Digital Extra: The Station Fire

A team from Brown University documents the items placed at the fire site over a period of more than a year.

01:09 AM EST on Saturday, February 19, 2005

BY ZACHARY R. MIDER
Journal Staff Writer

No politician ordered it, no court authorized it, no public funds maintain it.

But two years after the Station fire in West Warwick, the makeshift memorial that sprang up at the fire site is a lingering reminder, a place where private grief is publicly displayed.

Now, a Brown University archaeologist who has studied the habits of ancient tribesmen is preparing an essay on the site. He and an assistant have documented the artifacts that people leave there -- from birthday balloons and beer bottles to elaborate religious displays.

"It reflects what's happening in the community at large," said the professor, Richard A. Gould. "It's a material expression of what's going on."

Gould and assistant Randi L. Scott provided a draft of the essay to The Journal.

Journal photo / Gretchen Ertl

Brown University archaeologists Richard A. Gould, left, and Randi L. Scott have been studying memorials placed at the Station fire site.

The imagery at the site has tracked the news of the day, the authors write : the emotional State House hearings that led to the creation of a new fire code; the criminal indictment of the nightclub owners and the band's tour manager; the first anniversary of the fire.

Many of the displays express grief or anger. Over time, the symbols of anger have become physically segregated from the symbols of grief.

A group of about five families has maintained the collection of signs along Cowesett Avenue that faults public officials for failing to properly inspect the club, Gould said in an interview. But those same families also maintain shrines honoring their lost family members, elsewhere on the site -- separated from their "anger" displays by more than 100 feet, he said.

"The competing emotions of grief and anger began to diverge more clearly . . . as the year anniversary of the disaster approached," the authors write. "Metaphorically speaking, the memorial site was turning into a kind of emotional centrifuge for the affected community."

Gould and Scott say in the essay that they visited the site 64 times, over the past year and a half, noting changes in the physical layout and the symbolism. They also spoke with dozens of visitors about the objects they placed there.

At the busiest times, they say, 80 to 100 people visited the site per hour.

The Station fire of Feb. 20, 2003, sparked by pyrotechnics set off by the band Great White, killed 100 people. The scene was closed to the public until that May, after workers had hauled away most of the debris, leaving a bare patch of dirt at 211 Cowesett Ave.

Soon, visitors filled it up, taking remnants of the club's old tongue-and-groove floorboards and fashioning them into 100 makeshift crosses, which they planted in a rough outline of the club's layout. The crosses got a coat of lavender paint and strings of plastic beads.

By the time Gould and Scott began cataloguing the displays, in July 2003, families and friends had inscribed the names of the lost onto about half the wooden crosses. By that September, almost all the crosses bore names, and some names appeared on several crosses.

Eventually, many families added more-durable handmade crosses in addition to the original ones, and built elaborate displays around them.

Almost everything that has happened at the site has been the result of the uncoordinated actions of dozens of people. Officially, Triton Realty Limited Partnership, which had owned the club since the 1980s, still owns the land, but it has made no effort to control people's activities there.

Triton has been trying to sell or donate the land, but has complained that legal impediments may keep the site tied up for years. Most of the lawsuits brought by victims of the fire name Triton as a defendant.

Because of the legal problems, the Station Fire Memorial Foundation -- a nonprofit group trying to acquire the site and build a permanent memorial there -- has been focused on planning for tomorrow's anniversary ceremony and on raising money, said Kimberly Jalette, the group's president.

Gould, a Barrington resident, got involved at the site days after the fire, as leader of a volunteer forensic archaeology recovery team that helped investigators comb through the rubble.

He had formed the team after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, to use archaeological techniques to help recover personal effects and human remains from disaster sites.