THE NIGHT CENTURY HALL BURNED.

The phone rang at 11:10 pm. I tried to ignore it. I was tired and hoped the call wasn’t from a distraught therapy client. But the voice rising up from my answering machine was Kathy, one of the therapists I worked with on the second floor of a building called Century Hall. 

“Pick up! There’s a fire!” Kathy shouted.

I picked up. “What do you mean? A fire?” 

“There’s been an explosion. Century Hall is burning!” said Kathy.

This news was so bizarre that, at first, I couldn’t understand it. I’d been in our therapy clinic in the building called Century Hall until seven that evening. The restaurant and bar on the first floor of Century Hall had been busy, filled with the sounds we were accustomed to hearing in the background of our therapy work, not a distraction, just loud enough to remind us that we weren’t alone in the building. Our clinic had occupied the second floor for three years. I couldn’t picture Century Hall, a beautiful old Victorian building, on fire. I had to go see it for myself. 

I hung up and ran to my car. I was opening the driver’s side when my husband Chris pushed me gently aside and said “You’re upset. Let me drive.” 

Century Hall was three miles away. We smelled the smoke when we were two miles away. Hard to believe that a fire could cause that much smoke in just fifteen minutes. But it had.

Chris parked the car. I jumped out and ran toward a fireman.

The flames, spreading across multiple buildings, were shooting up at least fifty feet. Until this fire there had been two floors of rented apartments above the row of stores to the south of Century Hall. Now all I could see to the south was smoke and flames. And to the north, flames traveling across the front of a nearby duplex, and rolling across the roof of Century Hall.

I began to cry. At the time I couldn’t have said why. But remembering it now I realize I was grieving. 

Century Hall was dying.

I ran to a fireman who looked like he was in charge. 

“I have to get in there,” I shouted as I grabbed his arm. He looked at me like I was crazy. He uncurled my fingers from his wrist.

“Not a chance, Ma’am,” he told me.

“The front part of the building where I work isn’t on fire yet. I’m sure there’s time. I need to save our client records,” I begged. I didn’t tell him all the other things I wanted to save. The diplomas, licenses, notebooks, soft cushions, scented candles, and stuffed animals. 

The fireman smiled at me now, with either compassion or condescension—I couldn’t guess which—and said, “It isn’t safe. I can’t let you get any closer. Step back now.”

I stepped back. 

I swear I heard the building’s hundred-year-old wood crying out for me.

Chris came up behind me and wrapped his arms around me, “Shhh shhh,” he said, as if I was a child. I fell totally apart then, sobbing in his arms.  

There were hundreds of other people with us there in the bank parking lot across the street from the burning buildings, watching the flames, hearing the wind that the flames created, smelling the burning wood.

Chris and I left while it was all still burning. 

When I woke the next morning, I called the clients I was scheduled to see that day and gave them the bad news. Then I joined my colleague Kathy at the site. Together we picked our way through charred wood and broken glass. The back half of Century Hall was burned out but the staircase leading up to our waiting room looked like it was intact enough for us to walk up, so we did.  

Our clinic had escaped the worst of the flames, but the smell of smoke was everywhere. And everything—the rugs, the walls, the furniture— was soaking wet. Unsalvageable. 

I stopped a moment and stared down at the desk where I’d sat until seven o’clock last night catching up on paperwork. The desktop was wet and there was a small puddle on the chair. It occurred to me then that if the bomb had exploded at seven, rather than eleven, people downstairs in the restaurant probably would have been hurt. (The restaurant closed at ten pm) Maybe me, too. The thought sent a chill through me. 

Kathy and I didn’t stay long in the ruined clinic. It didn’t feel safe.

A policeman appeared as we came down the stairs with our bags of papers. He scolded us for risking the collapse of the probably weakened stairway. “Don’t come back,” he told us. 

It was a relief to never go back. 

We learned later that the fire was set by a man who had a grudge against the owner of the mall next to Century Hall. He’d set a time bomb, opened up a gas valve in the basement of the mall’s paint store and then left. The bomb blew at 11pm. The resultant fire, fed by the flammables in the paint store as well as by the gas, took five hours and 165 firefighters to put out. Half a city block was destroyed. 

The police suspected it was arson, but it took three months for them to gather enough evidence to bring charges. The perpetrator must have sensed them closing in, because before they got to him, he killed his wife and six days later he killed himself. The murder and the suicide were reported in the local newspaper. The case was closed; it was all over.

But not for me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The fifty foot flames, the billowing smoke, the rubble the next morning. The wet walls and floors of our clinic. The smoke clinging to everything, The murder and the suicide. I couldn’t shake a sense of having brushed up against someone, something, incredibly dark, truly evil. For weeks I replayed in my mind everything connected to that fire and its aftermath.

My preoccupation with the demise of Century Hall was, I guess, normal, a way to deal with the trauma of having witnessed something disastrous. You review everything until finally it recedes into the back of your mind and no longer demands attention. That’s what I did with the Century Hall memories, let them fade, until now, when I wrote this blog and was reminded of how lucky I was. It was a close call. 

This blog first appeared on Psychology Today's blog site on November 7, 2025. Reference: The night Century Hall burned. OnMilwaukee.