Tragedy on River Street

In the River Street neighborhood of North Adams, just west of Veazie Street, a modest brick building long known as the Attala Block stood as one of many mixed-use structures common across Northern Berkshire County. With a grocery store on the ground floor and apartments above, it blended easily into the cityscape—an ordinary four-story building that few residents gave much thought. That changed in the early morning hours of February 3, 1958. Before dawn on a bitterly cold winter morning, a fire broke out in a second-floor apartment believed to have been caused by smoking materials. At the time, thirty-two residents lived in the building’s upper floors. The flames were first discovered by a tenant, who rushed upstairs to alert neighbors and call the fire department. Within minutes, residents were scrambling through smoke-filled hallways and down the building’s rear porches in desperate attempts to escape. Among the families living there were the Kings and the Greys. Fourteen-year-old Ruth King ran through the building warning neighbors as the fire spread upward. Many residents fled through the back exits in their nightclothes, seeking refuge with nearby neighbors in the freezing darkness. When firefighters arrived, some children were trapped at the fourth-floor windows. Firefighters shouted for them to wait, but eight-year-old David Grey leapt before rescuers could position themselves to catch him. He died shortly afterward at the hospital. His sister Doris, who jumped moments later, was caught by firefighters and survived. A third child, four-year-old Dolores Grey, became separated from her family during the evacuation. Firefighters later found her body in the burned apartment. Despite the devastating losses, the outcome might have been far worse. With more than thirty people inside the building, the rapid response of neighbors, firefighters, police, and Civil Defense volunteers helped many residents escape the blaze. Ironically, the building’s owner at the time, Martin J. Taylor, was a former captain in the city’s fire department who operated Taylor’s Old Fashioned Variety Store in the ground-floor storefront. During the fire, Taylor rushed inside to retrieve business records as firefighters battled the flames above. By the end of the day, the building’s roof had collapsed and the upper walls had buckled from the heat. Fire officials declared the structure a total loss. Yet the Attala Block endured. Rebuilt as a two-story building, it remained standing for decades afterward. To passersby it still looked like an unremarkable neighborhood structure, but traces of the fire—darkened brick and sealed exits—remained quiet reminders of the tragedy that unfolded there on a winter morning in 1958.