A Washington Tragedy Remembered

Hundreds of Washingtonians, including a number of Georgetown students, braved a heavy continuing snowfall on the evening of January 28, 1922, to see the comic adventures of "Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford" on the screen of Crandall's Knickerbocker Theater at Columbia Road and 18th Street, N.W. At 9 pm, as the theater orchestra played to fill up the intermission during a change of reels, the Knickerbocker's roof, unable to handle the weight of 26 inches of snow, caved in. Among the 98 who died were five Georgetown men; another four were part of the 150 seriously injured. Virtually the entire Medical School took part in caring for the survivors.

Rescue work lasted all night and into the following day. The Sunday Star for January 29 characterized the rescue scene as frightful beyond description:

The moving lanterns, the shouts of the rescue workers and the cries and shrieks of the wounded made a picture which must be left to the imagination. A description would only serve to weaken the awfulness of the scene.

Shortly after the disaster Scripps-Howard Newspapers, publishers of the Washington News, commissioned 24-year-old artist Rico Tomaso, a former student of the well-known Dean Cornwell, to paint a depiction of the disaster. His canvas (rather brutally cropped in reproduction) was ultimately featured in an advertisement created by Scripps-Howard to drum up readers and advertisers. The gift of Gene Basset, editorial cartoonist and longtime member of the Associates, Tomaso's original 26x46-inch oil, with its compelling and poignant Washington and Georgetown associations, is now part of the library's special collections.