100 years ago: Massive fire trumped news of WWI in NJ

This Thursday marks the 100th anniversary of America's entry into World War I.

Thursday also happens to be the centennial of one of the worst disasters in Asbury Park's history, which also made national headlines.

Late on the night of April 5, 1917, "defective wiring" ignited inside a Boardwalk natatorium, a fancy, old-fashioned word for a building that houses a swimming pool. It was located on the Boardwalk across the street from where The Stone Pony stands today.  As 65 mph gale force winds blew in from the Atlantic Ocean, the blaze broke free of the structure and swept west.

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The fire laid waste to 48 buildings over four blocks from the Boardwalk to Grand Avenue, between First and Second avenues. Obliterated in its path were hotels, boarding houses, cottages, single-family homes, businesses, a police sub-station and the First Methodist Episcopal Church. More than $1 million in damage was done, about $20 million in 2017 money.

As the reality of what was happening sunk in, hundreds of residents grabbed what they could and literally ran for their lives.

"It was the fire that Asbury Park for years had realized, one day, would come," read a front page article in the Asbury Park Press on April 6, 1917. "In the catalog of dreads of such a fire, the rain last night was the single redeeming feature. Wind velocity started a blaze that seemed to spread like an exploding bomb and once the fire had crossed Ocean Avenue the whole middle section district of frame hotels, boarding houses and residences were endangered.

"The Natatorium seemed afire from wall to wall in an incredibly short time," the article continued. "Crossing Ocean Avenue, the flames attacked the Murphy and Krug amusement hall, spread to Daly's theatre and the Devonport Inn and then raced through that building to the Grand Central Hotel adjoining. Step by step the fire worked toward Kingsley Street and though the stucco exterior of the Winthrop (Hotel) offered something of a resistance, there was no time for a flanking movement by the firemen and the flames quickly gained headway."

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As the blaze threatened to engulf the entire city, a desperate word went out to surrounding towns that Asbury Park had an immediate need for dynamite. A tactical decision was made that a firebreak would be created at the expense of some of the surrounding properties that were destined to be destroyed anyway if the conflagration could not be stopped.

The Ardsley Hotel at 214 Second Ave. is where firefighters attempted to make their stand.

"Herbert O. Gardner, probably one of the few men in the city experienced in the use of dynamite, set off two charges," read the Press coverage. "The big boarding house was only partially wrecked and it was of no avail. The flash fired the Ardsley."

The momentum of the fire would slow at the Methodist church on Grand Avenue, a result of that street's additional width and the chapel's brick structure.

"Would the brick church check it? The question was on all tongues, prayerfully whispered by panic-stricken women, anxiously pondered by men whose alarm was now a near panic," read the article in the Press. "Flames suddenly appeared in the roof of the church then, from a circular window in the south, a burst of flame that filled the whole opening shot 25 feet toward the street. The Grand Avenue door was opened for an instant and another great cloud of fire rolled out. The tower caught fire; appeared in other sections of the roof; the building was gone."

Hundreds of firefighters who had come from all over Monmouth County's north shore decided that it was here and no farther that the blaze would continue.

"They realized the last stand must be at the church," the article read. "They faced the flames at close quarters. ... Many of them were burned, blistered, struck by red hot embers, choked with smoke. They were forced back, but charged again. And aided by the width of the street and a falling wind, they won."

A world on fire

As Asbury Park burned that night and early morning, the U.S. House of Representatives was in session 200 miles away in the nation's capital. Just after 3 a.m. on April 6, the House voted 373-to-50 to declare war on Germany. The U.S. Senate already had voted in favor of the resolution two days earlier. Shortly thereafter, President Woodrow Wilson affixed his signature to the declaration.

The headline on the front page of the Asbury Park Press on April 6, 1917, read in all caps: "GREATEST FIRE IN CITY'S HISTORY SWEEPS FOUR BLOCKS, CAUSING LOSS OF $1,000,000; WAR DECLARATION SIGNED BY PRESIDENT."

That day, coverage of the fire and the war were juxtaposed in equal measure throughout the newspaper.

By early 1917, "the war to end all wars" already had  been raging across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for three years, having stained the European, African and Asian continents with the blood of millions. Places like Somme, Verdun and Gallipoli were already part of history's lexicon.

Wilson had been determined to keep the United States out of the horrors of the world war. Although America was a powerful country by the second decade of the 20th century, it was not the geopolitical superpower it would become in the years that followed the Second World War. Our nation had none of the mutual defense pacts that drew all of the major powers of Europe and their colonial territories across the globe into one of the most catastrophic wars in human history — all over the assassination of a member of the Austro-Hungarian royal family.

American neutrality was tested in May 1915 when Germany sank the ocean liner R.M.S. Lusitania, killing 1,197 people, including 124 Americans. However, while the attack turned public opinion against Germany, Wilson maintained his restraint and kept America out of the war for the next two years.

"We have been neutral not only because it was the fixed and traditional policy of the United States to stand aloof from the politics of Europe and because we had had no part either of action or of policy in the influences which brought on the present war, but also because it was manifestly our duty to prevent, if it were possible, the indefinite extension of the fires of hate and desolation," Wilson said in his 1916 acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination for president.

The incumbent president made that address not at his party's national convention in St. Louis that year, but before an audience at what is now Monmouth University in West Long Branch, where he was vacationing that Sept. 2.

Nevertheless, Wilson warned the crowd — estimated at 25,000 — that in the future American isolation may not be an option given the impact of world war on all nations.

"No nation should be forced to take sides in any quarrel in which its own honor and integrity and the fortunes of its own people are not involved, but no nation can any longer remain neutral as against any willful disturbance of the peace of the world," he said on that late summer day at the Shore. "The effects of war can no longer be confined to the areas of battle. No nation stands wholly apart in interest when the life and interests of all nations are thrown into confusion and peril."

Wilson went on to win a second term two months later, and within five months, American involvement became unavoidable.

Anxious to bring an end to the war, Germany decided after New Year's Day 1917 to start a campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare against merchant ships bound for its enemies. Since American ships would inevitably be targeted in this campaign and American citizens killed, the United States would most certainly enter the war on the side of the Allied Powers. Germany needed to find a way to bring the war to North America, to keep America occupied with the defense of its own homeland.

Arthur Zimmermann, the German foreign minister, sent an encrypted telegram to its ambassador in Mexico with an offer to the Mexican government: Form an alliance with Germany and Germany will help you reconquer your lost territories now known as Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

British intelligence intercepted and decoded the telegram, ultimately sharing it with the Wilson administration.

Mexico rebuffed the offer, but what Zimmermann called the "ruthless employment of our submarines" went ahead, and Wilson decided America could no longer stand apart in such confusion and peril.

The dawn

As Asbury Park smoldered after sunrise on April 6, Mayor Clarence F. Hetrick went to the Casino where a command post had been set up. Exhausted and injured, most of his first responders had gone home to bed. Hetrick announced to a group of about 50 still present that America was at war and as mayor he was expected to organize a civil defense force and prepare a list of their sons who would be eligible for military service.

"Asbury Park expects not only every man, but every woman, too, to do her duty," Hetrick said.

But that would have to wait a few days, he conceded.

Asbury Park's sons could only fight one fire at a time.