The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire occurred in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, a borough of New York City, on Saturday, March 25, 1911. The fire was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in U.S. history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers—123 women and girls and 23 men—who died from either the fire, smoke inhalation, or falling or jumping to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent Italian and Jewish immigrants aged 14 to 23.
The factory was located on the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the Asch Building (later the Brown Building), which was built in 1901 and remains standing on the New York University (NYU) campus at 23–29 Washington Place, near Washington Square Park."23 Washington Place, Manhattan" New York City Geographic Information System map The building has been designated a National Historic Landmark and a New York City landmark.
Because the doors to the stairwells and exits were lockedLange 2008, p. 58—a common practice at the time to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and to reduce theft—many of the workers could not escape from the burning building and jumped from the high windows. There were no sprinklers in the building. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers.
Background The Triangle Waist Company factory occupied the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the 10-story Asch Building on the northwest corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, just east of Washington Square Park, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Under the ownership of Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, the factory produced women's blouses, known as "shirtwaists". The factory normally employed about 500 workers, mostly young Italian and Jewish immigrant women and girls, who worked nine hours a day on weekdays plus seven hours on Saturdays, earning for their 52 hours of work between $7 and $12 a week, the equivalent of $ to $ a week in currency, or $ to $ per hour.CPI Inflation Calculator United States Bureau of Labor Statistics The owners were said to have preferred hiring immigrant women over men because they would work for less and were less likely to unionize against them. E., Argersinger Jo Ann. The Triangle Fire: A Brief History with Documents. Bedford/St Martin's, 2016. Page 2. Often, these women were poor and young, with little to no education and poor command of English.
Fire
At approximately 4:40 pm on Saturday, March 25, 1911, as the workday was ending, a fire flared up in a scrap bin under one of the cutter's tables at the northeast corner of the 8th floor. The first fire alarm was sent at 4:45 pm; John Gregory, a 24-year-old passerby from East 83rd Street, was the first to spot the blaze from outside, seeing smoke from the upper floor windows as he passed the building. He rushed inside, shouted to an elevator operator that the building was on fire, then jumped into a freight elevator and rode to the tenth floor. Both owners of the factory were in attendance and had invited their children to the factory on that afternoon.
The Fire Marshal concluded that the likely cause of the fire was the disposal of an unextinguished match or cigarette butt in a scrap bin containing two months' worth of accumulated cuttings.Stein p. 33 Beneath the table in the wooden bin were hundreds of pounds of scraps left over from the several thousand shirtwaists that had been cut at that table. The scraps piled up from the last time the bin was emptied, coupled with the hanging fabrics that surrounded it; the steel trim was the only thing that was not highly flammable.
Although smoking was banned in the factory, cutters were known to sneak cigarettes, exhaling the smoke through their lapels to avoid detection. A New York Times article suggested that the fire had been started by the engines running the sewing machines. A series of articles in Collier's noted a pattern of arson among certain sectors of the garment industry whenever their particular product fell out of fashion or had excess inventory in order to collect insurance. The Insurance Monitor, a leading industry journal, observed that shirtwaists had recently fallen out of fashion, and that insurance for such stock was "fairly saturated with moral hazard". Although Blanck and Harris were known for having had four previous suspicious fire claims, arson was not suspected in this case.
A bookkeeper on the 8th floor was able to warn employees on the 10th floor via telephone, but there was no audible alarm and no way to contact staff on the 9th floor. According to survivor Yetta Lubitz, the first warning of the fire on the 9th floor arrived at the same time as the fire itself.
Although the floor had a number of exits, including two freight elevators, a fire escape, and stairways down to Greene Street and Washington Place, flames prevented workers from descending the Greene Street stairway, and the door to the Washington Place stairway was locked to prevent theft by the workers; the locked doors allowed managers to check the women's purses.Lange, Brenda. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, Infobase Publishing, 2008, p. 58 Various historians have further ascribed the locked doors to management's wanting to keep out union organizers, for anti-union bias. The foreman who held the stairway door key had already escaped by another route.PBS: "Introduction: Triangle Fire" , accessed March 1, 2011 Dozens of employees escaped the fire by going up the Greene Street stairway to the roof. Other survivors were able to jam themselves into the elevators for as long as they continued to operate.Hall, Angus (ed.) (1987) Crimes of Horror Reed Editions. p. 23
Within three minutes of the fire starting, the Greene Street stairway became unusable in both directions. Terrified employees crowded onto the single exterior fire escape, which city officials had allowed Asch to erect instead of the required third staircase. The fire escape was a flimsy and poorly anchored iron structure that may have already been broken before the fire. It soon twisted and collapsed from the heat and overload, spilling about 20 victims nearly to their deaths on the concrete pavement below. The remainder of the victims jumped to their deaths to escape the fire or were eventually overcome by smoke and flames.
The fire department arrived quickly but was unable to stop the flames. Their horse-drawn ladders reached merely as high as the 7th floor. The fallen bodies and jumping victims prevented the approach of fire department staff to the building.
Elevator operators Joseph Zito and Gaspar Mortillaro saved many lives by traveling three times up to the 9th floor for passengers, but Mortillaro was eventually forced to give up when the rails of his elevator buckled under the heat. Some victims pried the elevator doors open and jumped into the empty shaft, trying to slide down the cables or to land on top of the car. The weight and impacts of these bodies warped the elevator car and made it impossible for Zito to make another attempt.
William Gunn Shepherd, a reporter at the tragedy, would say, "I learned a new sound that day, a sound more horrible than description can picture—the thud of a speeding living body on a stone sidewalk." A large crowd of bystanders gathered on the street, witnessing 62 people jumping or falling to their deaths from the burning building. Louis Waldman, later a New York Socialist state assemblyman, described the scene years later:
Aftermath Contemporary reporting noted that by midnight, 130 of the approximately 700 employees had been taken to the morgue for identification, with bodies still being lowered from the fire-swept upper floors at the rate of one a minute; Coroner Holtzhauer estimated the total death toll would reach 250, while firefighters responding to the first alarm found 30 bodies on the pavements of Washington Place and Greene Street, nearly all of them women and girls. Although early estimates of the death toll ranged from 141Staff (March 26, 1911) "141 Men and Girls Die in Waist Factory Fire" The New York Times. Accessed December 20, 2009. to 148, almost all later references agree that 146 people died as a result of the fire: 123 women and girls and 23 men.von Drehle, passimStaff (March 26, 1997) "In Memoriam: The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire" The New York Times"The Triangle Factory Fire". The Kheel Center, Cornell University."98th Anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire". New York City Fire Department."Labor Department Remembers 95th Anniversary of Sweatshop Fire". U.S. Department of Labor.Stein, passim Of the victims whose ages are known, the oldest victim was 43-year-old Providenza Panno and the youngest were 14-year-olds Kate Leone and Rosaria "Sara" Maltese. Most victims died of burns, asphyxiation, blunt impact injuries, or a combination of the three.
The first person to jump was a man. Another man was seen kissing a young woman at a window before they both jumped to their deaths. The New York Times described the scene in detail: a 13-year-old girl hung by her fingertips from a 10th floor window sill for three minutes before flames reached her hands; five girls smashed through a window pane together and were crushed on the pavement below; a girl leaping for the fire ladder—which reached only to the 6th floor—struck a life net and was picked up with her back broken. Chief Croker initially estimated 25 dead, then revised the count to 65 based on bodies on the streets and reports from inside, before bodies found on the 9th floor and in the elevator shaft sent the total beyond all previous estimates.
Bodies of victims were taken to Charities Pier (also called Misery Lane), located at 26th Street and the East River, for identification by friends and relatives.Stein, p. 100 Victims were interred in 16 different cemeteries. Twenty-two victims of the fire were buried by the Hebrew Free Burial Association in a special section at Mount Richmond Cemetery. In some instances, their tombstones refer to the fire. Six victims remained unidentified until 2011, when Michael Hirsch, a historian, completed four years of researching newspaper articles and other sources for missing persons and was able to identify each of them by name. Those six victims were buried together in the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn. Originally interred elsewhere on the grounds, their remains now lie beneath a monument to the tragedy, a large marble slab featuring a kneeling woman. Evergreens Cemetery reports that there were originally eight burials, one male and six females, along with some unidentified remains. One of the female victims was later identified and her body removed to another cemetery. Other accounts do not mention the unidentified remains at all. Rose Freedman was the last living survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. (1893–2001)
Consequences