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Nation's oldest community theater ordered to replace all its seats as fire hazards
By adamg on Tue, 01/05/2016 - 7:22pm
Jamaica Plain News reports the Footlight Club is going to have to come up with $200,000 to replace all its seats at the demand of the Boston Fire Department - on top of the money it's already raised to replace its fire alarm, emergency lighting and sprinkler systems.
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Comments
Why? Because they're wood?
Why? Because they're wood? Does Fenway need to replace the grandstand seats?
Could be due to spacing,
Could be due to spacing, construction, material, placement, stability of the floor underneath them, or anything in between. I was at the Strand this weekend and found the seating to be very tight for someone of reasonably average contemporary size and couldn't help but think of how badly it could go down if the theater had to be evacuated in an emergency and people were in a panic (also thinking of a certain nightclub). Could even be an issue of accessibility (wheelchairs) but I don't think that's necessarily under the fire department's domain. Looking at the pictures of the inside of the theater it doesn't seem awfully out-of-shape or out-of-date. Maybe there's something particularly carcinogenic about the stain or the wood when it burns.
Or it could all be a racket. Who knows.
Grandstand fine
Green monster not up to code.
Grandstand - Not as much as a hazard
At least you are outside and can move in multiple directions away from any fire. Bradford City Fire was also helped by nearly everything being wood and people not being able to move towards the field.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradford_City_stadium_fire
$400 per seat?
That seems pricey to me.
Gotta be used movie theater seats available
from one of the many theaters going to huge recliners.
This is really a dick move on
This is really a dick move on the part of BFD. With the other life safety improvements and the lack of a catastrophic event over the years of operation, why couldn't they show leniency? Maybe give the theater a few years to be fully up to compliance?
Some of the run down nightclubs and bars in the city seem to get away with far worse. And those places are much more dangerous in the event of a catastrophe.
Dick Move?
We had 492 people roast to death back in 1942 because doors blocked and flammable materials at the Coconut Grove.
100 people were killed listening to that horrible band back in 2003 in West Warwick. You know "Bye honey, I'm going to see Great White and will be back around 1" and they never came home. Maybe if the nice little town (I'm kidding) of West Warwick had got on the Derderians more people would be around to request Cinderella and Warrant on HJY.
Are you suggesting that some amateur production of The Drowsy Chaperone should go on because BFD is trying to keep people from being killed? It is not just flammable material they are concerned about. It is life safety / exit issues as well when they call for these corrections. You really, really have a warped sense of priorities if that is the case.
Please call Fire Prevention at 617-343-3628 and also share with us that list of yours that has all the nightclubs and bars that are not up to code as well. We are waiting.
You forgot one thing: "Firefighters are the heroes of 911!"
First, while the BFD may well have been acting according to legal/procedural/scientific principle, I think it's fair and OK to call potential bullshit here; you're not the Pope. What we here here is called democracy, free speech, etc. Painful, but we get to question things here (by here, I mean UH and the USA) and those being questioned just have to fucking deal. (Don't like free speech? Leave.)
Second, the examples you cite are a big, big stretch to what that theater is facing. In both cases flammable _decorations_ (not what's cited here) and insufficient/blocked exits (again, not cited here) were to blame, as was overcrowding, which is relatively hard to accomplish in a THEATER.
To review: It's OK to call bullshit on any city agency at any time, and your arguments are horseshit.
P.S.: I knew someone who died at the Station. He loved that music. Fuck you for making a joke about it. Dick.
Nice Potty Fingers
Go make your case to BFD and ISD about how you think this is wrong then. I'm sure they will listen to you and your seemingly valid arguments.
PS - I haven't died at a bar, club, restaurant or THEATRE because someone did their job correctly.
Wait
So it's okay for you to call bullshit on the BFD, yet not okay for John Costello to call bullshit on you?
Gleek Level 5 Freakout
I used to work as a second job at one on the area's more reputable theatres selling tickets. The good actors, the one who were successful and continuously in the repertoire, were nice people, very professional in their requests, and overall way of handling themselves. Many years on many of them continue to work in area theatre and a number of them show up in small to medium roles on Broadway and in movies.
The biggest pains in the tush were the drama queens in the chorus roles who liked to boss people around and claim discrimination or something else when they didn't get their way.
This JP episode reeks of this. Mickey and Judy got told by the man to clean up and make the barn safe and all hell breaks loose with claims that they are being singled out by the BFD. Get you act together Footlights. You can't win this one.
Don't you think this could be
Don't you think this could be better spent on the firetrap that Adam just posted about North Station after the Bruins game? http://www.universalhub.com/2016/its-bad-enough-bruins-lost
People know people. I know
People know people. I know firefighters that respond to Fenway Park. I want them to be able to go home after a tour alive, If you knew someone from the Station fire , you should have more concern for fire safety, instead of trying to duck and dodge and second guess the professionals . Carry on
No,
it's not a stretch. As much as the operators of the theater may not like it, they are not excluded from fire and safety codes and violations, just because they're operating a live performance theater. And as another poster pointed out, the worse death toll in a fire at a club/theater in US history occurred in Boston at the Coconut Grove, during WW2 (which was located I believe in the Bay Village). Over 400 died. It was also the occasion of one of the first non-military use the newly invented blood plasma and the newly discovered penicillin.
http://www.cocoanutgrovefire.org/home/resources/bibliography
Since then, Boston has been notorious for having the strictest fire codes in the country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_disasters_by_death_t...
Deaths and Incident
1,995 Theater fire (Kamli, Japan, 1893)[99]
1,670 Theater fire (Canton, China, 25 May 1845)
900 Theater fire (Shanghai, China, June 1871)
800 Lehman Theater fire (St. Petersburg, Russia, 1836)
667 Cinema fire (Xinjiang, China, 1977)
658 Antoung Movie Theater fire (China, 13 February 1937)
602 Iroquois Theater Fire (Chicago, Illinois, 30 December 1903)
600 Theater fire (Tientsin, China, 20 May 1872)
500 Gran Circus Norte-Americano – Niterói circus fire (Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 17 December 1961)
448 Ringtheater Fire (Vienna, Austria-Hungary, 8 December 1881)
430 Circus Ferroni fire (Berdichev, Russia, 13 January 1883)
422 Cinema Rex fire (Abadan, Iran, 20 August 1978)
400 Coliseo theater fire (Zaragoza, Spain, 17 December 1778)
278+ Brooklyn Theater Fire (Brooklyn, United States, 5 December 1876)
250 Flores Theater fire (Acapulco, Mexico, 15 February 1909)
208 Hoteiza theater fire (Kucchan, Japan, 6 March 1943)
200 Carslruhe theater fire (St. Petersburg, Russia, 1847)
200 Banquet theater fire (Porto, Portugal, 21 March 1888)
186 Theatre Royal, Exeter, England, 5 September 1887
171 Rhoads Opera House Fire (Boyertown, Pennsylvania, 1908)
168 Hartford circus fire, (Hartford, Connecticut, 6 July 1944)
165 Beverly Hills Supper Club fire (Southgate, Kentucky, 28 May 1977)
163 Cinema fire (Amude, Syria, 13 November 1960)
130 Cinema fire in Kirin, China, 18 March 1930
104 Cinema fire at the Chinkai Guard District, 10 March 1930[108]
90 Novedades Theater fire, (Madrid, Spain, 23 September 1928)
78 Laurier Palace Theatre fire, (Montreal, Canada, 9 January 1927)
59 Uphaar Cinema fire, India on Friday, 13 June 1997
56 Bradford City Football Club stadium fire, Bradford, West Yorkshire, 11 May 1985
50 Summerland entertainment complex fire, Douglas, Isle of Man, 2 August 1973
42 Dromcolliher Cinema Fire, (County Limerick, Ireland, 5 September 1926)
17 A cinefilm fire in an elementary school in Kilingi-Nõmme, Estonia, on 20 April 1937
17 Top One Karaoke Fire Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong, 25 January 1997
So sad
And nobody could warn anyone because shouting "fire" in a crowded theater is the only limitation to free speech anyone ever considers :(
I'm a fire-safety nut
It drives me crazy when business doors are locked (usually one is open and the other is not.) I often take it upon myself to unlock that second door. I'm the first one to recite the Coconut Grove stats and I always look to see where the nearest exit is when I'm at a club or concert. With that said, there must CLEARLY be some political motive behind this move against the Footlights Club. The place is NOT a firetrap and demanding that wooden chairs be replaced because they are a fire hazard is clearly trumped-up BS.
I'd love to know the REAL back-story to this.
NOW the seats are a safety hazard? When it was not before?
Was there a recent change in state laws/fire codes in that something (in this case, all the seats) which was not a fire hazard before - is a fire hazard now?
Something seems off
The Footlight is clearly not a firetrap, and having BFD come in after 139 years and require ~$350-400k of upgrades seems very suspicious. I wouldn't at all be surprised to find out that there is a political issue or personality conflict somewhere here. That said, I've worked with BFD on one-day events and they are never easy to work with. They require things that vastly exceed the NFPA standards and they do it with very little transparency into the process so you never know what to expect.
The cost of the seats strikes me as highly suspect, too. $400 per seat, or $200k? About one minute on google took me to this business that sells used theater seats: http://www.preferred-seating.com/used-theater-seating.html
Even if they bought new, I expect that they could get the seats for under $400 each. If it is an issue of spacing, as mentioned above, it would be far cheaper to simply rearrange the existing seats and give up a little of the seating capacity. If it is an issue of fire-proofing the seats, I expect that there would be a way to retrofit the existing seats for much less than $400 per seat.
Would love to know the real story on this. If it is as simple as helping them find a way to get the job done more cheaply, I'd be happy to volunteer to do the research.
Footlight Club
It has nothing at all to do with wooden seats. It has everything to to do with the flammable upholstery which failed flame spread tests for flammability, toxicity and excessive generation of smoke.
Fire Captain James Bruynell
Boston Fire Prevention