The Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire

On the night of May twenty-eighth, nineteen seventy-seven, the Beverly Hills Supper Club burned, and one hundred sixty-five people died here. It remains one of the deadliest nightclub fires in American history.

The club sat just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, a glamorous destination that had once drawn Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. That night it was dangerously overcrowded. The Cabaret Room, rated safe for six hundred, may have held more than a thousand, and the building had too few exits, no firewalls, and no fire alarm.

When fire broke out in an unoccupied room and spread, a busboy walked onto the stage to warn the crowd, but the panic and the bottlenecks were deadly. The tragedy reshaped fire codes nationwide. Officials ruled it accidental, though many survivors have never accepted that conclusion.