The 15-story building still stands on Peachtree Street, an empty monument to tragedy - and the good that can come of it.
Fifty years ago Saturday, fire raged inside the so-called "absolutely fireproof" Winecoff Hotel as 119 of its guests frantically jumped to their deaths or huddled in their rooms until they were overcome by fumes, smoke and flames.
From the ashes of the worst hotel fire in America came tougher fire codes, new equipment for the Atlanta Fire Department and a community of strangers forever united by pain.
"It's hard for me to believe it's been 50 years, " said Cary Horne of Dunwoody, who survived the fire but even now can't go to movies without sitting by the fire exit and can't go to bed without unplugging her appliances.
"If it will help anybody else from being hurt or burned, if it makes a person more careful about their use of fire, I think it's important to note this anniversary, " she added.
A ceremony to remember the fire is planned for 2 p.m. Saturday at Atlanta's Fire Station 6 Museum, where a temporary exhibit about the fire will be on display.
But for many survivors, victims' relatives, firefighters and bystanders who rushed to the rescue, it doesn't take ceremonies or photographs to remind them of that terrifying night. For them, the memories seem as fresh as yesterday:
- Horne clutching the scant concrete between bricks as she climbed down the outside wall of the hotel;
- Bystander Claud Beckham, now 74 and living in New Jersey, gripping the rescue net meant to save people only to see a man plunge head-first into the net's unforgiving metal rim.;
- Weary firefighter T.H. Roberts, now 79, a retired battalion chief and living in Peachtree City, washing the blood of victims off his ladder truck the next day.
The fire started before dawn that Saturday in 1946.
The Winecoff, with its 150 rooms, was filled to capacity with Christmas shoppers, teenagers in town for the annual Youth Assembly and guests making the trek to Atlanta for jobs, medical care and other big- city needs.
The hotel boasted on its stationery of being fireproof, although it had none of the safety features - such as a fire escape and fire doors - required by a 1943 building code. City officials had said they could not enforce the code on older buildings such as the Winecoff, built in 1913.
Its open inside stairway actually acted as a giant flue, quickly spreading the fire from where it started on the third floor, said current Atlanta Fire Deputy Chief Joe Tolbert.
By the time the first firefighters arrived, shortly after getting the alarm at 3:42 a.m., smoke was billowing out of both the third-and 11th-floor windows, Roberts said.
Beckham, hearing the sirens, raced from his nearby job at Southern Bell to the hotel, where he first "thought there was some kind of wild celebration going on, there was so much hollering. I quickly realized these people were screaming for help and all the things I thought were decorations were actually sheet ropes hanging off the front of the hotel."
On the 10th floor, Bob and Billie Cox started fashioning their own sheet rope, realizing the fire department ladders could not reach that high. The couple from North Carolina had brought their 3-year-old son to Atlanta for Christmas shopping and to see the mechanical Santa Claus in the window of Davison-Paxon's (now Macy's) department store window.
Their babysitter climbed down the rope to a ladder safely. But Billie Cox could not hold on and fell to the street below.
As Beckham held one edge of a safety net below the Cox's room, he suddenly saw a man, a toddler wrapped in his arms, hurtling through the smoke. The man - Bob Cox - hit his head on the metal rim of the net and died. "The little fellow in the snowsuit bounced harmlessly, " said Beckham, who has since talked to the boy, now Kansas pediatrician Robert Cox.
On the top floor, Horne and her husband, Reid, were awakened by the sound of a woman screaming. The couple from Cordele had come to Atlanta for Reid Horne's tonsillectomy.
They precariously crawled along an outside ledge, first to a room that was less smoky. Then they tried to climb down the face of hotel on a sheet rope. But falling bodies and the intense fire forced them back to the top floor where they and eight strangers waited for help, only a waterlogged mattress between them and the inferno.
Finally, "we heard a knock on the door, " Cary Horne recalled. "It was a wonderful sound, to know someone was out there."
Nearly three hours after the fire began, it was out. The onetime splendor of the Winecoff was replaced by charred rooms, blown out windows and an awning ripped to shreds by falling bodies.
On their way out, the Hornes stopped in their original room to get a few belongings. On the bed lay a young man, dead, his shoe leather and foot curled from the heat.
Fire officials ruled the deadly blaze an accident, although some investigations have pointed toward arson. No arrests were ever made.
In the aftermath, cities across the United States enacted tougher building codes. In Atlanta, owners of older buildings were quick to retrofit their places with fire safety features, Tolbert said. The fire "just heightened awareness." When the Winecoff reopened five years later as the Peachtree on Peachtree Hotel, it had fire escapes, sprinklers and fire doors.
The building now stands vacant at the corner of Peachtree and Ellis streets, its paint peeling and masonry crumbling. The South Korean company that owns it plans to spend up to $4 million in the next year to turn it into corporate apartments.
"We are all safer today, " said Sam Heys, who along with Allen Goodwin wrote a book about the fire. "I think the survivors and victims' families have taken solace in the fact that the deaths of their loved ones were not completely in vain."
The fire also prompted Atlanta to get better firefighting equipment and hire more firefighters, said Roberts, the retired battalion chief. That night, one of the city's tallest ladders malfunctioned, another was in the shop, he said. Roberts said his truck's 85-foot ladder only reached the fifth or sixth floor. At a ceremony two years ago to dedicate a plaque at the Winecoff site, old and new equipment sat side-by- side. The modern truck ladder "was extended to the room we were in, " said Robert Cox (the toddler who survived a fall from the 10th floor). "I was standing under it realizing it would be totally easy to walk down it today."
That ceremony, along with the publication of the Heys-Goodwin book, have brought together again the people whose lives were inextricably linked that night 50 years ago.
"It was important to meet the people who saved me, " Robert Cox said. "And I realized how important it was to (them) to see someone who survived. These people who landed on the net . . . disappeared into the smoke and destruction. They (rescuers) may not have known if anyone (they helped) lived."
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