Explosion at the Gumry Hotel, 0916 COBJ, Vol. 45, No. 9 Pg. 73

• Author: Frank Gibbard, J.

45 Colo.Law. 73

Explosion at the Gumry Hotel

Vol. 45, No. 9 [Page 73]

The Colorado Lawyer

September, 2016

Frank Gibbard, J.

Historical Perspectives

In Stephen King’s 1977 horror novel The Shining, a winter caretaker at the Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies is driven mad by alcoholism and supernatural evil. While terrorizing his family trapped inside the snowbound hotel, he neglects his duty to care for its unstable boiler. At the novel’s climax, the boiler explodes, destroying the hotel and its malevolent ghosts.¹

Stephen King based the Overlook Hotel on the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park. In recent years, the Stanley has profited from its connection with King’s fictional tale of a haunted hotel.² But in 1895, only 60 miles away, a real-life tragedy unfolded in downtown Denver involving a neglectful alcoholic caretaker, a luxury hotel, and an exploding boiler that triggered a fire and killed 22 people.

Though mostly forgotten today, the Gumry Hotel explosion and fire was one of the worst disasters of its kind in Colorado history, setting off litigation in state and federal courts that continued for years. Reverberations from the explosion were also felt in Colorado’s appellate courts, which were confronted with legal issues involving strict liability, the survival of actions, and the use of expert testimony.

Peter Gumry and the Gumry Hotel

Peter Gumry was born in Sweden in 1835. In 1860, he and a brother came to America. Initially, they settled in Minnesota, but in the early 1870s Peter relocated to Denver.^[3]

Peter Gumry built a successful career as a contractor in the Mile-High City. In 1883 he helped construct the old Arapahoe County Courthouse, located between 15th and 16th Streets and Tremont and Court Place. The building, later known as the Denver County Courthouse, remained standing until the 1930s. Gumry also later served as construction superintendent and supervising architect for the Colorado State Capitol building.⁴

For his eponymous “Gumry Hotel,” Gumry chose an ill-fated location.⁵ In 1887, he built his five-story brick building with a cut-stone front and mansard roof at 1725 Lawrence Street. To ornament the structure, he recycled the façade from the old Clifford Building at 14th and Lawrence, which, foreshadowing the fate of the Gumry Hotel, had burned down the previous year.⁶

At first, Gumry operated 1725 Lawrence as a commercial building. Its initial tenant was the “Eden Musee.” The “Eden Musees” were a cross between a vaudeville theater and a dime museum that sprang up across America around the turn of the century. Although they used the stylish French word for “museum,” the Musees were known for their lowbrow entertainment, including exhibitions of human oddities, performances by “exotic” foreigners, magic acts, and minstrel shows.

The best-known Eden Musee, in New York City, had something for everyone, including a wax museum with a chamber of horrors in its basement and a chess-playing automaton. Denver’s Eden Musee was not an initial success, however, and in the fall of 1888 it was forced to close down for lack of sufficient patronage.⁷ Despite its short tenure at 1725 Lawrence, the Eden Musee managed to lend its name to Gumry’s building, which was thereafter referred to as the “Musee Building.”⁸

After Eden Musee moved out, a hardware store moved in.⁹ A few months later, in February 1889, a fire broke out in the building and the hardware store was forced to shutter its doors.¹⁰ The damage from the fire was patched up. A furniture store moved in. But a short time later, it too was destroyed in a fire.^[11]

Peter Gumry then renovated the building to serve as the Gumry Hotel, which he operated with Robert C. Greiner.¹² The plush facility opened around 1891 and featured such amenities as steam heat, electric lights with electric push buttons, iron fire escapes, and bathrooms in each room. It also housed a restaurant, bar, and billiard hall.¹³ By 1895, though still known as a hotel, the building also served as an upper-grade rooming-house.¹⁴

Enter Helmuth Loescher, Amateur Engineer

A hotel the size of the Gumry needed an engineer to keep its physical plant in good working order. To fill this position, Gumry and Greiner made a dubious choice. They hired Helmuth P. Loescher, a 20-year-old young man “whose habits were dissipated and unreliable, and whose experience did not justify them in placing him in such [a] responsible position,” as the coroner’s verdict later put it.¹⁵ Adding insult to injury, they allegedly made Loescher work 16 hours a day, too long a shift for even a more responsible and well-trained caretaker.

One of Loescher’s duties was to maintain the hotel’s boiler, located in its basement. Reportedly, “the forty-eight-foot-long Gumry boiler, used to power the hotel’s elevator, had a history of poor repair, breakdowns and leaks.”¹⁶ On May 16, 1895, just months before the explosion, the Denver boiler inspector had examined the boiler and ordered that it be repaired, but then apparently issued a certification for the boiler without verifying that the repairs were made.¹⁷ This certification would later play an important role in tort litigation involving the disaster.

A Rookie’s Mistake?

At around 11:00 p.m. on August 18, 1895, Helmuth Loescher shut down the elevator at the Gumry Hotel and traveled down 20th Street to the bar at Kopper’s Hotel.^[18] The “unskillful, negligent” young man, “addicted to the use of liquor,”^[19] later admitted he had not examined the safety valve on the boiler for at least two months. It is not clear exactly what role the boiler’s safety valve, or any of its other components, played in the tragedy. Most of them were severely damaged by the force of the explosion.

Some accounts have a drunken Loescher failing to keep sufficient water in the boiler and then flooding it with cold water, setting off the explosion.^[20]Others have theorized it was actually Peter Gumry and his endless fiddling with the boiler that touched off the catastrophe.²¹ Then there was the rumor that about a week before the explosion, a machinist and former hotel guest who knew about the leaky and unstable boiler had refused a room at the rear of the hotel out of fear for his own safety.²²

The Explosion

In any event, at around midnight on August 19, 1895, the guests had gone to bed and the Gumry Hotel was quiet. The hotel was at full occupancy, with an estimated 60 to 70 people inside. A.E. Irwin, the night clerk, and William Rubbe, the bartender, were performing their duties near the front of the hotel. Gumry, Greiner, and Greiner’s wife occupied rooms at the back of the hotel, over the boiler. The former group would survive the disaster; the latter would not be so lucky.

At Ford’s Restaurant on Larimer Street, Detective John Langdon was eating with a friend when he heard a terrific explosion. He rushed out of the restaurant and around the block. He saw a great cloud of dust and steam, and heard agonized voices. He pulled a fire alarm.²³

The blast had “wrecked the [Gumry Hotel] building, and caused floors, partitions, furniture and people to fall inward and downward in one confused, inextricable mass.”²⁴ It blew glass all over Larimer Street, from the hotel and from other nearby buildings. At least one pedestrian passing by was seriously injured from the flying glass.²⁵

Rescue and Recovery

Denver firefighters soon arrived. At first, there was no fire. The firemen set up ladders against the front of the building, which remained standing, and rescued people trapped in the upper-story rooms. They managed to save several people in this way from the front part of the hotel. For those in the rear of the building, near the boiler, however, there was no hope. This part of the hotel had been “blown to atoms.”²⁶

The firemen could hear the cries of other victims, trapped in the rubble beneath tons of brick, iron, and wood. But they could not see them in the dark. The firemen managed to locate one victim, John Manual of Cairo, Illinois. After two and a half hours of digging, they extracted him from the rubble. His body was badly mangled, but he was still alive.^[27]

Then, the fire broke out. A great cloud of black smoke poured out from the wreckage and the firemen could see flames appear beneath the ruins. The victims began crying out that they were suffocating. The firemen doused the flaming wreckage with water, but many victims were either suffocated or burned to death before they could be rescued.

The death of James Murphy, a wealthy contractor, was particularly pathetic. From the rear of the building, firemen heard him cry out that he was burning. He begged them to keep the water coming. After 15 minutes of hard work, the firemen reached him. They found that his legs were pinned between two of the hotel’s collapsed joists. Working in the blinding smoke, the firemen managed to free Murphy’s left leg. Then a sheet of flame drove them back. Murphy, not wanting to burn to death, offered the firemen $1,000 to get him out. He begged for them to cut off his leg and free him. But “[a] second later the west wall collapsed and covered poor Murphy with tons of ruins.”²⁸

The firemen worked all night. By the next afternoon, they had given up on rescuing victims, and turned to recovering the bodies of the dead. Their work was hindered by the building’s unstable walls, which risked collapsing at any moment.

The Coroner’s Inquest

It was initially thought that Helmuth Loescher perished in the blast.²⁹ But he had merely fled Denver, afraid of being lynched for his part in the explosion. Police arrested him in Antonito, Colorado, a few days later.³⁰ After being returned to Denver, he testified before the coroner’s inquest.

The six-member jury panel for the coroner’s inquest was...