At 3:56 on the afternoon of Sunday, October 14, 1973, somebody pulled a fire alarm box at Second Street in Chelsea for smoke coming from a building on Summer Street. Five hours and twenty minutes later, 18 city blocks were gone. Between 200 and 300 buildings had burned, more than 1,000 people had lost their homes, about 600 had lost their jobs, and firefighters from more than 100 communities were standing in the streets of a city that had already burned to the ground once before, in 1908, from a starting point 200 yards away. Nobody died. That is the fact people who were there still lead with.
The 53rd anniversary is three weeks away. This is the full account, drawn from the records preserved on this site since 2013, the Boston Globe’s coverage on the 40th and 50th anniversaries, and the accounts published since. It is also a guide to what stands on the burned ground now, because most people who drive Everett Avenue to Market Basket have no idea they are crossing it.
The Rag Shop District
The fire started in the part of Chelsea that ran between Second Street and the Boston and Maine railroad tracks, below Everett Avenue. Everyone called it the Rag Shop District. It was junk dealers, rag and salvage yards, machine shops and two-story wooden buildings, some of them the same frame construction that had burned in 1908. By 1973 the neighborhood was half dead. The city had marked it for urban renewal in 1971, the early 1970s recession had closed many of the businesses, and a number of owners had simply walked away from their buildings. On a Sunday afternoon the district was nearly empty of people, which is the main reason the death toll was zero.
The weather was the other half of the story. October had been dry, and on the 14th the wind was gusting to about 35 miles an hour. Everything the fire would need was in place.
3:56 p.m. to 4:20 p.m.: from box alarm to conflagration
The timeline preserved in this site’s archive puts the first alarm at 3:56 p.m., pulled at the box on Second Street for smoke at 122 Summer Street. The Globe’s account has the same box, number 215, which was the box that had sounded the alarm for the 1908 fire. The first three engine companies and a ladder company arrived within minutes. Lieutenant Ernest Copello of Chelsea’s Engine 5 was the first officer on the scene, and his first radio transmission, as the Globe recorded it, was “We’ve got a working fire. Heavy smoke, Arlington and Third Street.”
The fire crossed Summer Street at 3:59 p.m. The second and third alarms were struck at 4:01. Chief Herbert C. Fothergill asked five neighboring communities for help at 4:04 and struck a fourth alarm at 4:07. At 4:10 p.m., fourteen minutes after the first alarm, he notified the regional control point in Newton that Chelsea had a conflagration. Other accounts put that call at 4:20. Either way, it took less than half an hour for the chief of a small city fire department to tell the state that his city was burning down.
The reason it moved that fast was the wind, and the reason the wind could not be fought was water. Chelsea’s water mains in that part of the city were old and leaking, and when crews connected to hydrants, many did not deliver. Firefighters ended up laying hose lines from working hydrants more than half a mile away, with pumpers spaced along the line as relay stations. Lines ran from the Williams School through Bellingham Square and up Bellingham Street. A department that could not put water on a wind-driven fire could only try to get ahead of it.
4:30 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.: the retreats
By 4:30 the fire had jumped Third and Maple Streets and covered five blocks. Fothergill asked thirteen more communities for help at 4:40. Crews set up a defensive line on Everett Avenue, the only street in the district wide enough to act as a firebreak, and the fire went over their heads. Accounts compiled since describe embers carried 150 feet across the avenue to ignite an auto body shop on the far side before the line was even established. Once the fire crossed Vale Street, every building on it was burning within twelve minutes. A Medford engine company, working under mutual aid, had to abandon its engine to get out.
At 5:30 p.m. the fire spread across Elm Street to Fourth Street. Around the same time it surrounded the Engine 5 firehouse. The firefighters inside had no apparatus left to fight it with and stayed in the building anyway. At 6:00 p.m. the archive timeline records a single word: firestorm. The heated air rising off eighteen blocks of burning wood drew fresh air in at ground level so hard that the fire made its own wind, which later accounts put at up to 100 miles an hour in gusts, strong enough to drive debris down the streets. Buildings hundreds of feet from the flames were preheated by radiant heat until they ignited on their own.
Fothergill went up in a helicopter to direct the fight, because from the ground nobody could see the whole of it. The mutual aid companies pouring into the city had no common radio frequency with Chelsea command, so portable radios on Chelsea’s frequency were handed to officers in the critical sections and orders were relayed by hand.
6:30 p.m. to 9:15 p.m.: the stand at the Williams School
At 6:30 the fire reached Arlington Street at Fifth Street. From the helicopter Fothergill ordered an all-out stand at the Williams School. Heavy lines and apparatus were set up in front of the school, firefighters with hand lines went onto the roof, and mobile crews worked behind it putting out spot fires as embers landed. At 7:00 the wind picked up again and the fire pushed along Third, Elm, Fourth and Vale Streets. At 9:15 p.m. the wind dropped and the main fire was contained. The line at the school held.
Governor Francis Sargent declared Chelsea a disaster area at 9:30 p.m. An hour later, flying embers set City Hall on fire. That fire was out by 2:00 a.m. Crews worked through the night on spot fires across the city, and it was three days before the last of it was fully extinguished. National Guard troops closed the border streets to keep spectators out. Senator Edward Kennedy walked the burned district the next day.
By the end, published counts put as many as 1,200 firefighters and 111 departments in the city, including at least one company from Hampton, New Hampshire. The count depends on the source. One account puts it at 67 companies from eastern Massachusetts plus the New Hampshire crew; the higher figures count every department that sent anyone.
What burned
The map of the burned area in this site’s archive shows a rough triangle: Second Street on the south, the Boston and Maine tracks on the west, Everett Avenue on the east. The list of streets destroyed runs to fourteen: Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Vale, Spruce, Arlington, Ash, Walnut, Maple, Carter, Elm, Summer and Everett Avenue. Twelve of the fourteen had also burned in 1908.
The building count grew as the city counted. The governor’s request to President Nixon for a federal disaster declaration, sent the next day, said 18 blocks and 200 buildings, 1,100 people homeless and 600 out of work. Later tallies put the number of buildings at 300 or 303. The Globe’s 2013 account says about 1,000 people were displaced. A cause was never determined and neither was a dollar figure for the damage.
The casualty list preserved on this site names about 60 injured, none fatally. Most were firefighters, and most of the injuries were the same two things: smoke inhalation, and eye injuries from windblown ash and debris, treated at Massachusetts Eye and Ear. Firefighters from Boston, Lynn, Winthrop and Burlington are on that list beside Chelsea’s own. The Globe published a photograph of a Boston district chief having his eye treated while other firefighters lined up behind him for the same.
1908 and 1973: the same ground twice
Chelsea lost a large part of itself to fire twice in 65 years. The first Great Chelsea Fire started on the morning of Sunday, April 12, 1908, at the Boston Blacking Company on West Third Street near the Everett line, in a 40-mile gale. It ran east across the whole city to the water, destroyed City Hall, eight schools, a dozen churches and about 1,500 buildings, killed nineteen people and left somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 homeless. The 1973 fire started about 200 yards from the 1908 origin, and the same alarm box reported both.
The differences are what made 1973 survivable. In 1908 the fire ran through a dense residential and commercial city on a Sunday morning when people were home. In 1973 it ran through an industrial district that was mostly vacant on a Sunday afternoon, and it was stopped before it reached the neighborhoods above Everett Avenue and the business district on Broadway. The district that burned in 1973 was never rebuilt as a neighborhood at all.
What is there now
Drive Everett Avenue today from the Chelsea Street end toward Revere Beach Parkway and you pass through the middle of the burned area. The Market Basket plaza on Everett Avenue sits in the center of the 1973 fire zone; a local columnist who walked the smoking district the morning after wrote in 2009 that the shopping center marks the heart of it. The industrial buildings, distribution warehouses and parking lots on the streets behind them, Spruce, Maple, Arlington, Vale, are the rest of it. The Rag Shop District’s wooden buildings were replaced over the following decades by exactly the kind of low, wide, single-story commercial development that urban renewal had been planning for the area since 1971. The fire cleared the site faster than any redevelopment authority could have.
Two things from that afternoon are still standing in a form you can visit. The former firehouse that became the Chelsea Station Restaurant hosted the 50th anniversary gathering in October 2023. And the photographs in this site’s archive, most of them taken by Doug Robertson and shared with the site years ago, show the burned blocks the next morning: brick shells, the water tower on the skyline, a lone car picking its way down a street with nothing left on either side.
Why the water failed
The one lesson every account of the fire agrees on is the water system. The mains under the Rag Shop District were old, leaky and undersized, and a fire department cannot hold a line without pressure at the hydrant. Fifty-three years later the problem is smaller but not gone. The city’s own water quality letter to residents says that upwards of 70 percent of Chelsea’s roughly 56 miles of water main are more than 50 years old and an estimated 47 percent are unlined cast iron, the pipe that corrodes from the inside and breaks. We wrote about that in September after a main break shut off Shurtleff Street. The city has been replacing the worst of it a few streets at a time, including about 1,300 feet of new main under downtown Broadway. The 1973 fire is the reason older residents do not treat that as routine spending.
The record on this site
This site has held a set of 1973 fire pages since August 2013, compiled by the site’s previous editors. They are still the most complete public record of the fire online, and they are linked throughout this article: the minute-by-minute timeline, the map of the burned area, the streets destroyed, the list of the injured, and the photographs. Where the timeline on this site and later published accounts differ on a time or a count, this article gives both.
If you were in Chelsea on October 14, 1973, or your family was, we would like to hear what you remember and what you have in the drawer. Photographs, insurance papers, Red Cross cards, anything with a date on it. Write to [email protected].