Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire occurred in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, a borough of New York City, on Saturday, March 25, 1911. The fire was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in U.S. history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers—123 women and girls and 23 men—who died from either the fire, smoke inhalation, or falling or jumping to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent Italian or Jewish immigrants aged 14 to 23.

The factory was located on the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the Asch Building (later the Brown Building), which was built in 1901 and remains standing on the New York University (NYU) campus at 23–29 Washington Place, near Washington Square Park. The building has been designated a National Historic Landmark and a New York City landmark.

Because the doors to the stairwells and exits were locked—a common practice at the time to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and to reduce theft—many of the workers could not escape from the burning building and jumped from the high windows. There were no sprinklers in the building. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers.

Background

The Triangle Waist Company factory occupied the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the 10-story Asch Building on the northwest corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, just east of Washington Square Park, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Under the ownership of Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, the factory produced women's blouses, known as "shirtwaists". The factory normally employed about 500 workers, mostly young Italian and Jewish immigrant women and girls, who worked nine hours a day on weekdays plus seven hours on Saturdays, earning for their 52 hours of work between $7 and $12 a week, the equivalent of $242 to $415 a week in 2025 currency, or $5.04 to $8.65 per hour. The owners were said to have preferred hiring immigrant women over men because they would work for less and were less likely to unionize against them. Often, these women were poor and young, with little to no education and poor command of English.

Fire

At approximately 4:40 pm on Saturday, March 25, 1911, as the workday was ending, a fire flared up in a scrap bin under one of the cutter's tables at the northeast corner of the 8th floor. The first fire alarm was sent at 4:45 pm by a passerby on Washington Place who saw smoke coming from the 8th floor. Both owners of the factory were in attendance and had invited their children to the factory on that afternoon.

The Fire Marshal concluded that the likely cause of the fire was the disposal of an unextinguished match or cigarette butt in a scrap bin containing two months' worth of accumulated cuttings. Beneath the table in the wooden bin were hundreds of pounds of scraps left over from the several thousand shirtwaists that had been cut at that table. The scraps piled up from the last time the bin was emptied, coupled with the hanging fabrics that surrounded it; the steel trim was the only thing that was not highly flammable.

Although smoking was banned in the factory, cutters were known to sneak cigarettes, exhaling the smoke through their lapels to avoid detection. A New York Times article suggested that the fire had been started by the engines running the sewing machines. A series of articles in Collier's noted a pattern of arson among certain sectors of the garment industry whenever their particular product fell out of fashion or had excess inventory in order to collect insurance. The Insurance Monitor, a leading industry journal, observed that shirtwaists had recently fallen out of fashion, and that insurance for such stock was "fairly saturated with moral hazard". Although Blanck and Harris were known for having had four previous suspicious fire claims, arson was not suspected in this case.

A bookkeeper on the 8th floor was able to warn employees on the 10th floor via telephone, but there was no audible alarm and no way to contact staff on the 9th floor. According to survivor Yetta Lubitz, the first warning of the fire on the 9th floor arrived at the same time as the fire itself.

Although the floor had a number of exits, including two freight elevators, a fire escape, and stairways down to Greene Street and Washington Place, flames prevented workers from descending the Greene Street stairway, and the door to the Washington Place stairway was locked to prevent theft by the workers; the locked doors allowed managers to check the women's purses. Various historians have further ascribed the locked doors to management's wanting to keep out union organizers, for anti-union bias. The foreman who held the stairway door key had already escaped by another route. Dozens of employees escaped the fire by going up the Greene Street stairway to the roof. Other survivors were able to jam themselves into the elevators for as long as they continued to operate.

Within three minutes of the fire starting, the Greene Street stairway became unusable in both directions. Terrified employees crowded onto the single exterior fire escape, which city officials had allowed Asch to erect instead of the required third staircase. The fire escape was a flimsy and poorly anchored iron structure that may have already been broken before the fire. It soon twisted and collapsed from the heat and overload, spilling about 20 victims nearly 100 feet (30 m) to their deaths on the concrete pavement below. The remainder of the victims jumped to their deaths to escape the fire or were eventually overcome by smoke and flames.

The fire department arrived quickly but was unable to stop the flames. Their horse-drawn ladders reached merely as high as the 7th floor. The fallen bodies and jumping victims prevented the approach of fire department staff to the building.

Elevator operators Joseph Zito and Gaspar Mortillaro saved many lives by traveling three times up to the 9th floor for passengers, but Mortillaro was eventually forced to give up when the rails of his elevator buckled under the heat. Some victims pried the elevator doors open and jumped into the empty shaft, trying to slide down the cables or to land on top of the car. The weight and impacts of these bodies warped the elevator car and made it impossible for Zito to make another attempt.

William Gunn Shepherd, a reporter at the tragedy, would say, "I learned a new sound that day, a sound more horrible than description can picture—the thud of a speeding living body on a stone sidewalk". A large crowd of bystanders gathered on the street, witnessing 62 people jumping or falling to their deaths from the burning building. Louis Waldman, later a New York Socialist state assemblyman, described the scene years later:

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.

Aftermath

Although early estimates of the death toll ranged from 141 to 148, almost all later references agree that 146 people died as a result of the fire: 123 women and girls and 23 men. Of the victims whose ages are known, the oldest victim was 43-year-old Providenza Panno and the youngest were 14-year-olds Kate Leone and Rosaria "Sara" Maltese. Most victims died of burns, asphyxiation, blunt impact injuries, or a combination of the three.

The first person to jump was a man. Another man was seen kissing a young woman at a window before they both jumped to their deaths.