On This Day: March 25, 1911: The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, a sweatshop located on 23-29 Washington Place, right off Washington Square Park. The majority of workers were immigrant women. In the years preceding the fire, The International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union had been working to organize the garment workers all over America. There had been many strikes, some of them ending in violence. These brave women were arrested time and time again. Because the garment workers were mostly immigrant women, grateful to have jobs at all, organizing them to criticize working conditions was difficult. After fleeing pogroms in Russia, you tell the boss you need better ventilation? In the early days of the labor movement, there were organizations of mainly middle-class reformers who helped the workers to organize. The main requests were an 8-hour work day and safe working conditions. In 1909, there was an historic walk-out. But change was slow, and nothing had happened in time stave off the worst single disaster in the entire Industrial Revolution, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

146 people died. Remember them.

A first-hand account from Louis Waldman:

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.

More below the jump.

 
 

March 25, 1911 was a Saturday.

Survivors said if the fire had broken out on a weekday, the death toll would have been much higher. Many survivors said Saturday was the day workers stopped by to get their paychecks. Many decided to wait until Monday to pick up their paycheck, saving their own lives by sheer accident.

The fire broke out on the top floors of the building. The workers stored fabric underneath their stations, and this made the fire basically explode in the enclosed space, the piles of fabric acting as a natural lighting fluid. Many of the exit doors were locked. (One of the survivors said the doors were locked because the superintendent was afraid women would try to sneak out via those doors with dresses/shirts they had made.) Women crowded up at the locked doors, banging and screaming, their hair and clothes on fire. Women crowded out onto the fire escapes to escape the blaze, and the fire escapes began to buckle under the weight. Some of the women on the top floors escaped via the rooftops. There were only a couple of elevators. Within minutes, the 8th and 9th floors were engulfed in flames, and women were jumping to their deaths.

The fire trucks arrived within minutes, but, awfully, the ladders did not reach the 8th floor. There was a gap of a couple of stories.

And so the trapped women began to jump. Passersby stood and watched as woman after woman leapt out of the windows and off of the fire escapes, plunging to the sidewalk below.

I was talking with my friend Jen about it once and she told me her great-grandmother worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and had quit two months before the fire.

Here is the story, transcribed from text messages between Jen and her mother:

[Her name was] Sadie Heilweil, married name. Sadie Coopervasser maiden name… She was born in Austria on September 24th 1886. She was married to Abe in 1911, in NYC, while she was working at Triangle. I know she worked on collars and cuffs. She told me she helped another woman with her work as she was a slow worker and Sadie was fast. They did piecework. She said one of her friends escaped down the elevator shaft, wrapping her long hair around the cable and sliding down.

Interview with survivor, Dora Maisler, 1957 (full transcript here):

Q: You went to the funeral . . . ?
Maisler: Oh, I used to go, sure. But I belonged then to the union. I wanted them, you see. But not too much that you can make history about that.
Q: Did you go to the funeral?
Maisler: No. I couldn’t.
Female Voice: You were still in a state of shock? Is that what you mean?
Maisler: Yeah, I cried. I know I couldn’t see it. I just couldn’t see it without [inaudible]. I was there in 1950 in New York. I liked to go in the cemetery. I have a friend of mine who every chance she goes to New York. She – she didn’t work there. She – she goes to the cemetery. I – I understand there was one stone.
00:12:25
Q: One stone for everybody.
Maisler: For everybody.

In the wake of the fire, there were law suits and civil suits (unsurprisingly, the owners of the sweatshop were acquitted). Many of the survivors were changed forever. One said she never worked again: her mother wouldn’t let her.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was a watershed moment in American labor history. It forced change through. Sometimes things have to get that bad, as horrible as that is. The bureaucratic powers-that-be have no financial incentive to change (in fact, it’s the opposite), and at that level money is the only thing that matters. But following the galvanizing tragedy of the factory fire, all kinds of sweeping changes were implemented: Safety codes, fire codes, clearly marked unlocked exit doors, proper ventilation, regular safety inspections, cleanliness codes. Also, fire engine ladders were built to go higher.

In 1990, Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky wrote a haunting poem about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire called “Shirt”.

Shirt

by Robert Pinsky

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes–

The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

He stepped up to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers–

Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked

Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans

Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,

Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
to wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,

The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit

And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,

The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

A couple of years ago, 25 years after its first publication in The New Yorker, Pinsky’s poem was the first poem chosen by the Nantucket Poetry Project for their beautiful film/poetry installation series.

Here it is:

Interview with survivor Pauline Pepe, 1986 (full transcript here):

Pepe:
That was a terrible thing. And when we got down, we saw the three flights burning. I said, what good – were we up there? We couldn’t imagine we – the three flights were – the wind was blowing all up and everything was caught.
David: Umm.
Pepe: From one – one, two, three – the three flights, the office and everything were burning. Three flights all burning.
Daughter: Eight, nine, and ten it must have been.
Pepe: Oh, and . . .
Q: Right, right.
Daughter: Yes, it was eight, nine, and ten.
David: Yeah, that’s right.
00:12:09
Daughter: Cause it started on the eighth.
Pepe: Yeah. They – he – they had a big office upstairs and that’s where they had all the . . .
Q: What was it like out on the street? What – when the firemen let you go out from the building.
Pepe: Oh, my God, we never thought we were up there. We were all very nervous and crying. My God. I was cold. I had no coat or nothing. Some man was very nice; he took us in the car. He asked where we were going.
Q: So you didn’t stay there? You went straight home? So they did let you . . .
Pepe: Oh, straight home. We were – they were glad to take us home. The firemen. Sure.
Daughter: What was – what was going on downstairs when you came down? What did you see when you came down from . . . ?
Pepe: The people. There all – all bodies – oh, oh, oh, it was terrible. We got sick. We had – we had to – the man took us away right away. You know, they – some of them went down with those who – you know those little glasses?
00:12:59
David: Yeah. The [inaudible] lights.
Pepe: They went right through that. Can you imagine?
Q: And you saw that? You saw, like, the broken glass.
Pepe: The people – oh, when I think of all those girls getting engaged to be married, oh, I felt terrible. [Slightly tearful.] That was a sight to see.

Rasputina: “My Little Shirtwaist Fire”
Lyrics:
Once it started
The frail and fainthearted
Just withered to the floor
Oh, so sadly
We examined hands burned badly
By that which no man fears more.

The terrible flames of
All that remains of
My Little Shirtwaist Fire

My best friend
Was alone in the alcove,
Does anyone see her there?

Such a sweet face
Trapped in a staircase
By the smell of her own burning hair and the

Terrible flames of
All that remains of
My Little Shirtwaist Fire

Glow baby glow as the embers they died there,
Nobody knows what we saw inside there.
Twisting and burning, the girls’ fine young bodies

Yes, we’re burning can you help us please?
Yes, we’re begging, we’re on bended knees
Oh, My Little Shirtwaist Fire.

Girls work hard for
Small rewards or
Invitations to dine.

Or one kind word from
One who loves them but
What I have earned is mine

The terrible flames of
All that remains of
My Little Shirtwaist Fire

I took this photo on December 14, 2015 when I was walking around Washington Square. A larger memorial is now in the planning stages.

 
 
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