A crowd gathered outside the Knickerbocker Theater a few days after its roof collapsed. (Source: Library of Congress)
Washington, D.C. has been battered by some brutal winter storms, but none has been more lethal than the blizzard that hit the District in late January 1922. Today, that two-day storm is still remembered as the Knickerbocker Blizzard. That s in grim recognition of 98 people who lost their lives and the 133 who were injured in the catastrophic roof collapse that it caused at Crandall s Knickerbocker Theater, once the District s biggest and grandest movie house.
The Knickerbocker, located at Columbia Road and 18th Street Northwest in Adams Morgan, was one of the jewels in the crown of local movie entrepreneur Harry M. Crandall, who himself was one of Washington s most stirring Horatio Alger stories. As a 1922