This compelling history chronicles some of the most intense and tragic fires in Chicago’s storied meatpacking district. Chicago’s Union Stock Yards made the city “the hog butcher of the world,” but the notoriety came at a grievous cost. From their opening on Christmas Day of 1865 to their final closure in July of 1971, The Yards were the site of nearly three hundred extra-alarm fires. That infamous history includes some of the most disastrous conflagrations of a city famous for fire. In 1910, twenty-one firemen and three civilians were killed in a blaze at a beef warehouse—the largest death toll for an organized fire department in the nation prior to 9/11. The meatpackers who ran the yards considered the constant threat of fire as part of the cost of doing business, shrugging it off with an, “It’s all right, we're fully covered.” For the firefighters who were forced to plunge into the flames again and again, it was an entirely different matter.

A historical journey through the city’s catastrophic fires, and the stories of the heroes who fought them. Chicago’s war against cinder, flame, and smoke did not end with the Great Fire of 1871. In 1909, fire ripped through the dynamite room of a staging facility a mile and half off the Lake Michigan shoreline, transforming the pipe-laying operation into a raging inferno. During the World’s Columbian Exposition, thousands of fairgoers watched in horror as twelve firefighters were trapped in a blazing ice warehouse. An opera-goer left a smoking bomb under his seat at the Auditorium Theater in 1917. And the newly invented smoke ejector arrived too late to save firemen and laborers cut off in a sewer in 1931. Join John F. Hogan and Alex A. Burkholder for the history of these forgotten fires—and those who responded to them. “A must-read not only for first responders but also all history buffs, especially those interested in Chicago history.” —Robert Hoff, retired fire commissioner, Chicago Fire Department, from the foreword