99% Invisible - 211- The Grand Dame of Broad Street

Episode Date: May 4, 2016

The Bellevue-Stratford opened in 1904 and quickly became one of the most luxurious hotels of its time, rivaling the Waldorf Astoria in New York. The building was an incredible work of French Renaissance architecture. It was 19 stories high, had over a thousand … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The Bellevue Stratford Hotel opened in Philadelphia in 1904 and quickly became one of the most luxurious hotels of its time. It was 19 stories high, had over a thousand guest rooms, and what was said to be the most lavish and magnificent ballroom in the United States. It also featured light fixtures designed by Thomas Edison and a grand marble staircase. The hotel came to be known as the Grand Dom of Broad Street. And for years, the Grand Dom was the center of high society culture in Philadelphia. It hosted presidents and queens and all kinds of other rich and famous guests.

That's producer Alana Gordon from W.H.Y.Y. is the Pulse in Philadelphia. The hotel went through some harder times during the Great Depression and then again in the 50s and 60s. It lost some of the prestige from its early days, but it was always considered one of the nicest places to stay in Philadelphia. in Philadelphia. That is, until the mid-70s, when the Bellevue Shredford Hotel became the epicenter of a series of mysterious deaths that terrified the country. It all started in July of 1976, when more than 2,000 veterans descended on Philadelphia for the Convention of the American Legion, a support organization for wartime vets. The statewide convention happened every year, but in 1976 was a really big deal.

The time and place of the convention had been chosen to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence signed in Philadelphia in 1776, and the convention would be held in, you guessed it, the Bellevue Stratford Hotel. The gathering was going to be a big party for the members of be held in, you guessed it, the Bellevue Stratford Hotel. The gathering was going to be a big party for the members of the American Legion, a chance for the Legionnaires to celebrate and reminisce. So it's just a big get-together, and then there were a lot of wives and families there at the same time. That's Jasper Stalfur.

I am a best department commander of the American Legion. Staufer drove to the convention from South Central Pennsylvania with his wife, and they rode up with another couple, some really close friends of theirs, Charlie Chamberlain and his wife Henrietta. Here's Henrietta, who's now 86, recalling the trip. Well, we were having a good time down there. Everything was going great. The convention ran four days, and the whole thing ended with a big parade of lesionaires through the center of Philadelphia, led by a brass band. On the St. Scow March, you man.

That was a real pop or song. Henrietta's husband Charlie had just been elected commander of his local legion post, so he was right up front. And they were the one that carried the banner for the parade, and it was wonderful. had just been elected commander of his local legion post. So he was right up front. And they were the one that carried the banner for the parade. And it was wonderful. We had a wonderful time. After the parade, Charlie and Henrietta

began the drive back home with Jasper and his wife. And Charlie fell asleep, which was strange. He seldom ever slept in the car. But that year, whenever we got on the turnpike of Brandy wine, he went to sleep. He came home and went to bed that night and never got out of bed. I was trying to get him better, but every day he got worse. Charlie's body ached. His temperature kept going up. 104 degrees, 106 degrees.

Henrietta took him to the hospital. temperature kept going up 104 degrees, 106 degrees. Henrietta took him to the hospital. After taking him in on Wednesday, the nurse, he'd put him under ice, nice blanket, and then Friday he was dead. From a flu of unknown cause, the doctor said, Charlie Chamberlain was dead at the age of 48. I didn't know what to think. Nobody else knew what to think. That was what was strange about it.

It was a total shock for everybody. Jasper Stalfa remembers that it was during Charlie's funeral, that he realized his friend's death was part of something bigger. I wanted the other members of the headquarters staff was there, and he said that the headquarters were getting all kinds of calls from people that got sick and passed away. Within a week of the convention, weagen headquarters had started getting calls from around the state about members who'd fallen ill.

By that following Monday, nine days after Charlie Chamberlain fell asleep in Stalfurs' car, news of this mysterious respiratory illness had spread across Pennsylvania. No one knew what had caused it, but the Legionnaires who were getting sick had been at the Bellevue Stratford for the convention. Scientists working for the state of Pennsylvania and the federal government are still hard at work this morning trying to determine the cause of the mystery disease that so far. Health leaders back in Philadelphia soon caught wind that something was up. Dr. Robert Charar was director of infectious diseases for the city's health department

at the time. All of a sudden I had four lines coming to my office, all four lines were led up at the same time. As someone said there's some sort of an outbreak going on. The death toll logged by the state kept growing. Four deaths, 11 deaths. They called in federal investigators from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention

in Atlanta. The man charged with overseeing that investigation was David Fraser. He's originally from Philly, and he was 32 at the time. He was the director of the CDC's special pathogens unit. I spent a very intense plane ride trying to figure out how would I systematically begin to approach what looked to be a very complicated problem. Within 48 hours of his arrival, the death toll was nearing 20, with dozens more sick.

Some feared this mysterious pneumonia could be the start of a swine flu outbreak, or worse, a flu pandemic like the one that had killed 50 million people in 1918. The authorities readied themselves for the worst, as many as 100 state and federal workers were called in. About 50 police detectives took part. This is the biggest investigation CDC undertook at the time. We needed to define the illness, because this was potentially a new disease. News reporters were already giving it a name,

Legionnaires' Disease. State laboratories worked all night. Medical data is being flown in by helicopter as a pressure increases to find the answer. Everybody in the state of Pennsylvania knew about it. We had worldwide recognition. We had phone calls from as far away as Australia asking his questions about it. But scientists still had no idea what was causing the illness. It was a bacteria, a virus, or some sort of toxin. they had to tease out a pattern. Throughout Pennsylvania, health investigators are talking to the more than 100 patients who have the disease but are still alive.

What did they do at the American Legion Convention, where they all together at a single time, or gathered in one location? Question after question. Toine that common link. Defined answers, David Fraser and his investigative squad cast a wide net. Which means we had to send physician epidemiologists out to take histories from and examine a large number of people. They monitored the people who had gotten sick and their families, but they also wanted to talk to people who had been at the convention who hadn't gotten sick. And because there was no central list of who had attended, they distributed questionnaires to hundreds of Legion posts throughout the state.

And to have a comparison group, they telephoned random samples of people who weren't even at the convention. And through all this research, it became clear early on that this was not the major flu pandemic that some had feared. The disease seemed confined to the Legionnaires' Convention. But still, Fraser remembers public pressure mounting to figure this out. This was a time when certain infectious diseases were thought to have been largely worked out and controlled.

It challenged assumptions. And it increased the fear. Maybe it was something people ate or drank. Some people even thought it could have been an act of bioterrorism by a disgruntled veteran. Investigators were stumped, but Robert Charar with Philadelphia's health department says they did have one general suspect in mind. It's called the Grand Old Lady of Broad Street. I mean, that's what I've always heard referred to, and she was the Grand Old Lady of Broad Street.

Charar says the Grand Old Lady, some say the Grand Dom. But yes, he's referring to the Bellevue Stratford Hotel. Perhaps this iconic landmark of the city was the killer. Investigators flagged it in their reports, and it didn't take long for this to become a media frenzy. The Bellevue Stratford may still hold a key to solving the mystery of Legionnaire's disease. Somewhere in this hotel, there may be an environment.

And it was like hysteria. That's Steve Hornstein. He was a dormant at the Bellevue at the time of the outbreak. Bright eyed, 21-year-old, looking to break into the hotel business. He remembers people started calling into cancel reservations. They feared the place, and anything or anyone associated with it. I was dating a young lady, and I remember she told me her mom didn't want me to come to the house anymore because I worked at the Bellevue.

And the hotel was losing guests. We were going down for the count and each day would get a little worse. They would have the engineer turn on lamps in the Broad Street rooms so that the lights were on in the evening and it wasn't all dark. That's how bad it got. in the evening and it wasn't old dark. That's how bad it got. But for David Fraser, the director of the CDC's Special Pathogens Unit, there was only one way to get to the bottom of this.

After spending the first week of the investigation in the state capital of Harrisburg, he and several others joined the Philadelphia crew on the ground. And guess where they stayed? Because there were rooms available, and we got a good price. Fraser brought his team to the Bellevue. He really wanted to solve this mystery.

There was part of me that was hoping that somebody got sick. He's only half joking. This might give an important clue. They got to work trying to figure out the source of the disease. Maybe it was somehow traveling through the elevator shafts. And I thought perhaps the elevator would permit an agent to waft into the air as the elevator went up and down, but we found no evidence. Other theories blame the pigeons perched on the window ledges.

Maybe the pigeons were the source. Maybe the lady who feeds the pigeons out on the sidewalk was the source. In the end, they came up with two leads. First, the more time people spent in a lobby of the hotel, the more at risk they were for contracting the disease. And second, the more time people spent just outside the hotel on the sidewalk, the greater the risk. Even some people who had nothing to do with a hotel

or the convention had gotten sick, if they'd spent time on the sidewalk. None of David Fraser's staff became ill while staying in the hotel, but they also couldn't figure out what it was about the place that I got in everyone else's sick. And so people's fear of the building persisted.

And in November of 1976, the Grand Dom of Broad Street was forced to close. It had already been in financial trouble, but the outbreak was the final fatal blow. It was the end of an era for a very elegant hotel with all kinds of memories in Philadelphia history. It was the final day today for the Grand Old Bellevue Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, battered and finally done in by the fact that people died after attending the American Legion Convention there. Occupancy used to be a- After one final party, Hornstein helped lock the place up. We had put the chains on the door at the front door and we put it around the grab handles.

So the doors couldn't open with a padlock. It was like a death sentence. I don't think there'll ever be another hotel that big and bustling like that one was on Broad Street. Back in the CDC labs, scientists continued reviewing samples and running more tests. Weeks went by.

It was a very high pressure, very frustrating. David Fraser and his colleagues were eventually called into Congress to account for why they still hadn't solved the mystery. We expected to be raked over the coals for failing to solve an outbreak and we were raked over the coals. It was a very unpleasant couple of hours. Fraser worried about morale. Some of the CDC scientists had spent years trying to solve other outbreaks with no success. Which I was afraid was going to set in with lead

generes to these two. Did you think maybe it would take years? Yes, I hope it would only take years. Five and a half months had passed since the first death. Around 30 people had died. The grown-up dome had closed. Things were not looking good. And then finally, the CDC caught a break. A scientist named Joseph McDade was combing through all the biological specimens they collected from victims' lungs and re-examining them, looking for something he might have missed.

McDade said this process was like looking for a contact lens on the floor of a basketball court, but then finally, on December 27th, he found that contact lens. In his microscope, it looked like a red cluster of tiny rods. McDade ran tests and found these tiny rods were part of a bacteria, one they hadn't seen before. Within a few weeks, they confirmed that this was indeed the bacteria that had caused the disease. On January 17th, 1977, CDC scientists announced their findings with great fanfare. I was so excited. This was such a spectators of great weight off my shoulders and a great discovery of

a very, very special discovery. They called the new bacteria, Lysianella Numafala. They had found the fatal bacteria. David Fraser and his colleagues went from being humiliated to congratulated. But wait a minute. Where have the bacteria come from? This question wouldn't be answered until a couple years after the bacteria was discovered. David Fraser retraces his steps around the outside of the Bellevue nearly 40 years after the outbreak. The Grand Hotel was restored and

reopened in 1979. He points up to the very top of the building's roof. There are cooling towers, which would operate to eject heat from from the hotel. Fraser explains that Legionella bacteria occurs naturally in the environment, which can make it hard to pin down a specific source. But it really likes to grow in warm water, and one ideal environment is the warm water basins in air conditioning systems. When those systems convert warm water into cold air, they produce a mist as a by-product. And that mist can come across the edge of the roof and layer down the side of a building.

It's one of the curious things about airflow in cities. If that mist carries lesionella bacteria and is inhaled, it can make you sick. That's why people who are right outside the hotel and inside the front lobby were most likely to get infected. Fraser says contaminated mist from the Belvies cooling tower would have likely dropped down the side of the hotel exposing people on the sidewalk. And then? So here's some of these utility events here.

It also would have been sucked into a vent near the ground that leads right into the front lobby, exposing people there. The air conditioning system had always been a possible culprit as a breeding ground for the Legionella bacteria. But the CDC couldn't say for sure right away because the Belfew Stratford's cooling system had been thoroughly cleaned following the outbreak. By the time the CDC got there to get samples, there was no Legionella bacteria present. But as the years passed, there were more outbreaks of Legionnaires in other places.

And in those instances, they were able to confirm that the bacteria had come from the cooling systems. Researchers retroactively linked the bacteria to previously unsolved outbreaks, including a smaller one at the Bellevue a couple years before the 76 Legionnaires Convention. In the public health community, the story of Legionnaires' disease has turned into a sort of poster trial for the power of epidemiology. That shoe leather detective work that's used to map out

patterns and understand how diseases move and strike. But unfortunately, the discovery of the disease didn't lead to its demise. The government now has recommendations for how to design and maintain cooling systems, so they're not breeding grounds for Legionella. But even though the disease is treatable, there are still a lot of cases. In 2015, New York had an outbreak that was traced to an old opera house in the Bronx. Twelve people died and more than 120 became sick. As for the Bellevue Stratford, cleaning the cooling tower is now a routine part of the building's maintenance. They also analyze water samples.

And during a major restoration in the 80s, the hotel got a completely new heating and cooling system. These days business is good for the Grand Dom of Broadstream. The hotel, now owned by Hyatt, has been modernized, but it still has that classic feel. Rooms run upwards of $500 a night and feature king size beds, views of downtown Philly, 42-inch flat screen TVs, and of course, in the summertime. Ice-cold air conditioning. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Alana Gordon, Delaney Hall, and Katie Mingle. With Sam Greenspan, Avery Troubleman, Kirk Cole Stead, Sharif Usef, and me Roman Mars.

A version of this story originally aired on The Pulse from WHY in Philadelphia, The Pulse Covered Stories at the heart of health, science, and innovation. We are a project of 91.7KALW San Francisco and produced at the offices of ArcSide, the grandest architecture and interiors firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find this show and like the show on Facebooking, follow us all on Twitter and Instagram, but the best way to explore the 99% invisible activity that shapes the design of our world is to click around the hundreds of stories that comprise 99pi.org.

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