Welcome to the first post in a series that I am calling Morbid History. In it I will be examining historical events that were tragic in nature. If you are sensitive when it comes to that sort of thing you may want to skip this series.
I have always been into historical events that are morbid in nature. Not because I think it’s entertaining that people have died. Far from it. I like learning about such things because I find it fascinating how events can just go so horribly wrong and end up killing people. Sometimes such events are accidents, but at other times they are caused by the greed and carelessness of others. Which is what happened at the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that took place on March the 25th in 1911.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was located in the upper floors of the Asche Building. This was in the Greenwich Village neighbourhood of Manhattan in New York City. This 1901 constructed building was promoted as having ‘fireproof’ rooms to attract clothing factory companies. So, it was not unusual at all for clothing factories to be located in buildings such as this. It was also not unusual for some of the exits from the factory to be locked, so that the garment workers couldn’t steal any of the products that they were making. Their bags would be searched after their job had been finished for the day.
Shirtwaists were blouses for women,. By 1911 they were going out of style so business was down for the owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris. On that Saturday there were about 500 employees working in the factory which was located on the 8th, 9th and 10th floors. At around 4:20 that afternoon a witness on the street saw smoke coming from an 8th floor window of the building so a fire alarm was raised. What happened next was a series of events directly caused by the greed of both the building owner and the company owners, and those events would have lasting consequences for the workers.
The fire started, according to fire officials after the event, when a lit cigarette or match was carelessly discarded in a large metal bin full of cutting scraps. These scraps were what was left over when the material for the blouses was cut into shape. Workers were not allowed to smoke in the building, but sometimes they would anyway. The fire quickly spread from those scraps to all of the cloth hanging nearby. Somebody from the floor was able to telephone the 10th floor that there was a fire but there was no way to tell the 9th floor what was quickly happening. The 9th floor finally learned about the fire at around the same time that it was coming through the floor.
There were several exits that people from the 9th floor could have taken to escape, but one by one they became unusable. The Washington Place stairway exit was locked to prevent theft so that was unusable from the start. The supervisor who had the key had escaped early on. The Greene Street stairway was used by dozens of people to get to safety up on the roof. Within mere minutes it became unusable in both directions. Both elevator operators were able to make it to the 9th floor three times to carry employees to safety before the heat from the fire made the elevators useless. What was to happen next was even more tragic.
Since all the exits were now blocked by flames there was nowhere for the employees to go besides the outside steel fire exit. This fire exit was put upon the side of the building by the owner, Joseph J. Asch, to comply with a building regulation that required three exits to be present in a building of that size and use. However, the fire exit was made very cheaply and wasn’t even correctly attached to the building. When the employees started to crowd onto the fire escape it broke away from the building and they all fell to their deaths onto the pavement below. The employees had no way of escaping now so many jumped out of the windows so that they wouldn’t feel the agonizing pain of being burned to death.
This is the most deadly industrial type fire to happen in New York City history. All told 146 people died that day, most having suffered in their last moments. 123 women perished, while 23 men were also killed. Most of the victims were young Italian and Jewish immigrant women between the ages of 14 to 23. They came to America because they thought that they could have a better life than the one that they had left at home. They had no way of knowing that they would be just as exploited by American businessmen as the ones that they had worked under back in their home countries.
The owners of The Triangle Shirtwaist Company, Blanck and Harris, were charged with first and second degree manslaughter, but they were found not guilty by a jury. It really rankles me that these creeps didn’t even spend any time in jail for this. Wealthy men getting away with murder is by no means a modern phenomenon. A civil suit was then brought against them by the relatives of the victims. Guess what they had to pay? Only $75.00 per victim, while they received about $60,000 from an insurance company for the damage that their factory suffered. That’s right folks! Machines are worth more than humans! There has been a theory floating about for decades that the owners set the fire themselves in order to get the insurance payout. Remember, the shirtwaist blouses that they made were going out of fashion so their business was beginning to lose money.
New York state, after this tragedy, worked hard to change their labour laws so that factory workers no longer had to work long hours six days a week. They also required the presence of safe toilets and lunch areas. The state also imposed restrictions as to how new buildings were made. They had to have a sufficient amount of exits, automatic sprinklers, fireproofing and other safety measures. Other states would eventually pass their own laws, some more strict than others. Garment worker unions, and other unions in general, gained in popularity after the fire, much to the consternation of wealthy business owners. To this day those type of owners are still trying to dismantle unions so that they can have the opportunity to work their employees literally to death.
The Asche Building is now called the Brown Building and it is owned and used by New York University. If you are ever in New York City and visit the building please remember all of the victims, because they should never be forgotten.
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