Triangle Fire Essay Research Paper Triangle Shirtwaist

Triangle Fire Essay, Research Paper

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, NY, NY-1911

Near closing time on Saturday afternoon, March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the top floors of the Asch Building in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Within minutes, the quiet spring afternoon erupted into madness, a terrifying moment in time, disrupting forever the lives of young workers. By the time the fire was over, 146 of the 500 employees had died. The survivors were left to live and relive those agonizing moments. The victims and their families, the people passing by who witnessed the desperate leaps from ninth floor windows, and the City of New York would never be the same. The images of death were seared deeply in their mind’s eyes.

Many of the Triangle factory workers were women, some as young as 15 years old. They were, for the most part, recent Italian and European Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States with their families to seek a better life. Instead, they faced lives of grinding poverty and horrifying working conditions. As recent immigrants struggling with a new language and culture, the working poor were ready victims for the factory owners.(http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/).

The Triangle Waist Company was one of the largest shirtwaist manufacturers at the time of the fire. Located in the top three floors of the ten-story Asch Building in Greenwich Village, it usually employed 900 workers. On the day of the fire, only between 500 to 600 workers were there. When the fire was out, 146 were dead.

How the fire started no one knows. On the three upper floors of the building were 600 employes of the waist company, 500 of whom were girls. . The fire began small, but attempts to put it out failed. The fire jumped from debris pile to debris pile, eating up the fabric used in making the shirtwaists. The workers began to rush to the stairways and elevators. Some made it down the eight flights of stairs, though at least one door leading to the staircase was locked. Some workers made it down the elevators. Some even successfully jumped down elevator shafts once the elevators stopped working. The workers were hindered by the exits that were either locked or blocked and windows that were rusted shut. Only one door was open at the time the workers were trying to escape. Many workers were left trapped behind the mob of escaping co-workers or between the long work tables.When the fire department reached the Asch Building, the ladder truck was of no use, having a ladder that only reached to the seventh floor. Once the firemen had successfully connected their hoses, the entire eighth floor was aflame. The firemen enlisted spectators to assist in holding the safety nets so that the workers that were escaping to the ledge of the building could jump to safety. The victims mostly Italians, Russians, Hungarians, and Germans were girls and men who had been employed by the firm of Harris & Blanck, owners of the Triangle Waist Company, after the strike in which the Jewish girls, formerly employed, had been become unionized and had demanded better working conditions. The building had experienced four recent fires and had been reported by the Fire Department to the Building Department as unsafe in account of the insufficiency of its exits.

The building itself was of the most modern construction and classed as fireproof. What burned so quickly and disastrously for the victims were shirtwaists, hanging on lines above tiers of workers, sewing machines placed so closely together that there was hardly aisle room for the girls between them, and shirtwaist trimmings and cuttings which littered the floors above the eighth and ninth stories.

Girls had begun leaping from the eighth story windows before firemen arrived. The firemen had trouble bringing their apparatus into position because of the bodies which strewed the pavement and sidewalks. While more bodies crashed down among them, they worked with desperation to run their ladders into position and to spread firenets.

One fireman running ahead of a hose wagon, which halted to avoid running over a body spread a firenet, and two more seized hold of it. A girl’s body, coming end over end, struck on the side of it, and there was hope that she would be the first one of the score who had jumped to be saved.( New York Times, March 26, 1911, p. 1.)

Samuel Levine, a machine operator on the ninth floor, told this story when he had recovered from his injuries at the New York Hospital: “I was at work when I heard the shout of ‘Fire!’ The girls on the floor dropped everything and rushed wildly around, some in the direction of windows and others toward the elevator door. I saw the elevator go down past our floor once. It was crowded to the limit and no one could have got on. It did not stop. Not another trip was made.”There were flames all around in no time. Three girls, I think from the floor below, came rushing past me. Their clothes were on fire. I grabbed the fire pails and tried to pour the water on them, but they did not stop. They ran screaming toward the windows. I knew there was no hope there, so I stayed where I was, hoping that the elevator would come up again.( New York Times, March 26, 1911, p. 4)

The Triangle Waist Company had obvious fire violations, but up until the fire there was no one who could or would do anything to enforce them. The doors leading to th