The Triangle Shirtwaist Company was located on the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the Asch Building, situated at the corner of Washington Square in New York City’s Greenwich Village. On 25 March 1911 at 4:40 pm, a fire broke out on the eighth floor, The flames then rapidly consumed both it and the two floors above it. About six hundred people worked there, young, immigrant women and girls mostly from Eastern Europe. In less than an 20 minutes, 146 garment workers had tragically died in the blaze. It was the deadliest industrial disaster in New York state history. In its aftermath, unions surged and better workplace safety and working conditions were instituted in notorious sweatshop factories. What exactly happened that terrible afternoon?
In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company was a typical American sweatshop with low wages, long hours, and dangerous working conditions. Max Blanck and Isaac Harris owned the shirtwaist factory and delegated much of the hiring to unscrupulous managers. Sweatshops typically attracted poor immigrants and those desperate for employment. Of the 600 employees, 500 were girls (ages 13-23) – primarily Jews, Italians, Russians, Hungarians, and Germans.
The International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) had started to organize female workers in the clothing industry. In 1911 though, many garment workers were still unorganized, partly because they were young, immigrant, and female. When the ILGWU led a strike in 1909, demanding higher pay and shorter work days, Blanck & Harris ignored negotiations, instead paying off police to arrest the striking women.
The shirtwaist or women’s blouse was the first American fashion trend to transcend classes. It was appropriate for working in a factory or attending church on Sunday, a hot commodity replacing the layered and bulky women’s clothing of the prior century. Blanck & Harris employed women working in cramped conditions at rows of cutting tables and sewing machines. Nearly all were teenaged girls who spoke little or no English.
Employees were paid just $7 a week, working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Two freight elevators that ascended to the factory floors, but only one was operational that terrible March day. There were two stairways that led down to the first floor, but managers kept one locked to prevent thefts and unauthorized breaks by the workers. The outside fire escape was so narrow it could only be used in single file. Though there had been smaller fires in the building in 1902 and 1909, Blanck and Harris refused to install sprinkler systems. After all, there were no city regulations forcing them to do so.
Many of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory workers were recent European immigrants who had come to the U.S. seeking a better life. Instead, they faced lives of crushing poverty and horrifying working conditions. As recent immigrants, the working poor were ready victims for exploitation by ruthless factory owners. Complaining to managers or talking with a union organizer could get you fired from a desperately needed job.
It was just 5 minutes to closing time, 4:40 pm on a Saturday afternoon, March 25th, 1911, when a fire broke out in the southeast corner of the 8th floor cutting room. Embers from a discarded match or cigarette ignited a scrap bin filled with flammable fabric cuttings. ‘Fire!’ the nearest girls shouted, ‘There’s a fire over here!’ A manager rushed over and attempted to use a fire hose to extinguish it. But the hose was dry rotted and its useless valve rusted shut. As the fire grew beyond the bin, panic ensued. In a cramped space draped with thousands of pounds of fabric, flames easily spread like brush fire.
Within minutes, the floor erupted into madness.
Terrified girls rushed to the two stairs, the freight elevators, or the fire escape. The workers could not warn fellow employees on the upper floors as they had no fire alarm they could trigger. Within just five minutes, the eighth floor was consumed in flames as the fire spread rapidly through the stacks of linens and cottons.
On the street below, New Yorkers realized something was wrong when plumbs of black smoke started to emerge from the building’s upper floors. Bystanders rang the alarm bells in the street-level fire boxes as frantic human figures appeared in the windows above. Four alarms in all were rung in the next fifteen minutes.
The normal way out for workers was the Green Street stairs, where foremen inspected all purses to check for theft. The Washington Place stairs were kept locked by the managers, so only a single stairwell was available to escape. The girls used the two freight elevators in the mornings, but one of them was not in service that day. The frantic young women soon realized the sole elevator could hold only 12 at a time. The harried operator, Joey Zito, was able to make just four trips before it too broke down amid the growing heat and flames.
Their fellow workers on the 9th floor sewing room did not know a fire had even started until it arrived at their feet through the floor boards. The girls caught sight of the smoke and flames through the windows. ‘Look, there’s smoke outside! The building’s on fire!’ The hungry flames had arrived for them. The sewing machines were placed so closely together that there was hardly an aisle between them to run. Trimmings and cuttings littered the floors and were stacked six feet high against the walls. What spread the fire most quickly were the hundreds of shirtwaists, hanging on lines above the rows of workers.
Women screamed and ran to the nearest staircase—only to find one filled with choking black smoke and the door of the other locked. They pounded on the door and shouted for help, but no one came. Others discovered the only working freight elevator was stuck, damaged from the encroaching fire. That left one route remaining, the external fire escape. As dozens of desperate women crammed onto it trying to escape the inferno, it began to bend under the weight of so many bodies. Soon the rickety metal stairs collapsed.
Amid screams of terror, the girls fell to their deaths onto the streets below.
Those workers on the 10th floor, including the two owners and their staff, had to escape to the roof, rather than go down into the inferno. Shouts and waving arms from the next building caught their attention. They were NYU law students who had been dismissed from their tenth story classroom. Workers were rescued when the boys stretched two wooden ladders across to them. The lucky employees crawled to safety on their hands and knees, 10 stories above the pavement below.
The remaining terrified seamstresses on the 9th floor found themselves trapped in the heat and smoke. The door to one staircase was locked and the other blocked by the fire. The elevators were both inoperable. The fire escape had collapsed under the weight of so many trying to escape. The terrified girls rushed to the windows and looked down at Greene Street, 100 feet below. There they saw NO fire trucks to save them. The women used chairs to smash the windows for gulps of cold fresh air.
At this point, many made the terrible decision to jump to their deaths rather than burn alive. One horrified young girl screamed and was the first to jump. Four more were standing beside her. The crowd below yelled up, “Don’t jump!” but it was leap or be burned to death. All four dropped to their death in unison. The first five girls who jumped did so before the first fire engine could even arrive.
Horrified onlookers could do nothing but watch. “I learned a new sound that day,” wrote reporter William Shepard, “a sound more horrible than description can picture—the thud of a speeding living body on a stone sidewalk.” Witnesses first thought workers were tossing fabric out the windows, but then realized in shock that workers themselves were jumping.
On the 9th floor inferno, some had rushed to the elevators when the fire escape collapsed. When they found the elevator hopeless as well, a few tried to slide down the greased elevator cables, but quickly lost their grip. Some simply jumped down into the shaft and died once the approaching flames were at their backs.
At the shattered windows, more desperate girls jumped to their deaths.
By the time Pump Engine Co. 20 and Ladder Company 20 arrived, the bodies of victims littered the sidewalk. The firemen had trouble bringing their apparatus into position because of all the corpses which covered the pavement and sidewalks. While more bodies crashed down around them, they worked in desperation to run their ladders into position.
One fireman ran ahead of a hose wagon, spread a 10 foot fire net, and two more seized hold of it. A girl’s body, tumbling end over end, struck the side of it. Three other girls who leaped a moment later, landed on top of her, ripping the net. All four rolled out onto the pavement dead. The force of the fall was simply too great.
Then firemen came to the realization their scaling ladders on the horse-drawn fire trucks could only reached the sixth floor. The water from their hoses could barely reach the top floors. Those pitiful girls watching and waiting at the windows, waving handkerchiefs for the firemen to rescue them also realized they were too high.
To escape the suffocating smoke and flames at their backs, some 70 girls jumped to their death, 100 feet above the streets. Many were holding hands, many others screaming with their clothing and hair already aflame. They struck the sidewalks with water pouring on them too late. Those who chose not to jump died from their terrible burns or smoke inhalation.
Hundreds of people who had rushed in from Broadway and Washington Square screamed in horror as they watched the jumpers. One eyewitness explained “I learned a new sound—one more horrible than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding body on a stone sidewalk. Thud-dead. Sixty-two thud-deads.” One reporter said, “the remains of the dead, it is hardly possible to call them bodies, because that would suggest something human, collected on the sidewalks.”
As the firemen worked, it became clear the vast majority of bodies were young women. Most workers on the 8th and 10th floors managed to escape. However, the dozens of women and girls working on the 9th floor mostly died.
Within 18 minutes, it was all over.
A total of 146 of 500 employees were killed by the fire due to severe burns, smoke inhalation, and injuries sustained during the jumps. A heap of corpses lay on the sidewalk for more than an hour. The firemen were too busy dealing with the fire to pay any attention to people who no longer needed saving. The soot covered women who stumbled onto the streets were left to relive those agonizing moments and mourn the loss of their coworkers.
Thirty bodies clogged the bottom of the elevator shaft, all girls. Of the one hundred and forty-six victims, six remained unidentified. The dead included one 13-year-old, two 14-year-olds, three 15-year-olds, seventeen 16- year-olds, and fourteen 17-year-olds. One of the saddest facts was that they had almost finished for the day. In five minutes, their shift would have been over.
In the days that followed, families identified and collected the dead. The ILGWU planned an official day of mourning. The grief-stricken city gathered in churches, synagogues, and the streets. The workers union set up a march on April 5th. Over 80,000 people attended on New York’s Fifth Avenue to honor the victims of the shirtwaist fire and protest the conditions that had led to the deaths.
The Ladies’ Waist and Dress Makers’ Union of the ILGWU planned relief work for the survivors and the families of the victims. In addition, they distributed weekly pensions and secured work and proper living arrangements for the workers after they recovered from their injuries. The American Red Cross also collected funds from the general public.
Protesting voices then rose up, angry at the lack of humanity and the greed that had made such a horrific disaster possible. The people demanded Amends, Justice, and Action to improve the unsafe conditions in sweatshops. Workers flocked to unions to offer testimonies, support unionization, and demand that Harris & Blanck be brought to trial.
“Justice!” they cried. “Where is justice?“
NYC authorities started an investigation as to how such a firetrap could exist. It intended to find out if the present laws covered such cases, and if they did not to frame laws that would. The building had experienced four recent fires and had been reported by the Fire Department as unsafe. Wealthy businessmen however defended the rights of factories to resist government regulatory overreach.
Triangle Shirtwaist owners Blanck & Harris publicly declared that their brick building was classified as “fireproof,” and had just been approved by the Dept. of Buildings. The owners maintained that their factory was a “model of cleanliness and sanitary conditions, second to none in the country.” Yet reports that the doors to the stairs were locked prompted the District Attorney to seek an indictment against the owners.
On April 11, a grand jury indicted Harris & Blanck on seven counts and charged them with second degree manslaughter. Survivors testified to their inability to open the locked stairway doors. In December however, a jury acquitted Blanck & Harris of any wrong doing. Despite evidence that the owners had been horribly negligent, their defense had been that they were unaware the doors were locked and it was the fault of the foremen. Grieving families and much of the public felt that justice had not been done.
Victim’s families brought twenty-three civil suits against the owners. In 1914, three years after the fire, Harris and Blanck settled. They paid just 75 dollars per life lost in the 23 families, a fraction of the $400 per death that they were paid by their insurer. In 1913, the factory was found littered with rubbish piled six feet high, with cloth scraps kept in flammable baskets. The judge fined them just 20 dollars and merely issued a stern warning. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company went out of business in 1918.
The Triangle Shirtwaist fire forced a reckoning over building codes and workplace safety in the country. There was no city regulation requiring fire drills, sprinklers or fire escapes. Such innovations were not available in most factories. New York created a commission to investigate factory conditions and public safety. The state passed 38 new laws included requiring improved fire safety; limited working hours, and better eating and bathroom facilities. The city established the Bureau of Fire Investigation, giving the fire department powers to improve factory safety.
The labor movement also grew stronger in the wake of the disaster. At a memorial meeting after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, union leader Rose Schneiderman issued an indictment of a public that she felt had turned a blind eye to dangerous sweatshops: “I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies, if I came here to talk good fellowship. … Too much blood has been spilled.”
Labor advocate Frances Perkins, witnessed the shirtwaist factory fire and heard Rose Schneiderman’s fiery speech at the memorial. She led the New York Factory Investigating Commission. Years later, she brought her commitment to using government power to protect workers when President Franklin D. Roosevelt made her Secretary of Labor—the first ever woman cabinet member in the U.S.
After the 1911 fire, the Asch building was refurbished and sold to Frederick Brown, who rented it to nearby New York University. The Brown Building still stands today in lower Manhattan and was added to the National Register of Historic Places and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1991. On March 25, 2011, a march was held in Greenwich Village to commemorate the 100th Anniversary. At 4:40pm, hundreds of church bells rang out throughout the city to honor the fallen dead.