I See by the Papers...

It was nearly dawn when a Boy Scout jumped off his bicycle and burst into the hotel lobby with an urgent message: The building next door was on fire. At about the same time, the driver of the city street sweeper found billowing smoke in the alley behind the hotel and pulled the nearby fire alarm. It was 5AM on May 8, 1936.

Santa Rosa's Fire Department was there almost immediately with their eight year-old La France "Quad" fire truck, capable of throwing 750 gallons of water a minute. Fire Chief William Muenter saw that wouldn't be adequate so he also brought on line their older 650 gallon pumper.

Meanwhile, The New Hotel Santa Rosa was being evacuated. Although the building on the corner of Fourth and B (currently the location of the CitiBank office) was best known as Rosenberg's, the department store only occupied the street level with a mezzanine. The eighty room residential hotel took up the second and third floors, with about 65 people staying there when the fire began.

As soon as the Boy Scout with a newspaper route told night clerk Russell Sutor about the fire he roused his boss Leo Bonalanza, who lived at the hotel with his wife and two kids. Sutor began calling rooms from the switchboard to awaken guests while hotel manager Bonalanza contacted the Occidental Hotel and other places in town to accomodate their displaced residents. An elderly woman was carried to the Occidental but otherwise people gathered in the lobby still in their pajamas ("scantily clad" and "partially clad" were the terms used by our Santa Rosa newspapers).

Evacuating the hotel was precautionary - the fire was contained at first to the McDannel Building on its east side and besides, the big store-hotel was built with reinforced concrete after the 1906 earthquake and always touted as fireproof.

There were several tenants in the McDannel, most prominently a hat shop and the L. A. Drake electrical supply and paint store. Signs for those businesses can be seen in the photographs below. The fire started in the backroom of Drake's store, but the exact cause was never determined (as far as I can find). Muenter told the press he thought it might have been a wiring short circuit or spontaneous combustion from flammable dirty rags.

The sequence of events during the early part of the fire are unclear, but by the end of the first hour Chief Muenter realized his two engines weren't enough, so he reached out to Petaluma and Guerneville for assistance. What we don't know is whether that happened before or after McDannel's exploded.

The rest of this article can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com. - Jeff Elliott