The theater had thirty exits. All were opened before the fire reached full headway, but some had to be forced opened. Only one door at the Randolph street entrance was open, the others being locked, according, it appears, to custom.
From within and without these doors were shattered in the first two minutes after the fire broke out—by theater employes, according to one report, by the van of the fleeing multitude and the first of the rescuers from the street, according to another.
The doors to the exits on the alley side, between Randolph and Lake streets, in one or more instances, are declared by those who escaped to have been either frozen or rusted. They opened to assaults, but priceless seconds were lost.
Before this time Foy had run back across the stage and reached the alley. With him fled the members of the aerial ballet, the last of the performers to get out. The aerialists owed their lives to the boy in charge of the fly elevator. They were aloft, in readiness for their flight above the heads of the audience. The elevator boy ran his cage up even with the line of fire, took them in, and brought them safely down.
As Foy and the group reached the outer doorway the stage loft collapsed and tons of fire poured over the stage.
The lights went out in the theater with this destruction of the switchboard and all stage connections. One column of flame rose and swished along the ceiling of the theater. Then this awful illumination also was swallowed up. None may paint from personal understanding that which took place in that pit of flame lit darkness. None lives to tell it.
To those still caught in the structure the light of life went out when the electric globes grew dark.
In spite of the terrible form of their destruction, it came swiftly enough to shorten pain. This at least was true of those who died in the second balcony, striving to reach the alley exits abreast of them.
Six and seven feet deep they were found, not packed in layers but jumbled and twisted in the struggle with one another.
Opposite the westernmost exit of the balcony—on the alley—was a room in the Northwestern University building (the old Tremont house) where painters were working, wiping out the traces of another fire.