The Sun

CROKER FIRST AT $100,000 FIRE
MANY GUESTS OF NOTE SEE A WAREHOUSE GO UP.

The Chief and Waldo There Before an Alarm Went In - Apartment House and Tenement Scorched and Scathed - Firemen Cut - J. H. Rogers, Jr., in Crowd.

Chief Croker and Fire Commissioner Waldo entertained yesterday in Yorkville, the occasion being a fire in the Hetherington storing and steam carpet cleaning establishment at 114 East Sixty-third street. Among the more prominent guests decorated with fire badges were Col. George R. Dyer, Munson Morris, H. H. Rogers, Jr., Boston Jack McDonald, Jerry Siegel, Percival Wharton, Eliot Lee, T. R. Pell and Coroner's Physician Lehane.

The invitations were directed by Mrs. George McDuffy, who looked out of a rear window of the Hetherington apartments at Sixty-third street and Park avenue and saw that the storage house was ablaze. The elevator boy did a hard day's work in the next ten minutes taking down eighteen families laden with all kinds of household goods from babies' bottles to fur coats.

While Charlie, the hall boy, was sprinting for a fire box Chief Croker, who was taking Commissioner Waldo from Fire Headquarters to a pumping station in his automobile, saw the smoke and turned into Sixty-third street with a swerve that nearly upset the Commissioner. They got there before the engine did.

The guests of honor began to drop in immediately and were escorted to the front row while the reserves from eight precincts kept the crowd back a block and a half in each direction.

J. P. Heath, the manager of the storage house, with his two sons, Howard W. and J. P. Heath, Jr., were the only persons in the place and they did not know it was afire until some one passing told them smoke was coming from their windows. They got out eighteen horses and three automobiles before the smoke drove them away. The horses, with twenty more from Stewart's stables at 120 East Sixty-third street, were tethered to the fence surrounding the Jewish synagogue Ahawath Chesed Shaar Hashomayim at Sixty-third street and Lexington avenue.

The fire, which started on the first floor near the elevator shaft, puffed up through all six floors so quickly that a second and a third alarm were turned in and even then it was only by the hardest kind of work that the firemen saved the tenements adjoining on the east and the Hetherington apartments on the west.

The wall of the burning building fell against the rear of the Hetherington and broke most of the windows below the third floor. Several of the firemen were slightly cut by glass. The tenements on the east were emptied by the police. Some of the women were so hysterical that they had to be carried out.

Mr. Heath had no idea how the fire started. The cleaning plant has been closed for several weeks. Chief Croker said the damage was in the neighborhood of $100,000.