By Bob Warrington

“From the lips of a frightened little girl came a cry of terror yesterday afternoon that lured hundreds of panic-stricken men to death and injury at the Philadelphia Base Ball Grounds.” So begins the front-page story in the Philadelphia Inquirer describing the collapse of part of the top left field bleachers’ balcony at the Phillies’ ballpark on August 8, 1903 that hurled hundreds of people headlong to the pavement and street below. Twelve people died and 232 were injured. This article tells the story—100 years later—of Philadelphia’s deadliest sports disaster, and its far-reaching, dramatic consequences for baseball, its fans, and the city.

 

Background on the Ballpark

The origins of Philadelphia Base Ball Park date to 1887 when the team’s owners, Alfred J. Reach and Col. John I. Rogers, wanted a new ballpark for their Philadelphia Phillies, a team which had come into existence just four years before. Recreation Park—the team’s first home field located at 24th Street and Columbia Avenue—had been constructed hastily of wood and held only 6,500 people. The site selected for the new structure was in North Philadelphia—about three miles north of Independence Hall. The first base foul line ran parallel to Huntingdon Street, right field to center field parallel to Broad Street, center field to left field parallel to Lehigh Avenue, while the third base foul line paralleled 15th Street. The seating capacity was 12,500. The most modern and advanced ballpark of the era, it incorporated some brick in its construction and had a pavilion for seating.

 

Philadelphia Base Ball Park still contained a great deal of wood in its construction, however, the drawback of which became apparent on August 6, 1894. That morning, the Phillies were preparing for an afternoon game against the Baltimore Orioles when, at 10:40 AM, one of the players noticed a fire in the grandstands. The fire quickly spread and largely consumed the ballpark. Its cause was never determined. Although there were no fatalities and only minor injuries, the fire caused $250,000 in damage and destroyed everything with the exception of part of the outer brick wall that enclosed the ballpark. The Phillies played their next six games at the University of Pennsylvania’s University Field at 37th and Spruce Streets, winning five of the match-ups. On August 18th, the team returned to its home field where temporary stands seating about 9,000 people had been built to finish out the season.

 

Determined to avoid such catastrophes in the future, Reach took the bold step of creating a new ballpark at the same location using mostly steel and brick in its construction. It contained no wood except for the floors and seats of the grandstands. Dubbed National League Park when it opened in 1895, the ballpark was stilled referred to often as Philadelphia Base Ball Park and, less frequently, the Huntingdon Street Grounds. It seated 18,800 and featured a cantilever pavilion—a radically new architectural technique in stadium construction. By building it, according to baseball historian Michael Gershman, Al Reach “created the first modern ballpark.” National League Park remained essentially untouched until 1903.

 

By that year, Reach and Rogers were no longer the owners of the Phillies. They had sold the team for $170,000 following the 1902 season to a coterie of “millionaires” from Philadelphia and Cincinnati who together had formed the “Philadelphia Base Ball and Entertainment Company.” James Potter, the chief stockholder, became the club’s president and led the new owners—numbering a remarkable 24 in number. Reach and Rogers, however, retained ownership of the ballpark itself. This arrangement would become important in sorting out the torrent of law suites, verbal recriminations, and accusations of responsibility and liability that were to follow in the disaster’s wake.

 

The Deadliest Disaster

A doubleheader was scheduled between the Phillies and Boston Braves on Saturday, August 8, 1903. A crowd of some 10,000 saw the Braves take the first game in 12 innings, edging the Phillies by a score of 5-4. In the second game, the teams were locked in a 5-5 tie in the fourth inning. At 5:40 PM, the Braves’ Joe Stanley was at the plate with two outs. However, the attention of the fans who had each paid 25 cents for seats in the bleachers down the left field line had been drawn to an incident occurring below on 15th Street outside of the ballpark.

 

Two drunken men were walking slowly down 15th Street followed by a small group of boys and girls who were teasing them. Suddenly, one of the men turned toward the children and grabbed one of the girls by the hair. In doing so, he stumbled and fell on top of her. The child, who was later identified as 13-year-ol Maggie Barry, shrieked in terror as did her companions. They cried, “Help!” and “Murder!” The commotion drew people in the ballpark to the top of the bleachers to see what was happening below.

 

They congregated on an overhanging wooden balcony at the top of the outer wall that ran along 15th Street and continued around the corner on Lehigh Avenue. The balcony was seven-to-eight feet wide and protruded beyond the wall by about three feet. It was intended as a footway for people to use for entering and exiting the grandstand and bleachers. The balcony had a handrail but was not independently braced underneath.

 

Instead, the same joists that were used to support the grandstand and bleachers held up the balcony. The joists extended through the top of the wall to provide support. According to newspaper accounts of the time, an estimated three hundred people jammed onto the balcony to witness the incident that was unfolding approximately 30 feet below on 15th Street. The Inquirer described what happened next in a headline story that ran the following day:

 

Suddenly, jammed with an immense, vibrating weight, the balcony tore itself loose from the wall, and the crowd was hurled headlong to the pavement. Those who felt themselves falling grasped those behind and they in turn held on to others. Behind were thousands still pushing up to see what was happening. In the twinkling of an eye the street was piled four deep with bleeding, injured, shrieking humanity struggling amid the piling debris.

 

The crash was as horrifying as it was deadly. In an instant, 15th Street was piled high with almost 200 bleeding, injured, and shrieking individuals struggling amid the ballpark debris. More people continued to fall off the balcony as those still in the bleachers who heard the noise and screams started pressing forward to see what the commotion was all about. One of the first police officers on the scene, Sergeant Bartle, told reporters:

 

There must have been one hundred men and boys, and every one of them was covered with blood. Some of them had their clothing almost torn from their bodies, while others were so bespattered with blood and mud as to be almost unrecognizable. Under the debris were the forms of those who were unconscious. You could not tell whether they were dead or alive. Timber, rubbish, and bricks were piled everywhere.

 

The alarm for the accident was turned in almost immediately by Policeman Coin who was walking down Lehigh Avenue, saw the disaster, and ran to the station house one block away. Within minutes, patrol wagons and ambulances were rushing to the ballpark, but the extent of the calamity was simply too great for them to handle. Streetcars were emptied of passengers and loaded with the injured. Delivery wagons and automobiles were commandeered by police to rush victims to local hospitals. The injured were taken initially to Samaritan and St. Luke’s Hospitals. When they became overwhelmed tending to 150 people, victims were sent to the Jewish Hospital.

 

Back at the accident scene, the best and worst of humanity were on display. Neighbors opened their houses to the wounded, Good Samaritans tried to give comfort to the fallen, and doctors rushed to the ballpark when they heard of the disaster. At the same time, pickpockets sought to loot the injured and dying while curiosity-seekers simply looked on without offering any relief to those in need.

 

The game stopped immediately when the calamity occurred. Shock quickly turned to panic as people in the leftfield bleachers started jumping onto the field fearing that addition sections of the ballpark would collapse. Some players armed themselves with bats to keep from being overwhelmed by the wild stampede. The game was canceled.

 

Aftermath and the Deadly Toll

The break started along the bleachers about 50 feet from the intersection of 15th and Huntingdon Streets, continued north along 15th Street, and stopped at the point the stands curved toward Lehigh Avenue—a distance of between 100-150 feet. It was customary during the era for men to wear hats to baseball games, and over a hundred were gathered up and placed in the window of a grocery store on 15th Street waiting for their owners to reclaim them. Some never would.

 

Immediately after the collapse, ballpark employees were ordered to remove the debris and clear the site. This was done by 7 PM. Even the jagged ends of the timbers that once supported the balcony and still jutted out from the wall were cut off and taken away. While the clean up was in progress, a city building inspector named Kessler arrived on the scene, secured pieces of the joists and specimens of the brick and mortar, and took them with him to City Hall. They were impounded as evidence to be used in the inquiry that was sure to follow to discover the cause of the disaster and affix responsibility for it.

 

The final count showed that 12 had been killed and 232 injured in the catastrophe, and it remains Philadelphia’s deadliest sports disaster. The youngest fatality, 24, was William J. Graham who lived with his parents. His 18-year-old sister had died of illness in May, and the double blow left the family prostrated by grief. The oldest victim was Edward Williamson, a 63-year-old Civil War veteran who had been wounded at the Battle of Antietam and endured the misery of incarceration at the South’s notorious Andersonville Prison.

 

What about the drunks? Efforts were made to find them once an investigation into the accident began. There were at least four versions of the drunken men story circulating, and authorities wanted to talk to the individuals whose actions had started the ruckus that drew ballpark spectators to their fate. Neighbors said that after the accident they saw the two men lying in an alley near 15th Street. The police, however, were so busy tending to the needs of victims that they paid no attention to the drunks. During the excitement the men apparently recovered sufficiently to amble off and disappear into the black hole of history. They were never identified.

 

Finger-Pointing and Lawsuits

Phillies’ Business Manager William Shettsline was in charge of ballpark operations when the disaster struck. In the immediate aftermath of the accident, according to an Inquirer reporter, he “was so badly prostrated by the shock that he could scarcely tell a coherent story.” By the next day, Shettsline had recovered sufficiently to issue a statement in which the owners of the club asserted their claim of having no culpability in the matter. While expressing sympathy for the victims, the statement explained:

 

The accident was in no way due to any lack of proper precautions or neglect on the part of officials of the club…When the present management assumed control of the grounds, the pavilion and stands were in perfect condition, and, for the purposes intended were safe and reliable, but the simultaneous rush of several hundred persons to one concentrated point weakened the structure and precipitated several hundred unfortunate persons to the street below…Over-anxiety on their part resulted in the regrettable accident.

 

Club president Potter was vacationing outside the city but returned to Philadelphia quickly when informed of the disaster by telegraph. Accompanied by National League President Harry Pulliam, Potter appeared before the press on August 10th and echoed the defense offered the day before by Shettsline. The statement he read said, in part, “I feel that no precaution was omitted on the part of the company to protect the patrons of the ground. It was one of those unfortunate accidents that occur when large numbers of people, actuated by a common impulse, do something they are not expected to do.”

 

Colonel John I. Rogers, co-owner of the ballpark along with A. J. Reach, also returned hastily from a vacation in Cape May, NJ. He released a lengthy statement to the press in which he recounted the ballpark’s construction and noted that it was inspected each spring by “experienced mechanics” to confirm its soundness and ensure the safety of ballpark patrons. Rogers observed:

 

The inspection usually lasted for weeks, and always entailed a large expenditure for maintenance and replacement. Three years ago we appointed an experienced carpenter as our park superintendent, so that inspections could be daily instead of annually, and we firmly believed that nothing of doubtful strength or fitness escaped his attention. The new club owners who took possession on March 1 followed, as Mr. Shettsline informs me, the same rule last spring and spent a large sum for maintenance and repair before their opening game. One thing is certain, that the mad rush of an excited crowd suddenly jumping to the balcony and pushing everything irresistibly before it, would have crushed any similar structure, no matter how strongly or recently built. It was a football center rush, multiplied indefinitely, that few, if any, walls could have withstood.

 

Rogers also commented that R. C. Ballinger & Co. had done the original construction of the ballpark, and he emphasized that “all the details were left to their superior skills and judgment.” Rogers added, in an apparent effort to distance himself and Reach from any culpability in the accident, “They submitted outline plans to the Building Inspectors and to us, and went ahead with their tasks and on their own responsibility, just like every other first-class firm.”

 

R. C. Ballinger immediately shot back in a comment to newspaper reporters stating, “The fault, if it lies anywhere, is theirs; not mine.” He praised the quality of the original construction but also cautioned that eight years had since passed, and that “the best timber, when subjected, unprotected, for eight years to the effects of the sun, wind, snow and rain may become rotten.” Ballinger declared emphatically, “My responsibility ended when the grounds were opened and the tests made.”

 

“Rotten timbers!” was Philadelphia Mayor John Weaver’s opinion of the cause of the balcony crash when he inspected the site along with other city officials two days after the accident. He opined, “I am not a builder, but he looks to me as if the construction of the balcony was faulty.” When asked who was responsible for the rotten timbers, Weaver replied, “The people whose duty it is to keep the stand in repair.” With an eye toward insulating the city from any culpability, Weaver commented that under present law, “building inspectors were not under obligation to inspect buildings, except theaters, after they had been completed unless some complaint was made.” He further noted that the city did not have enough building inspectors to inspect all such structures regularly.

 

By the time Weaver spoke, charges about the decrepit condition of the balcony’s support structure had become common currency. Reporters at the scene immediately after the accident observed the problem at once. An Inquirer reporter wrote:

 

A cursory glance at the debris before its removal by the ball park employees showed that much of the timber was in a badly decayed state. While the main body of the wall looked firm, the bricks about the top, where the joists protruded, were loose and some of them looked as though the mortar had been worn out or washed away.

 

The efforts by Potter, Rogers, Ballinger, and Weaver to absolve themselves from any fault can be well understood. The first lawsuit filed as a result of the accident was submitted on 10 August. Attorney John R. K. Scott, as counsel for Walter Mariner and Harry Quigley—two of the men injured in the collapse—issued summonses from Courts of Common Pleas Nos. 1 and 5, respectively, against the Philadelphia Base Ball Club and Exhibition Company (Potter’s group) to recover damages for the injuries they sustained. It was alleged in the statements of claim “that the defendant company was negligent in maintaining the overhanging promenade in a condition which was unsafe for the patrons of the ballpark.”

 

Another lawsuit—the third one filed—asked for $5,000 in damages for James E. Dwyer, who was amongst the injured. While the amount is a pittance compared to claims for damages in personal injury suits filed today, it was a considerable amount back then. The average annual salary for a major league baseball player in 1903, by comparison, was less than $3,000. The suit alleged that the Philadelphia Base Ball Club and Exhibition Company was negligent in not providing a safe passageway for patrons, and that the company further rendered itself liable by not providing a sufficient number of “special officers” at the ballpark to control the crowds.

 

As the days passed, additional lawsuits were initiated, and eventually, over 80 were filed. Later suits were expanded to also include the Philadelphia Base Ball Club, Limited—the company headed by Rogers and Reach—which owned the ballpark and from which Potter’s group leased it for Phillies’ ball games.

 

The Coroner’s Inquest

Coroner Charles Dugan began his inquest into the accident on August 18th, and all six members of the jury were builders. The first witness called was R. C. Ballinger, whose company had erected the balcony and bleachers at the ballpark. He said the balcony had been constructed only to accommodate those fans passing to and from the bleachers. It was not intended, he explained, to “withstand a mob,” and he added, “I can’t see where any one has any reason to blame any one but himself. If an accident of the sort had happened while they were seated, then they might have complained.” Ballinger noted that the supporting joists were built of the “best yellow pine lumber,” with an average life of seven-to-nine years. The foreman in charge of the construction, David S. Lockwood, appeared on the stand and testified that the building materials and construction quality were good, and that the structure had been subjected to extensive testing before the park was opened in 1895.

 

Colonel Rogers appeared as well and described in great detail the story of the construction of the ballpark. He emphasized that there had been no indication that the timbers extending from the wall to support the balcony—which had been covered in tin for protection when put in place—had rotted. Shettsline appeared next and said that the special officers on duty at the ballpark had done their best to control the crowd and return the curious to their seats but had been simply overwhelmed by the mob.

 

Finally, James Potter took his place on the witness stand and testified that when his corporation took over the Phillies in February 1903, he had asked Colonel Rogers if there was anything that needed to be done to improve the conditions in the grandstands. According to Potter, Rogers replied, “You cannot spend a cent in the way of repairs, for no repairs are needed.”

 

An Inquirer reporter offered this interpretation of the cumulative testimony of the first day’s witnesses, “The impression seemed to prevail that the fatal balcony might have withstood ordinary usage for some time, but the great weight of the mob that rushed upon it on the day of the accident was too much for even an iron-braced balcony.”

 

The most sensational commentary during the second and final day of testimony came from Edward Clark, an engineer of the Bureau of Building Inspection who had examined the accident scene. He found that in the area of the balcony that had collapsed, 50 of the wooden support joists were “rotten and worthless,” 10 were 75% bad, and 14 were 50% bad. Only two of the joists were in good condition. Disputing Ballinger, Clark said that the lumber used for the joists was hemlock—not pine—and that water seeping through nail holes created when the tin capping was affixed to the joists had rotted the timber over the years.

 

The chief of the Bureau of Building Inspection, Robert C. Hill, corroborated Clark’s testimony and pointed out that under current law, inspectors had no right to enter a building after the inspection following its completion except on complaint. Hill confirmed that since the ballpark’s 1895 opening, it had not been inspected by the bureau. He also condemned the use of hemlock in building construction noting, “From what I have seen in the last two weeks, I would not consider an application for a permit for any stand of a permanent character in which hemlock forms the main foundation or its component parts.”

 

The Coroner’s jury deliberated for two and one-half hours after testimony on the ballpark disaster had concluded and announced three principal findings:

 

The jury finds that the falling of a balcony on the left field stand on 15th Street which caused the deaths of Joseph Edgar and eleven others at the Philadelphia Base Ball Park was due to the rotten condition of the supporting timbers. We further find that the Philadelphia Base Ball Club, Limited (Rogers and Reach) were responsible in not having a thorough examination made of those timbers throughout the time of their ownership, and in stating at the time of the transfer (to Potter’s group) that the buildings on the grounds were in first-class condition.

 

We also find it our duty to recommend that the staff of the inspectors for the Bureau of Building Inspection should be increased, and that a number of inspectors should be assigned whose sole duty it should be to inspect all places of amusement, ball parks, race-track pavilions, external fire escapes, etc., and that they should be empowered to enter upon the premises of any place at any and all times to make such inspections as should insure the safety of the patrons or employees thereof; and that a permit be issued and publicly posted stating when the inspection was made and the condition of the place.

 

The jury also recommends that the Bureau of Building Inspection allow no hemlock lumber to be used in the stands of a permanent nature or in buildings where big assemblages congregate. The jury also recommends that there shall be no seating capacity allowed under any stand of wood construction unless a permit is first secured from the Bureau of Building Inspection.

 

The Disaster’s Legacy

 

The lawsuits wended languidly through the court system for six years, reaching all the way up to the US Supreme Court. The Court largely accepted the defense offered by the owners of National League Park and the Phillies, ruling that an extraordinary number of fans had congregated at a location where many of them should not have been, and consequently, that neither the ball club nor the ballpark’s landlords were responsible for the accident. Both were absolved of all blame and financial responsibility.

 

By the time this ruling was handed down, Potter was long gone as president of the Phillies. His tenure lasted just two seasons—1903 and 1904—and the team went from bad to worse during that time. The Phillies finished in seventh place in 1903, posting an anemic 49-86 record. In 1904, the club finished in eighth and last place, carving out a 52-100 record. This was the first time the Phillies lost 100 or more games in a season, but certainly not the last. A blue-blood and socialite of considerable status, Potter was out of place in his role as Phillies president. Baseball historian Rich Westcott has noted that had Potter bought “a polo franchise instead of the Phillies in March 1903, maybe it would have all worked out for the best.” The stockholders elected William Shettsline—an experienced baseball man and long-time official with the Phillies—as the new president. The syndicate organized by Potter sold the team early in 1909 leaving him, in the words of baseball author David Jordan, “very happy to be freed of any further connection with baseball.”

 

The Phillies’ 1903 season changed abruptly because of the accident. Shettsline attempted to restart games at the ballpark on August 10th, saying that the left field bleachers would be roped off and only the grandstand and right field bleachers would be used to seat fans. City officials blanched at the proposal until the entire ballpark could be thoroughly inspected. Potter canceled all future games until an inspection could be done and repairs made. A conference was held on August 17th between Potter and Ben Shibe, the president of the American League’s Philadelphia Athletics. It was agreed that until the Phillies’ ballpark was ready to reopen, the team would continue its season by playing at the Athletics’ home field—Columbia Park—located at 29th Street and Columbia Avenue. Forebodingly, a continuous rain forced nine straight postponements of Phillies’ games at their temporary location. When the team finally did get to play, it posted a 6-9-1 record at Columbia Park before returning to National League Park.

 

The arrangement between the Phillies and Athletics was a portent of things to come. During the 1938 season, the Phillies finally abandoned their ballpark—called Baker Bowl after one of the team’s former owners William F. Baker—which by then had come to be regarded as a “pitifully down-trodden heap that always seemed on the verge of collapsing.” The team moved down Lehigh Avenue to Shibe Park—the home of the Athletics—and it remained their home field until after the 1970 season.

 

Before they were able to leave National League Park for good, however, an additional collapse of part of the structure occurred during a game. The Phillies were playing the St. Louis Cardinals on May 14, 1927 when it began to rain in the third inning. Hundreds of fans from the bleachers swarmed into the lower deck side of the first base grandstand trying to squeeze in under the pavilion roof to keep dry. In the sixth inning, the Phillies exploded for eight runs, and with each one scored, the fans cheered louder and stamped harder on the wooden grandstand floor. Without warning in the seventh inning, two sections of the stands—that had seats for about 300 fans—suddenly collapsed. Panic gripped the ballpark as fans swarmed onto the field, and the head umpire responded to the chaos by quickly calling off the game. Fifty spectators were injured, but only one died, and it was later determined that his death had been caused by a heart attack.

 

The legacy of “Black Saturday,” as the 1903 disaster came to be known, included a profound influence on the future of ballpark construction. In its wake appeared the classic American ballparks that would dominate the 20th century, and their arrival coincided conveniently with the use of reinforced concrete as a building material. The first and most notable of these palaces was Shibe Park—the home of the Philadelphia Athletics—which opened in 1909. The souvenir program sold at the inaugural Opening Day provided a detailed description of the ballpark’s construction, and the unmistakable influence of the 1903 tragedy was apparent in the text:

 

In the construction of the seating provisions of previous ballparks the use of wood was general. Several unfortunate accidents called serious attention to the need of something more durable than wood for the safety of the enormous crowds which thronged parks where winning baseball was being played…In the evolution of building construction vast strides have been made, and daring builders experimented with various materials to overcome the corrosive influences of time and the elements. Up to the present time nothing has been contrived which form a more lasting combination than wrought steel and cement. Technically it is known as reinforced concrete…The bleachers and grandstand and walls (at Shibe Park) are solid beds of concrete.

 

Philadelphia’s building inspection laws were also fundamentally affected by the disaster. Taking up the recommendation of the Coroner’s jury, Mayor Weaver called immediately for more rigorous and extensive inspections of buildings in which the public gathered, declaring, “I shall insist that provisions be immediately made that hereafter all places where crowds congregate shall be thoroughly inspected.” As the Inquirer noted at the time, Mayor Weaver’s admonition, coupled with the recommendations of the jury, were “expected to revolutionize the existing laws on building inspection.” They did. The staff of inspectors at the Bureau of Building Inspection was increased significantly, and legislation was soon enacted that made more rigorous, frequent, and intrusive than heretofore had been the case, the inspection of public buildings in Philadelphia. The most visible evidence of these changes was the requirement that owners of establishments where the public gathered post openly the permits they had received from the inspection bureau attesting to the soundness of the structure.

 

The most poignant measure of a disaster like the one that visited National League Park on a hot August day in 1903, however, is in human terms. This sad and all-too-obvious point is highlighted in the fate of Joseph Edgar, one of the fatalities, as described by the Inquirer:

 

Edgar had been in poor health and went to the game at the advice of his physician, who advised open air recreation as a remedy for his ailment. In starting for the base ball park he invited his son Robert, aged 15 years, to accompany him, but the boy had an engagement and did not go. The death of Joseph Edgar leaves a widow and five children destitute.

Sources:

The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 9-12, 18-20, 1903

 

Michael Gershman, Diamonds: The Evolution of the Ballpark, (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1993).

 

David M. Jordan, Occasional Glory: A History of the Philadelphia Phillies, (Jefferson, McFarland & Co., 2002).

 

Lawerence S. Ritter, Lost Ballparks: A Celebration of Baseball’s Legendary Fields, (New York, Penguin Books, 1992).

 

Rich Westcott, Philadelphia’s Old Ballparks, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996).

 

Rich Westcott and Frank Bilovsky, The New Phillies Encyclopedia, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993).