Beverly Hills Supper Club fire

On the evening of May 28, 1977, a fire occurred at the Beverly Hills Supper Club in Southgate, Kentucky. With a total of 165 deaths and over 200 injuries, it is history's seventh-deadliest nightclub fire.

Club

The Beverly Hills Supper Club was a major attraction, less than 2.5 miles (4 km) outside Cincinnati, just across the Ohio River in Southgate, Kentucky, on US 27, near what later became its interchange with Interstate 471. The club booked its entertainers from Las Vegas, Nashville, Hollywood, New York, and other show-business hubs. The site had been a popular nightspot and illegal gambling house as early as 1926. Ohio native Dean Martin had been a blackjack dealer there.

In 1967, organized crime figures Moe Dalitz, Morris Kleinman and Samuel A. Tucker sold The Beverly Hills Country Club to Joseph E. Cole, Sam W. Klein, Carl Glickman and two other men (one of whom has been linked to New Jersey mob boss Gerardo Catena), who, in 1974, sold to the Richard Schilling family.

In 1971, the club reopened under the then-current owners and management and was considered an elegant venue that attracted top-notch talent and affluent clientele.

thumb|A floor plan of the former Beverly Hills Supper ClubSeveral additions had been built onto the original structure between 1970 and 1976, creating a sprawling, non-linear complex of function rooms and service areas. The resulting complex was roughly square, and though it was not situated in a north–south direction, reports of the fire have tended to use these as reference points when describing the complex. Assuming this system, the front entrance of the complex lay at the southern point of the compass. Along the central portion of the southern wall, to the east of the building entrance, was a small event room called the Zebra Room. A narrow corridor to the Zebra Room's east separated it from the Viennese Room and a series of service spaces, which ran northward along the building's eastern wall. This interior corridor terminated between the Garden Room, occupying the central portion of the north wall of the building, and the Cabaret Room, which jutted out from the northeastern corner of the building.

A smaller, branching corridor led from the internal corridor to an exit door that sat between the Garden Room and the Cabaret Room; to exit the building from the Cabaret Room using that corridor, a person had to pass through a set of double doors into the main interior corridor, pass through a single door between the main interior corridor and the branching interior corridor, turn a sharp corner into the branching corridor, and proceed approximately one-quarter of the length of the Cabaret Room to the single door connecting the branching corridor to the exterior. Based on its number of exits, the Cabaret Room could safely accommodate about 600 people, according to the calculations of the Fire Marshal. and 1,300. a wedding reception drew to a close around 8:30 p.m. in the Zebra Room, near the building's main entrance; some of its guests had complained of the room being excessively warm with loud explosions from beneath the floor, and the group left the building before the end of their allotted time. The room remained vacant from their departure until 8:59 p.m. when an employee smelled smoke and opened the Zebra Room's door to confirm the presence of smoke. She asked another employee to call the fire department while she and others began trying to fight the flames with fire extinguishers. The employees' opening of the Zebra Room's door allowed enough oxygen into the room to cause what had been a smoldering fire in the room's drop ceiling to flashover and begin to spread rapidly, becoming impossible to extinguish with the fire extinguishers. The Fire Department was alerted to the fire at 9:01 p.m. and arrived by 9:05; Fire investigators later estimated that, once it spread through the northern doors of the Zebra Room, it took two to five minutes for the fire to spread to the Cabaret Room; as a result, news of the fire and the first of the smoke and flame reached the Cabaret Room, the farthest point from the Zebra Room, nearly simultaneously.

At 11:30 p.m., fire command, suspecting that the building's roof would soon collapse, ordered all firefighters to evacuate the building. On the afternoon of June 1, the death toll rose to 161 when another two bodies were found in the rubble where the Viennese Room was. A 162nd victim died in hospital on June 11, a 163rd on June 23, a 164th on July 1, and a 165th nine months after the fire on March 1, 1978.

<!--The fire has been the subject of numerous scholarly investigations, as a case study of behavior in sudden disaster situations. These studies have found that despite the rapid spread of the fire and the dire situation facing the victims, patrons did not panic. Instead, people stayed with and helped their families and friends as the threat grew, and employees continued to help people exit the building. However, other witnesses claim that there were no persons in charge and that employees had received no training on how to handle such a situation. They further claim that patrons did panic, and that their pushing, shoving, and trampling caused numerous deaths, including that of club cocktail waitresses.

Lack of firewalls: This allowed the fire to spread and draw oxygen from other areas of the complex.
Poor construction practices: The club had been built piecemeal with inadequate roof support, no common ceiling space, and highly flammable components.
Extreme safety code violations: There was no sprinkler system and no audible automatic fire alarm.
Poor oversight by regulatory authorities: According to the Enquirer, the local volunteer fire department knew of the deficiencies, but by law, at the time, did not have the authority to compel corrections.

Aftermath

thumb|Beverly Hills Supper Club site, Southgate, Kentucky (2012)

Richard Whitt of the Louisville Courier-Journal was awarded the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for Local General or Spot News Reporting for his articles on the fire. His citation reads: "For his coverage of a fire that took 164 lives at the Beverly Hills Supper Club at Southgate, Ky., and subsequent investigation of the lack of enforcement of state fire codes."

In a letter dated July 8, 2011, Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway ordered a retired Kentucky State Police forensic specialist to return 30 boxes of color slides taken in the days after the fire, including pictures of the club's basement during the aftermath, which the forensic specialist had taken personal possession of following his retirement from the State Police. Conway decided that these documents were public records and must be handled and made available to the public in accordance with Kentucky's Open Records Act.

A state historic marker commemorates the fire.

In 2020, a private developer reached a deal with the City of Southgate to build a mixed-use development on the site. First responders, families of fire victims, and others filed a lawsuit in September 2020 to halt the project, but came to an agreement in November 2020, allowing the project to move forward. In May 2023, a permanent memorial was inaugurated near the development's northern access road.

Later arson allegations

Author Robert D. Webster, along with co-authors David Brock and Thomas McConaughy, in their 2012 investigative history Beverly Hills Supper Club: The Untold Story of Kentucky's Worst Tragedy, alleges that the fire was actually set deliberately by the mafia, in retaliation for the Supper Club's owner's refusing to sell the venue to them. Webster and McConaughy began their investigation at the behest of David Brock, who had been a busboy at the venue on the night of the fire and claimed to have seen unidentified "maintenance men" working in the ceiling of one of the party rooms shortly before the fire broke out. Webster was awarded a 2013 Kentucky History Award for his work on their book.

Brock's allegations had previously been presented to Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear in 2008 by a group called the Beverly Hills Survivors for Justice. Beshear appointed a special Governor's Review Team, which reviewed the allegations and evidence with assistance from the Office of Inspector General of the Kentucky Public Protection, Environment and Energy, and Labor Cabinets. This Review Team's final report on the matter described the allegations as "a very tiny shred of evidence of arson and a huge mountain of conjecture, unsupported speculation, and personal opinion" which "fall[s] many miles short of the kind of proof that would be needed to justify a ... re-investigation..."

References

External links

Beverly Hills Supper Club fire - An oral history by WCPO-TV
The Beverly Hills Tragedy by The Cincinnati Post 10 March 2007
"Cautionary Tales – Fire At The Beverly Hills Supper Club", podcast by Tim Harford