The Gulliver’s fire
July 4, 2024 at 7:23 p.m.
The Gulliver’s nightclub fire of June 30, 1974 is ingrained in the psyche of most Port Chester residents who were alive at least 50 years ago, and particularly anyone related to the Port Chester Fire Department. For every volunteer firefighter celebrating 50 or more years with the department, it is the incident they recall most vividly and horrifically so many years later.
The fire occurred in the early hours of the morning, killed 24 patrons and injured 32 others including 13 firefighters. It was the result of a 22-year-old thief setting a fire in an adjacent bowling alley to cover up a minor burglary.
According to an account by Rick DeGroot of DeGroot Fire Training and Consulting LLC, who gathered content from multiple media sources, 300 firefighters from 19 fire companies from New York and Connecticut responded. 
Mike Fratello was one of the Port Chester firefighters on hand for the June 30 ceremony. He was 14 on that date 50 years ago, but he remembers it well.
By Richard Abel
With the five-decade anniversary looming, a few Port Chester residents alerted Mayor Luis Marino and Village Manager Stuart Rabin who in turn contacted Greenwich First Selectman Fred Camillo and a 50 years-to-the-day commemoration was planned for Sunday, June 30, not far from the actual location of the tragedy.
“We could not get ahold of the building owner,” said Camillo, who emceed the ceremony, held where the historic Thomas Lyon House is located on Boston Post Road, just over the Greenwich, Conn. line. “I apologize.”
Gulliver’s Restaurant, which turned into a nightclub with a sunken dance floor at night, was located at 729 Hillside Ave., straddling the New York-Connecticut border, and the current site of an office building.
About 100 people crowded onto the small plot and spilled out onto the street for the commemoration.
Jeanne Gauruder of Bethel, Conn., was holding photos in a clear plastic bag, the largest of her brother-in-law Michael Gauruder she never got to meet as well as one of him with his girlfriend Janet Haehl who also died that night. Michael was 19 when he perished.
“He went in to save his girlfriend and unfortunately he could not get out,” Jeanne said. “It changed so many lives forever.”
Jeanne commented that nothing had ever been done for the victims up to this point.
Her husband Stephen, who spoke tearfully about his fond memories of his older brother at the ceremony, was 16 at the time. “I identified my brother and came back and told my parents,” Stephen said in an interview. “It was probably the hardest thing I had to do in my life.”
Linda Charette, Michael’s sister, looks at things differently than Stephen and admitted that “we all have our own way of grieving.”
“I have moved on from this,” she said. “I have learned a lot of lessons from it. They are up in heaven asking us to move on.”
“Family members are here and firefighters who were on the scene,” said Camillo. “We want to remember people who fought the fire. Codes were changed. That is the only good thing that came out of it.”
Mayor Marino was 7 years old at the time and living in Peru, but since immigrating to the U.S. and settling in Port Chester, being a volunteer firefighter has been an important part of his life. “As a firefighter myself, I want to thank all the firefighters of Port Chester,” he said.
At Sunday’s ceremony, Jeanne Gauruder of Bethel, Conn., holds photos of her brother-in-law Michael Gauruder she never met and his girlfriend Janet Haehl, who both perished in the Gulliver’s fire on June 30, 1974.By Richard Abel
“Their actions will never be forgotten,” said Port Chester Fire Chief Angelo Sposta, whose father was a firefighter at Gulliver’s and who grew up in the PCFD.
“Robin Seeley, who lost her life, was a good friend of my mother’s,” Sposta added. “We think about her every day.”
At the Monday, July 1 Port Chester Board of Trustees meeting, Trustee Phil Dorazio said Seeley was the only person from Port Chester who died in the fire.
Trustee Joe Carvin added that Seeley was in his class at Port Chester High School.
“I was about 5 years old,” said Dorazio at Monday’s meeting. I didn’t know anyone who was lost. I was reminded [about the anniversary] by my brother Fabian who is much older than I. He became a cop six months later.”
Camillo read the names of the 24 young men and women who perished at Gulliver’s 50 years earlier and a bagpiper played “Amazing Grace.”
“Thanks to all the EMS members who set up triage and gave us comfort,” said a firefighter who was given the mike. “Mentally they kept us squared away.”
Westchester County Executive George Latimer was 20 on June 30, 1974. “Gulliver’s was the place you would go,” he said. “I happened to be out of town when this happened. My wife was planning to go to Gulliver’s, but it didn’t work out.”
“By now they would be grandparents,” Latimer said of the victims. “It is a pain that does not end.”
U.S. Senator from Connecticut Richard Blumenthal acknowledged that Connecticut and New York officials may not always see eye to eye, but “we work seamlessly together on what’s important. I want to thank these two communities for coming together today. What happened at Gulliver’s was criminal and there was failure to take precautions, so there is a life lesson here.”
According to the Rick DeGroot compilation, “a rock group was performing when the first wisps of acrid smoke drifted into the nightclub. There were about 200 young people in the lower level lounge at the time of the fire, just before 1:00 a.m. Then, according to one of the survivors, ‘smoke came in really quickly and there was almost a stampede for the stairway.' The band was The Creation…They stopped playing the song "I Wanna Know Your Name" after a waitress told them she smelled smoke. They calmly announced ‘There's a fire. Please walk out quietly.’ For the most part the dancers did, funneling through a four-foot-wide staircase of six steps that took them up to the dining area and out the front door. But within seconds, a rush of acrid smoke engulfed the dance floor and blinded more than 100 stragglers, leaving them gasping for air and trapped behind a staircase clogged with fallen bodies. The thick smoke spread so quickly that it appeared the lights had gone out. At this point, there was a panic; because of the heat, patrons on the dance floor were unable to climb the only stairs to the main floor. Twenty-four young men and women were killed by the smoke and fire, their cars sitting in the parking lot, their parents at home waiting for them to return.”
“I was 14 at the time,” said Mike Fratello, now a Port Chester volunteer firefighter. “My father worked for the Greenwich Gas Company” and had to turn off the gas to the building. “I’ve done so much reading on it because I remember it so well. It was the worst tragedy Port Chester ever had.”
“I remember watching from my house on Riverdale Avenue,” said Linda Turturino, who was at the ceremony and at Monday’s meeting as a member of the Port Chester Entertainment Committee. “I was 10. It was a night I will never forget. I truly thought it was worth remembering. It gave people time to mark that day.”
“To be a small part of that yesterday was very touching,” said Dorazio Monday night. “The firefighters that were there that have to relive this every day must be very difficult. I wanted to say thank you to them.”
First Selectman Camillo said in an interview Sunday that he would like to get permission from the State of Connecticut and the State of New York to put a plaque memorializing the Gulliver’s tragedy on the new bridge that is going to be constructed at the state borders on Hillside Avenue in the next few years.
In a letter to the editor in this week’s Westmore News, Camillo expounded on that thought.
“I pledge to continue to work with our friends in Port Chester to get a memorial plaque, sign, or statue placed near the site so that the memory of the 24 men and women, and the modern day building codes as well as state and Federal laws that followed in the wake of the tragedy will be acknowledged by all who travel by this location,” Camillo wrote. “These codes and laws have saved the lives of untold numbers of people over the past 50 years due to capacity limits for indoor spaces, construction materials, and sprinkler systems as well as the requirement of more than one entrance and exit—things that were not present or required in 1974.”
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