L’Histoire de Mode~Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on

March 25, 1911, was the deadliest industrial disaster in the

history of the city of New York and resulted in the fourth highest

loss of life from an industrial accident in U.S. history. The fire

caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, who either died

from the fire or jumped to their deaths. Most of the victims were

recent immigrant Jewish women aged sixteen to twenty-three.

Many of the workers could not escape the burning building because the

managers had locked the doors to the stairwells and exits. People jumped from

the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors. The fire led to legislation requiring improved

factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union,

which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was

located in the Asch Building, now known as the Brown Building of Science, a New York University facility.

It has been designated as a National Historic Landmark and

a New York City landmark.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory occupied the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors

of the Asch Building. 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 immigrant women, who worked nine

hours a day on weekdays plus seven hours on Saturdays.

On the afternoon of Saturday, March 25, 1911, as the workday was ending, a fire

flared up in a scrap bin under one of the cutters’ tables on the eighth 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 the scrap bin. 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 may have been

started by the engines running the sewing machines, while The Insurance Monitor, a leading

industry journal, suggested that the epidemic of fires among shirtwaist manufacturers

was “fairly saturated with moral hazard.” No one suggested arson.

A bookkeeper on the eighth floor was able to warn employees on the

tenth floor via telephone, but there was no audible alarm and no way

to contact staff on the ninth floor. According to survivor

Yetta Lubitz, the first warning of the fire on the ninth

floor arrived at the same time as the fire itself.

The floor had a number of exits – two freight elevators, a

fire escape, and stairways down to Greene Street and

Washington Square – but flames prevented workers from

descending the Greene Street stairway and the door to the Washington Square

stairway was locked to prevent theft and the foreman who held the

key had escaped by another route.

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

while they continued to operate. Within three minutes, the Greene Street stairway

became unusable in both directions. Terrified employees crowded

onto the single exterior fire escape, a flimsy and poorly-anchored iron structure

which may have been broken before the fire. It soon twisted and collapsed from the

heat and overload, spilling victims to their deaths onto the concrete pavement

nearly a hundred feet below. Elevator operators Joseph Zito

and Gaspar Mortillalo saved many lives by traveling three times up

to the ninth floor for passengers, but Mortillalo 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 down the empty shaft. The weight of these

bodies made it impossible for Zito to make another attempt.

As a large crowd of bystanders gathered on the street, sixty-two people

died by jumping or falling from the ninth floor. Louis Waldman, later a

New York Socialist state assemblyman, described the scene years later:

One Saturday afternoon in March of that year — March 25, to be precise — I was sitting at one of the reading tables in the old Astor Library… It was a raw, unpleasant day and the comfortable reading room seemed a delightful place to spend the remaining few hours until the library closed. I was deeply engrossed in my book when I became aware of fire engines racing past the building. By this time I was sufficiently Americanized to be fascinated by the sound of fire engines. Along with several others in the library, I ran out to see what was happening, and followed crowds of people to the scene of the fire. A few blocks away, the Asch Building at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street was ablaze. When we arrived at the scene, the police had thrown up a cordon around the area and the firemen were helplessly fighting the blaze. The eighth, ninth, and tenth stories of the building were now an enormous roaring cornice of flames.

Word had spread through the East Side, by some magic of terror, that the plant of the Triangle Waist Company was on fire and that several hundred workers were trapped. Horrified and helpless, the crowds — I among them — looked up at the burning building, saw girl after girl appear at the reddened windows, pause for a terrified moment, and then leap to the pavement below, to land as mangled, bloody pulp. This went on for what seemed a ghastly eternity. Occasionally a girl who had hesitated too long was licked by pursuing flames and, screaming with clothing and hair ablaze, plunged like a living torch to the street. Life nets held by the firemen were torn by the impact of the falling bodies.

The emotions of the crowd were indescribable. Women were hysterical, scores fainted; men wept as, in paroxysms of frenzy, they hurled themselves against the police lines.