The Triangle Shortwaist Factory Fire took place in New York City in March 1911. It is one of the deadliest industrial disasters in U.S. history, resulting in 146 deaths. Richard Bluttal explains.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire on March, 25, 1911.
“My name is Sadie Frowne. I work in Allen Street (Manhattan) in what they call a sweatshop. I am new at the work and the foreman scolds me a great deal. I get up at half past five every morning and make myself a cup of coffee on the oil stove. I eat a bit of bread and perhaps some fruit and then go to work. Often, I get there soon after six o'clock so as to be in good time, though the factory does not open till seven.
At seven o'clock we all sit down to our machines and the boss brings to each one the pile of work that he or she is to finish during the day--what they call in English their "stint." This pile is put down beside the machine and as soon as a garment is done it is laid on the other side of the machine. Sometimes the work is not all finished by six o'clock, and then the one who is behind must work overtime.’’
The Life of a Shirtwaist Maker in New York City early 20th Century
The shirtwaist makers, as young as age 15, worked seven days a week, from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. with a half-hour lunch break. During the busy season, the work was nearly non-stop. They were paid about $6 per week. In some cases, they were required to use their own needles, thread, irons and occasionally their own sewing machines. The factories also were unsanitary, or as a young striker explained, “unsanitary—that’s the word that is generally used, but there ought to be a worse one used.” At the Triangle factory, women had to leave the building to use the bathroom, so management began locking the steel exit doors to prevent the “interruption of work” and only the foreman had the key.
The “shirtwaist”—a woman’s blouse—was one of the country’s first fashion statements that crossed class lines. The booming ready-made clothing industry made the stylish shirtwaist affordable even for working women. Worn with an ankle-length skirt, the shirtwaist was appropriate for any occasion—from work to play—and was more comfortable and practical than fashion that preceded it, like corsets and hoops.
The Fire
It was a warm spring Saturday in New York City, March 25, 1911. On the top three floors of the ten-story Asch Building just off of Washington Square, employees of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City began putting away their work as the 4:45 p.m. quitting time approached. Most of the several hundred Triangle Shirtwaist employees were teenage girls. Most were recent immigrants. Many spoke only a little English. Just then somebody on the eighth floor shouted, "Fire!" Flames leapt from discarded rags between the first and second rows of cutting tables on the hundred-foot-by-hundred-foot floor. Triangle employee William Bernstein grabbed pails of water and vainly attempted to put the fire out. As a line of hanging patterns began to burn, cries of "fire" erupted from all over the floor. In the thickening smoke, as several men continued to fling water at the fire, the fire spread everywhere--to the tables, the wooden floor trim, the partitions, the ceiling. A shipping clerk dragged a hose in the stairwell into the rapidly heating room, but nothing came--no pressure. Terrified and screaming, girls streamed down the narrow fire escape and Washington Place stairway or jammed into the single passenger elevator.
In the hell of the ninth-floor, 145 employees, mostly young women, would die. Those that acted quickly made it through the Greene Street stairs, climbed down a rickety fire escape before it collapsed, or squeezed into the small Washington Place elevators before they stopped running. The last person on the last elevator to leave the ninth floor was Katie Weiner, who grabbed a cable that ran through the elevator and swung in, landing on the heads of other girls. A few other girls survived by jumping into the elevator shaft, and landing on the roof of the elevator compartment as it made its final descent. The weight of the girls caused the car to sink to the bottom of the shaft, leaving it immobile. For those left on the ninth floor, forced to choose between an advancing inferno and jumping to the sidewalks below, many would jump. Others, according to survivor Ethel Monick, became "frozen with fear" and "never moved."
It took only eighteen minutes to bring the fire under control, and in ten minutes more it was practically "all over." Water soaked a pile of thirty or more bodies on the Greene Street sidewalk. Doctors pawed through heaps of humanity looking for signs of life. Police tried desperately to keep crowds of hysterical relatives from overrunning the disaster scene. Officers filled coffins and loaded them into patrol wagons and ambulances. The bodies were taken to a temporary morgue set up on a covered pier at the foot of East Twenty-sixth Street. Firemen searched the burned-out floors of the Asch building, hoping to find survivors. What they mostly found were, according to Chief Edward Croker, "bodies burned to bare bones, skeletons bending over sewing machines." Four hours after the fire, workers discovered a lone survivor trapped in rising water at the bottom of the elevator shaft.
Suzanne Pred Bass, Executive Board Member at the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, located in New York City, to discussed how the legacy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, which took the lives of 123 women and girls and 23 men, has inspired future movements to protect workers’ rights – particularly for vulnerable populations such as immigrants and women.
‘’ Immigrants struggling to make a life for themselves, without the language and educational skills necessary to protect and guide them, become extremely vulnerable in the workplace. As they struggle to
help their families survive, they end up working wherever they can. Many don’t have the necessary papers to legally work and therefore are prey to greedy bosses who will exploit them and see them as nothing but tools to make money. Without unions to protect them they are forced to accept low wages, unsafe workplaces, sexual harassment, and unfair conditions over which they have no say. “
This is what was happening in 1911 when the fire occurred and is still happening here and around the world. The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) had been fighting for the creation of unions since 1900. The union’s first major strike – comprised of 20,000 female workers – occurred in 1909, followed by an even larger one in 1910. Led by Clara Lemlich, women sweatshop workers went on strike to protest their unsafe, unfair workplace environments. The strike succeeded in getting many sweatshops to become union shops. Unfortunately, the Triangle Factory owners – Max Blank and Isaac Harris – refused to be unionized. They made promises to workers that were never fulfilled. The Triangle Factory fire galvanized New Yorkers and people across the country as well as in other countries, particularly those from Russia and Italy; countries that claimed the most victims.
Building Structure of the Brown ( Asch ) Building
The Brown (then called the Asch) Building, constructed in 1901 of steel and iron, was advertised as “fireproof” and, hence, attracted several garment factories. The Triangle firm occupied the 8th, 9th and 10th floors, at the top of the building. The building offered few working bathrooms, faulty ventilation, and outmoded heating and cooling systems. The stairwells were poorly lit and hazardous. More egregious, it had no overhead sprinklers and only a single fire escape, which was neither durable nor big enough to accommodate all of the people working in the building in the event of a fire.
Added to these risks, the Triangle Company stored flammable products and chemicals on its production floors. Working cheek by jowl, the seamstresses sat at tightly arranged rows of sewing machines and cutting tables. All over the floor were clippings of flammable fabric. Under one of the work bins, where 120 layers of fabric were once stored, a spark turned into a flame and spread to the tissue paper shirt patterns, or templates, hanging from the ceiling.
The fire soon spread from worktable to worktable, gaining speed, heat, and venom with each passing second. Many died of smoke inhalation. Others, who could not find a means of escape, burned to death. And there also were the indelibly horrific images of the young women who jumped out of windows to their deaths, because the stairwell doors were locked shut and the elevators were out of order.
The New York City Department arrived but their ladders reached only as high as the 6th floor of the building, two entire floors below the fire. The mounting dead—covered in tarps— were arranged in rows along the sidewalk by the city coroners for the newspaper photographers.
Below were the laws of the Department of Buildings at time of the fire and the specific structure of Ashe building of these laws.
New York State Labor Laws (Article 6, Section 80):
“All doors leading in or to any such factory shall be constructed as to open outwardly, where practicable, and shall not be locked, bolted, or fastened during working hours.”
Triangle Shirtwaist Company Compliance:
Whether Section 80 was violated was the key issue in the trial of Harris and Blanck. The case turned on whether the ninth-floor staircase door on the Washington Place side was locked at the time of trial.
The prosecution contended the door was locked and introduced a witness who testified that at the time of the fire she tried the door “in and out, all ways” and was unable to open the door. The prosecution also showed that many of the victims of the fire died in front of the door. The prosecution argued that Harris and Blanck kept the door locked, especially near quitting time, to force exiting workers to pass through the only other exit, where they could be inspected if they were suspected of trying to pilfer waistcoats.
The defense contended that the door was open, but that the fleeing workers were unable to exit through the door because of fire in the stairwell. The defense introduced a witness who said that on the day of the fire a key was tied to the lock with the string and that she used the key to open the door. (The prosecution claimed the witness lied.)
It was also shown that the ninth-floor staircase door did not “open outwardly,” but inspectors failed to note a violation because only the width of a stair separated the door from the stairs, making it not “practicable” for the door to open outwardly.
Staircases
New York Law:
Buildings with more than 2,500 square feet per floor–but less than 5,000 square feet per floor–require two staircases. Each additional 5,000 square feet per floor requires an additional staircase.
Triangle Shirtwaist Company Compliance:
The Triangle Shirtwaist Company floors had 10,000 square feet of space. Any additional floor space would have required a third staircase. As it was, two staircases–the number the Triangle factory had–sufficed.
Fire Escapes
New York Law:
New York law left the matter of fire escapes to the discretion of building inspectors. The building inspector for the Asch building insisted that the fire escape proposed for the building “must lead down to something more substantial than a skylight.” (The architect’s plans showed a rear fire escape leading to a skylight.)
Triangle Shirtwaist Company Compliance:
The Asch building architect promised “the fire escape will lead to the yard and an additional balcony will be put in.” In the final construction, however, the fire escape still ended at a second-floor skylight. During the fire, the fire escape collapsed under the weight of the fleeing workers.
Non-Wood Surfaces
New York Law:
Buildings over 150 feet high must have metal trim, metal window frames, and stone or concrete floors. Buildings under 150 feet high have no such requirements.
Triangle Shirtwaist Company Compliance:
The ten-story Asch building was 135 feet high. If it had one more floor, it would have required non-wood surfaces.
Consequences and Conclusion
More than 350,000 people marched in the funeral procession for the Triangle victims. Activists kept their memory alive by lobbying their local and state leaders to do something in the name of building and worker safety and health. Three months later, John Alden Dix, then the governor of New York, signed a law empowering the Factory Investigating Committee, which resulted in eight more laws covering fire safety, factory inspection, and sanitation and employment rules for women and children. The following year, 1912, activists and legislators in New York State enacted another 25 laws that transformed its labor protections among the most progressive in the nation. Many of these reforms—all proposed to protect the health and safety of the American worker—were swept into federal law during the New Deal. Years later, in 1970, the Occupational Safety and Health Act was passed and created, “whose primary mission is to ensure that employees carry out their tasks under safe working conditions.” It remains a critically important agency in the lives of working Americans.
The Triangle Fire of March 25, 1911, destroyed hundreds of lives — both those who died and their families. Sadly, it required the ashes of 146 people to redesign and reimagine the workplace of the early 20th century. Once a dirty and unsafe place, filled with dangerous machines and, before child labor laws, small children, American factories and offices are now far safer than they once were only a century ago. Nonetheless, as new technology and manufacturing processes develop, we must remain vigilant in ferreting out and preventing the health risks they impose to workers and consumers. Now, as then, we must always remember the horrific flames of the Triangle.
The company's owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris – both Jewish immigrants – who survived the fire by fleeing to the building's roof when it began, were indicted on charges of first- and second-degree manslaughter in mid-April; the pair's trial began on December 4, 1911.Max Steuer, counsel for the defendants, managed to destroy the credibility of one of the survivors, Kate Alterman, by asking her to repeat her testimony a number of times, which she did without altering key phrases. Steuer argued to the jury that Alterman and possibly other witnesses had memorized their statements and might even have been told what to say by the prosecutors. The prosecution charged that the owners knew the exit doors were locked at the time in question. The investigation found that the locks were intended to be locked during working hours based on the findings from the fire, but the defense stressed that the prosecution failed to prove that the owners knew that the jury acquitted the two men of first- and second-degree manslaughter, but they were found liable of wrongful death during a subsequent civil suit in 1913 in which plaintiffs were awarded compensation in the amount of $75 per deceased victim. The insurance company paid Blanck and Harris about $60,000 more than the reported losses, or about $400 per casualty.
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