The Flame night club in downtown St. Paul lived up to its name in August 1950.
A fire that started inside the club, which was housed on the ground floor of the Hotel Jewell on Fifth Street, ripped through the five-story building on a Sunday afternoon.
Firefighters quickly gave up on saving the hotel and focused their efforts on rescuing guests and preventing the flames from spreading to neighboring structures.
“Dense smoke pouring from the building made the State Capitol only a blurred image to spectators on the scene,” the Pioneer Press reported the next day. “At Lexington baseball park, spectators standing on the roof could see only the top of the First National Bank building poking up through a layer of smoke.”
Although no one was seriously injured by the blaze, the hotel — located where Osborn370 is today — was reduced to a burned-out shell standing in a pile of rubble.
With losses estimated at $275,000, it was one of the most destructive fires in St. Paul history.
‘Looks like there’s a fire in there’
The fire was first reported about 3 p.m. by a passing motorist, who saw smoke escaping from the offices of the St. Paul Hockey Club, which shared the first floor of the Jewell with the Flame.
“You’d better send someone to the hockey club office,” he told the dispatcher. “There’s smoke coming out under the door and it looks like there’s a fire in there.”
The hockey club and the Flame were both closed, but roughly 85 people were registered at the Jewell.
Hotel staff quickly began evacuating guests while firefighters rushed to the scene. Most of the Jewell’s occupants were able to leave safely, but some made dramatic escapes down fire department ladders.
Thousands of curious onlookers flocked to the burning building as firefighters deployed 30 hoses at once to hammer the flames with at least 6 million gallons of water.
The St. Paul Fire Department summoned all 410 of its personnel to duty — even some who were on vacation rushed back to battle the blaze. They worked late into the night, extinguishing flare-ups with the help of firefighters from neighboring cities.
Totally gutted
A pair of Minneapolis firefighters arrive with hoses outside downtown St. Paul’s Hotel Jewell to aid the city’s fire department in battling the blaze that destroyed the building on Aug. 13, 1950. (Ted Strasser / Pioneer Press)
By morning, the Jewell had been totally gutted and two of its exterior walls had collapsed. Demolition crews worked for more than a week straight to tear down the building’s remains and clear rubble blocking Fifth Street.
In the days following the fire, officials determined the cause was likely a discarded cigarette or faulty wiring in the Flame, which was known at the time for drawing big-name musical acts to its stage.
The owner of the Flame later told St. Paul Dispatch columnist Oliver Towne that he was on a flight home from Chicago when he saw flames from the plane as it passed over downtown.
“My God, that’s my investment going up in smoke,” he screamed.
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