DEATHTRAP

Retired engineer Keefe’s nonfiction work chronicles a historic tragedy in Boston.

In the early hours of July 4, 1925, a group of over 120 young Bostonians took to the dance floor at the Pickwick Club, a speakeasy previously revered for its mix of wealthy and working-class patrons. But as couples began to stomp the floor, doing the Charleston, sediment began falling from the ceiling. Suddenly, around 3 a.m., the floor and a wall collapsed, sending dozens through to the level below, many to their deaths. As first responders would later tell reporters, “It was like peering into a fog bank. Behind that hazy veil, there should have been a five-story, red brick building. A crowd of holiday eve revelers should have been drinking and dancing on the second floor. It took a moment or two to grasp the extent of the horror. The building wasn’t there.” In Keefe’s latest nonfiction book, he draws from archival research to re-create the timeline of the tragic event, its aftermath, and what caused the implosion that killed 44 people. Keefe gives the victims as much humanity as the dearth of available information allows, including two daughters of a widow, a labor leader, and a Boston Police lieutenant; most of the patrons that night were in their 20s and 30s. The author reveals how the days and months following the Pickwick collapse would put a glaring spotlight on the failures of city and state bureaucracy, with neither entity willing to take responsibility: “The only agreement among officials was that the blame must lie with someone else. The city government points in the direction of the state house…and the state government points back at city hall.”

Keefe’s prose is fairly mild in tone, considering the emotional subject matter, but his attention to detail shows his deep investment in the story. His own father had attended the Pickwick Club that night, but fortunately left shortly before the collapse. The author breaks the book into two halves: “The Collapse,” which chronicles the building’s history, gives a harrowing account of the building collapse from multiple sources, and highlights initial media coverage of the disaster, and “The Aftermath,” which largely covers the subsequent funerals, the investigations, and the criminal trial of men connected to the Pickwick Club, to the neighboring garage business, and to the construction company that had worked on the building after a fire damaged it earlier that year. There were no convictions in connection with the terrible event, but Keefe’s diligent reporting clearly insinuates that there were many guilty parties involved in the Pickwick disaster. The building, for example, had been built before Boston instituted building codes in 1871, and its permits were murky at best; newspapers were notorious for printing inaccurate information. There are multiple photos, interspersed throughout the text, of the various figures involved, as well as cartoons and newspaper clippings that ably contextualize how bureaucracy and personal interests endangered the public.

A thoughtful exploration of a deadly event that reveals broader social issues of the era.