The Labor Temple Fire

Early in the morning of November 28, 1946, Kankakee’s Labor Temple at Court Street and Washington Avenue was destroyed by fire. Four other buildings also burned. (Kankakee County Museum Photo Archive)

By Jack Klasey

April 12, 2025

In the early morning darkness of Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1946, Mrs. Adelore Masse awakened in her home at 240 W. Merchant Street, and looked across the street to see whether there was a light on in the home of her ill elderly aunt, Mrs. Octave Cartier.

Her aunt’s house was dark, but Mrs. Masse saw a different sort of light—flames were leaping from the roof and second floor windows at the back of the Kankakee Labor Temple, one block to the north at 220 West Court Street. She awakened her husband, who called the Kankakee Fire Department at 2 a.m.

In its November 29 edition, the Kankakee Daily Journal reported, “A fire that was battled spectacularly for more than 10 hours by most of the firemen and firefighting equipment in Kankakee County Thanksgiving Day morning left nearly a half block of the West Court Street business district a mass of gutted blackened ruins. Loss to the owners and tenants….is expected to total more than $150,000.

 “The blaze, which is believed to have originated in the basement of the Kankakee Labor Temple…spread so rapidly in less than a half hour that firemen could do little but attempt to prevent it from enveloping other buildings. The fire departments of Manteno, Peotone, St. Anne, Bradley, and the Kankakee State Hospital were also summoned, and their combined equipment enabled the firefighters to play streams of water from 15 leads of hose into the buildings.”

The two-story brick Labor Temple building was located on the southwest corner of Court Street and Washington Avenue. Although its address and entrance were on Court Street, the building stretched southward along Washington Avenue for a quarter-block. It contained the offices of the Kankakee Federation of Labor and dozens of local labor unions, as well as a large meeting hall used for union gatherings. The hall was also rented out for community events, such as dances.

There had been a dance at the Labor Temple on Wednesday evening. The Journal noted, “Oscar Fabry, president of the Kankakee Federation of Labor, Herman Houde, an official of the Federation of Labor, and Joe Grencher, the bartender, were the last to leave the building following a dance there. They said they locked up about 1:40 a.m. and there was no smoke or other sign of the fire at that time.”

Kankakee Fire Chief Roy Marquart told the newspaper that when firemen attempted to enter the building through the front door, “they found the entire interior, from the basement to the second floor, a mass of flames. How the blaze gained such headway in 20 minutes [since the alarm was turned in] is a mystery. It began in the kitchen or the boiler room, both of which were in the rear.”

From the Labor Temple, the flames spread southward to a house at 131 S. Washington Avenue, and westward to three two-story brick buildings on Court Street. Those structures housed a plumbing shop, a grocery store, apartments, and a printing business. Chief Marquart said the fact that there were no fire walls between the brick buildings permitted the flames to spread easily from one to the other.

The residence on Washington, which was only a few feet from the back of the Labor Temple, was occupied by Charles Valade, his sister Mary, and three roomers. Valade told a Journal reporter that he was awakened by the shattering of windows in his house from the intense heat. He and his sister escaped the house without injury. None of the roomers were home at the time of the fire.

“For a time, the house and its closely grouped neighbors appeared to be doomed,” the reporter noted, “but when the wind shifted from the northwest to the southwest, firemen were able to extinguish the house fire, confining the damage to the northwest corner of the structure.”

The first of the adjoining buildings to the west of the Labor Temple was Daniel Raiche’s plumbing shop. Next was the Sadler Building, which was occupied by the Community Market on its Court Street frontage and the quarters of an evangelistic religious group on the second floor. The second floor also contained two apartments; their occupants escaped without injury.

The Acme Printing Company, housed in the third building, suffered a severe loss. “Costly printing machinery at the Acme Printing Company including typesetting machines and presses, were nothing but twisted masses of metal, and can probably be salvaged for little but scrap,” reported the newspaper. “The machinery might have escaped serious damage if the floor of the building had held, but it crashed through into the basement. It then became more of a hopeless mass when the roof toppled in on top of it.”  Printing company owners Kenneth and Marvin Shoup estimated their loss at about $30,000.

The Labor Temple had been built in the 1930s to serve as the headquarters and meeting space for the more than 30 Kankakee labor union organizations. By that time, organized labor in Kankakee had been in existence for approximately 30 years—the Kankakee Federation of Labor received its charter from the American Federation of Labor on October 27, 1908.

In late 1948, two years after the devastating fire, construction began on a new Labor Temple in the 200 block of West Court Street. Beginning in the 1980s with the closing of a number of major manufacturing plants, union membership declined drastically, leading eventually to the sale of the Labor Temple building. Today, that site is occupied by a Walgreens drug store.

Jack Klasey is a former Journal reporter and a retired publishing executive. He can be contacted at jwklasey@comcast.net.