HOMELESS REFUGEES

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 310, 25 August 1932, Page 2

HOMELESS REFUGEES

ISLAND TRAGEDY GREAT CONEY ISLAND F}RE LEAVES THOUSANIIS HOMELESS. SEARCHING THE ASHES. Coney Island, N.Y., July 18. Yictims possibly trapped by flames or crushed when 100,000 terrified merrymakers stampeded, were sought to-day in the ashes of a £600,000 fire that started in a rubbish pile and swept America's most famous playground. So far as known. no one in the madened throng that poured half-dressed from bath-houses, that scurried through the surf to the beach, that poured through doors of hotels, tenements, side shows and other eoncessions, was reported missing. But 3000 were believed homeless, and many slept near here on the sandy shores of the Atlantic, or on army cots rushed here by truck. Steeplechase Park, Brighton Beach Avenue, and Oeean Parkway became cities of cots from which sleepy, homeless families tumbled to-day to begin their hunt for new homes, or continue their hunt for jobs with which to pay for new homes. Refugees Housed in Theatre. Other refugees were housed in Loew's Theatre, the Shelby Hotel, Hotel Eleanor, the Tuxedo Theatre, and in vacant houses and bungalows seattered along the white sand beach that has been a paradise to New York's sweltering millions. Others caught by the swiftness of the flames could not return home until | morning. They were stranded with j little 01* no clothing or in bathing suits, with no money when the roaring ! blaze erackled across 1000 feet of the ! boardwalk and destroyed most of four 1 I square blocks. j Some became separated from their ! i families. They were garbed in towels, i bathing suits or what not, as they ran j hysterically from group to group, seeking relatives or money with which to telephone for help. Lost Children Recovered. More than 300 children were lost, but police believed they had restored them to their homes by morning, unless in the confusion some may have been trapped. Only a shift in the wind after the fire had blazed for three hours allowed the city's fire-fighting apparatus, there in full strength, to confine it to the area between Twenty-first and Twenty-fourth Streets, between Surf 1 Avenue and the boardwalk and an additional hlock on the north side of Surf Avenue. Some four blocks of the boardwalk itself yielded to the flames as the 40- j mile wind fanned them. The fire started in a pile of rubbish i beneath the boardwalk. Someone, pro- | bably a careless bather, ignited the j refuse. Fanned by the wind, a ' tongue of flame started a blaze in the J | underplanking of the city's expsnsive ' boardwalk.