The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
by Jeff Weinstein
MARCH 22, 2011 TAGS:
The Ways That Tragedy Counts
Late Saturday afternoon, on March 25, 1911, New Yorkers on their way home stop to look up at the eighth and ninth floors of the Asch Building’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, a quick stroll from Henry James’s gracious Washington Square. Flames are showing through the windows and smoke is beginning to curl out. Then, amid faint screams, they hear the thud, thud, thud as fabric-covered bundles begin to hit the street. Is a manager trying to “save his best cloth,” one onlooker reportedly shouts?
Oh, my God, no, those aren’t bolts of blouse stock, though they had been treated by their bosses as if they were. They’re bodies, young bodies, Jewish and Italian immigrant bodies. Fire trucks arrive, but the firemen’s flimsy nets do not hold the jumpers, who crash through them into the ground. More than 50 of the 500 Triangle employees desperate for a way out of the sudden workplace inferno die this way.
No fire drills. No sprinklers. No fire stairs, no outside fire escapes. The same police who weeks before beat picketing garment workers with truncheons now help them flee the blaze, one officer leading a string of terrified people down dangerous, funnel-narrow stairs, others keeping those who reach the lobby from going outside, where they could be killed, they are told, by falling friends. Fire ladders stretch a few floors short, leaving crowds of frantic girls and women to incinerate where they are caught, in dressing rooms, at blocked or intentionally barred doors, crushed against windows – those useless ladders an image of fatal frustration.
Great tragedies can occur in an instant: in this case, from 4:40 p.m., when a cigarette or match was thrown into a pail of shirtwaist scraps, to around 5, when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the U.S. labor movement’s Titanic, was extinguished. On the surface, you’d never know anything had happened; the façade of the “fire-proof” Asch Building was undamaged. But in those few minutes a century ago, 129 women and 17 men, 146 altogether, perished.
“Woman Tells of Fight for Life at Barred Doors”
“Fire Trap Victims Buried: Draft New Law to Save Shop Workers”
“Who Is Responsible?”
As this small sample of headlines shows, the tabloid outcry was immediate, both for the usual scurrilous reasons and because workers and their allies had already been fighting for some control over the hazardous, greed-driven conditions under which they toiled often for more than 12 hours a day. Disasters such as the Triangle Fire are inevitable, the burgeoning International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union argued, unless government demands standards and employees organize and bargain.
The Fire This Time
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire has slowly become a linchpin of labor and New York histories, with a trail of political and personal books in its wake. (David Von Drehle’s Triangle: The Fire That Changed America is a vigorous, passionate introduction.) The centenary has generated new TV documentaries (on PBS and HBO) and plenty of newspaper and magazine articles on topics that include the identification of the last six victims and a reminder in the Forward – once the Forverts, a Jewish paper that covered the fire tenaciously and fought for labor reforms -- that weak unions are once again under stark attack.
When I mentioned the fire to a few New York friends, the first two said that their grandparents knew someone who survived it! When I discovered that New York University’s Grey Gallery had mounted a small show of documents and ephemera commemorating the anniversary, the Grey’s director reminded me that NYU’s Brown building, which adjoins the gallery, is actually the old Asch.
So I asked to visit and took the elevator to the university’s Center for Developmental Genetics -- the fateful ninth floor. Research associate Karin Kiontke was sitting and reading in a corner lounge that looks down on Washington Place and Greene Street and across, to the same ornate rooftop-crowns the jumpers saw at their very last. Smoke and fire forced them to this spot, this trap, where they struggled and died.
I approached their window. Nine stories? The same as nine miles, sheer terror. How did Kiontke feel about working here? She and her colleagues knew about the event, the scientist said quietly, but didn’t think about it often. Yet a few years ago, in her own sixth-floor office right below, she got a surprise: “I looked out my window and saw a ladder coming right up to it, with a man on top.” Ceremonies marking the fire are held most March 25ths, and that’s how the city’s fire department demonstrates the short-ladder failure as a never-again example. Tens of thousands are expected to fill the surrounding streets on this week’s anniversary.
A university representative then led me to a fire door, which opened into an airshaft. We walked onto a fire-escape platform; I couldn’t look down. “On the wall there,” he said, pointing, “you’ll see the rivets, where the old fire escape that collapsed was attached.”
The original “escape” was so poorly and cheaply designed that it ripped from the wall and threw those clinging to it, some of whom already fatally burned, down to the basement -- “like a big pile of rubbish coming out of the windows,” said a witness cited by author Von Drehle.
On the sidewalk outside the building, I spotted a handmade cardboard sign attached to flowers, dirty from being stepped on. It read, “Ladies, Daughters & Wives, Shirtwaist Workers of 1911, You Are Not Forgotten, Rest in Peace.”
Not forgotten, but how remembered, and to what effect? At the gallery show there’s a “take one” box of cards with the name and age of a dead Triangle worker on the back of each. I took two and went online to the Cornell University Kheel Center’s victims list to see who my random choices were:
Frieda Velakofsky, age 20. Female. Single. Jewish. Born in Russia. Lived in the U.S. for five years. 639 E. 12th St., New York, N.Y. Buried in Mt. Zion Cemetery. Union member.
She lived five blocks from where I live now.
Jacob Klein, age 23. Male. Married. Jewish. Born in Russia. Lived in the U.S. for five years. 1301 Washington Ave., New York, N.Y. Union member.
Yes, they were union, at a time when union members literally put body and soul on the line. And why? Not just for an eight-hour day and a job that wouldn’t kill them, but also for the sense of self, the decency, that comes from knowing you have a say in what you do. For all those “benefits” we take for granted, unions and unions alone are responsible.
So, as my remembrance, I imagine that Frieda and Jacob are reading how Chinese iPhone workers are poisoned by solvents at the job. How could anyone lock in workers after our fire, they wonder, when Wal-Mart did exactly that not so long ago?
Then there’s that governor and the others, trying to strip away the right to bargain. So wrong, so foolish. Doesn’t he remember what happened to us?
If he doesn’t, others certainly will.
Jeff Weinstein, deputy director of the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program, writes about culture and gay issues at artsjournal.com/outthere.
All Images Courtesy of the NYU's Grey Gallery. Reprinted with Permission. Full Credits Below.
VIEW SLIDESHOW [14 PHOTOS]
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Image 1: Firefighters spray water on the Asch Building, trying to put out the Triangle factory fire blaze, March 25, 1911
Photograph attributed to Brown Brothers
International Ladies Garment Workers Union Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University
Image 2: Interior view of room gutted by fire which killed 146 in 1911 at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, New York City, 1911
Photograph by Brown Brothers
International Ladies Garment Workers Union Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University
Image 3: Mourners’ procession for the Triangle fire victims, 1911
Photograph by Unknown
International Ladies Garment Workers Union Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University
Image 4. Portrait of women shirtwaist strikers holding copies of The Call, 1910
Photograph by Unknown
International Ladies Garment Workers Union Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University
Image 5. “Hundred and Fifty Perish in Factory Fire; Women and Girls, Trapped in Ten Story Building, Lost in Flames or Hurl Themselves to Death,” New York Herald, March 26, 1911
Image 6. Friends and relatives identifying bodies in Twenty-sixth Street pier morgue after the fire, 1911
Photograph
International Ladies Garment Workers Union Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University
Image 7. Ad Hoc Memorial outside former Asch Buidling
Photograph by Jeff Weinstein
Late Saturday afternoon, on March 25, 1911, New Yorkers on their way home stop to look up at the eighth and ninth floors of the Asch Building’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, a quick stroll from Henry James’s gracious Washington Square. Flames are showing through the windows and smoke is beginning to curl out. Then, amid faint screams, they hear the thud, thud, thud as fabric-covered bundles begin to hit the street. Is a manager trying to “save his best cloth,” one onlooker reportedly shouts?
Oh, my God, no, those aren’t bolts of blouse stock, though they had been treated by their bosses as if they were. They’re bodies, young bodies, Jewish and Italian immigrant bodies. Fire trucks arrive, but the firemen’s flimsy nets do not hold the jumpers, who crash through them into the ground. More than 50 of the 500 Triangle employees desperate for a way out of the sudden workplace inferno die this way.No fire drills. No sprinklers. No fire stairs, no outside fire escapes. The same police who weeks before beat picketing garment workers with truncheons now help them flee the blaze, one officer leading a string of terrified people down dangerous, funnel-narrow stairs, others keeping those who reach the lobby from going outside, where they could be killed, they are told, by falling friends. Fire ladders stretch a few floors short, leaving crowds of frantic girls and women to incinerate where they are caught, in dressing rooms, at blocked or intentionally barred doors, crushed against windows – those useless ladders an image of fatal frustration.
Great tragedies can occur in an instant: in this case, from 4:40 p.m., when a cigarette or match was thrown into a pail of shirtwaist scraps, to around 5, when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the U.S. labor movement’s Titanic, was extinguished. On the surface, you’d never know anything had happened; the façade of the “fire-proof” Asch Building was undamaged. But in those few minutes a century ago, 129 women and 17 men, 146 altogether, perished.
“Woman Tells of Fight for Life at Barred Doors”
“Fire Trap Victims Buried: Draft New Law to Save Shop Workers”
“Who Is Responsible?”
As this small sample of headlines shows, the tabloid outcry was immediate, both for the usual scurrilous reasons and because workers and their allies had already been fighting for some control over the hazardous, greed-driven conditions under which they toiled often for more than 12 hours a day. Disasters such as the Triangle Fire are inevitable, the burgeoning International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union argued, unless government demands standards and employees organize and bargain.
The Fire This Time
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire has slowly become a linchpin of labor and New York histories, with a trail of political and personal books in its wake. (David Von Drehle’s Triangle: The Fire That Changed America is a vigorous, passionate introduction.) The centenary has generated new TV documentaries (on PBS and HBO) and plenty of newspaper and magazine articles on topics that include the identification of the last six victims and a reminder in the Forward – once the Forverts, a Jewish paper that covered the fire tenaciously and fought for labor reforms -- that weak unions are once again under stark attack.
When I mentioned the fire to a few New York friends, the first two said that their grandparents knew someone who survived it! When I discovered that New York University’s Grey Gallery had mounted a small show of documents and ephemera commemorating the anniversary, the Grey’s director reminded me that NYU’s Brown building, which adjoins the gallery, is actually the old Asch.So I asked to visit and took the elevator to the university’s Center for Developmental Genetics -- the fateful ninth floor. Research associate Karin Kiontke was sitting and reading in a corner lounge that looks down on Washington Place and Greene Street and across, to the same ornate rooftop-crowns the jumpers saw at their very last. Smoke and fire forced them to this spot, this trap, where they struggled and died.
I approached their window. Nine stories? The same as nine miles, sheer terror. How did Kiontke feel about working here? She and her colleagues knew about the event, the scientist said quietly, but didn’t think about it often. Yet a few years ago, in her own sixth-floor office right below, she got a surprise: “I looked out my window and saw a ladder coming right up to it, with a man on top.” Ceremonies marking the fire are held most March 25ths, and that’s how the city’s fire department demonstrates the short-ladder failure as a never-again example. Tens of thousands are expected to fill the surrounding streets on this week’s anniversary.
A university representative then led me to a fire door, which opened into an airshaft. We walked onto a fire-escape platform; I couldn’t look down. “On the wall there,” he said, pointing, “you’ll see the rivets, where the old fire escape that collapsed was attached.”
The original “escape” was so poorly and cheaply designed that it ripped from the wall and threw those clinging to it, some of whom already fatally burned, down to the basement -- “like a big pile of rubbish coming out of the windows,” said a witness cited by author Von Drehle.
On the sidewalk outside the building, I spotted a handmade cardboard sign attached to flowers, dirty from being stepped on. It read, “Ladies, Daughters & Wives, Shirtwaist Workers of 1911, You Are Not Forgotten, Rest in Peace.” Not forgotten, but how remembered, and to what effect? At the gallery show there’s a “take one” box of cards with the name and age of a dead Triangle worker on the back of each. I took two and went online to the Cornell University Kheel Center’s victims list to see who my random choices were:
Frieda Velakofsky, age 20. Female. Single. Jewish. Born in Russia. Lived in the U.S. for five years. 639 E. 12th St., New York, N.Y. Buried in Mt. Zion Cemetery. Union member.
She lived five blocks from where I live now.
Jacob Klein, age 23. Male. Married. Jewish. Born in Russia. Lived in the U.S. for five years. 1301 Washington Ave., New York, N.Y. Union member.
Yes, they were union, at a time when union members literally put body and soul on the line. And why? Not just for an eight-hour day and a job that wouldn’t kill them, but also for the sense of self, the decency, that comes from knowing you have a say in what you do. For all those “benefits” we take for granted, unions and unions alone are responsible.
So, as my remembrance, I imagine that Frieda and Jacob are reading how Chinese iPhone workers are poisoned by solvents at the job. How could anyone lock in workers after our fire, they wonder, when Wal-Mart did exactly that not so long ago?
Then there’s that governor and the others, trying to strip away the right to bargain. So wrong, so foolish. Doesn’t he remember what happened to us?
If he doesn’t, others certainly will.
Jeff Weinstein, deputy director of the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program, writes about culture and gay issues at artsjournal.com/outthere.
All Images Courtesy of the NYU's Grey Gallery. Reprinted with Permission. Full Credits Below.
VIEW SLIDESHOW [14 PHOTOS]
Image 1: Firefighters spray water on the Asch Building, trying to put out the Triangle factory fire blaze, March 25, 1911
Photograph attributed to Brown Brothers
International Ladies Garment Workers Union Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University
Image 2: Interior view of room gutted by fire which killed 146 in 1911 at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, New York City, 1911
Photograph by Brown Brothers
International Ladies Garment Workers Union Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University
Image 3: Mourners’ procession for the Triangle fire victims, 1911
Photograph by Unknown
International Ladies Garment Workers Union Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University
Image 4. Portrait of women shirtwaist strikers holding copies of The Call, 1910
Photograph by Unknown
International Ladies Garment Workers Union Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University
Image 5. “Hundred and Fifty Perish in Factory Fire; Women and Girls, Trapped in Ten Story Building, Lost in Flames or Hurl Themselves to Death,” New York Herald, March 26, 1911
Image 6. Friends and relatives identifying bodies in Twenty-sixth Street pier morgue after the fire, 1911
Photograph
International Ladies Garment Workers Union Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University
Image 7. Ad Hoc Memorial outside former Asch Buidling
Photograph by Jeff Weinstein
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