandherald.com
Comments are closed.