Fortunately, They Didn't Bring Down the Roof

Photos of Matt Berninger of The National, above at right, and his bandmate Aaron Dessner, at left, playing Wednesday night at the 9:30 Club by Kyle Gustafson for Express

AFTER TWO NIGHTS of concerts at the 9:30 Club, this writer's ears are ringing, but during Tuesday night's Editors' show, they were still sharp enough to overhear a conversation that unnecessarily caused worry: "What would happen if the roof caved in?" one guy said to another. "Yeah, that'd be nuts," came the reply.

For sure.

Wednesday night during The National's concert — the Brooklyn ensemble plays again tonight, check 'em out — we gazed up at the rafters, wondering if the unthinkable could happen. Of course, we have no real reason to think that the worst could befall the beloved 9:30 Club. That's as silly as fretting over the slim possibility that a plane from National Airport might slam into the 14th Street Bridge during rush hour — but that's happened before. District building inspectors would identify structural weaknesses, right?

Anyhow, during a pause between songs on Wednesday, a hazy Matt Berninger of The National unsuccessfully tried to make chit-chat, telling that audience that the band really enjoyed the last time they played 9:30's storied stage, but it abruptly ended, without a point. Trying to make up for his dry, nonsensical declaration, he said it was just a pure "historical fact."

Well, it's also a historical fact that one of the deadliest days in the District's history came in a packed theater when the crowd least expected it. And if you've ever withdrawn money from the Sun Trust bank at the corner of Columbia Road and 18th Street NW in Adams Morgan, you've stepped on hallowed ground.

On that corner once stood the Knickerbocker Theatre, the scene of a mass disaster on a snowy Jan. 21, 1922. According to "Capital Losses":

Toward the end of the movie, as the organist was playing the closing notes at 9:10 p.m., the patrons were alarmed by a groaning and cracking sound from above. Two minutes later a deafening crash brought every person in the theater to his feet. Screams were drowned in the noise of bending steel and splitting masonry as the ceiling fell under the weight of tons of snow. With the snow still falling, 98 persons lay dead and 136 others were trapped under the rubble.

As this writer's now 88-year-old native Washingtonian great aunt retells the story, her future husband, William H. Grass, was at a dinner party down Columbia Road when the disaster struck. Our late great uncle, a Foggy Bottom native, along with the rest of the dinner party, heeded the all-call for help and, early into the next day, dug victims out of the snowy mass grave as marines were called to keep a crowd of 3,000 onlookers away from the sad scene.

Then-representative and future vice president Alben Barkley of Kentucky was on the scene, too, frantically looking for his buried son, Murrell, as "piteous cries and shrieks for help came from those pinned beneath the debris," according to one press account at the time.

Our Aunt Louise's cousin happened to be in the theater when the roof caved in and, after surviving the initial collapse, died of exposure while stuck in the snow, we're told. Barkley, meanwhile, found what he thought was his son but after the survivor was dug out, "[o]ne close look under the lights of the street and back again into the utter depths of despair." It was not Murrell. (Barkley's son was later found alive.)

According to "Capital Losses," an investigation determined that the building contractor inserted steel beams only 2 inches into the walls instead of the required 8 inches. The District government strengthened building codes for theaters following the disaster.