The women workers at the triangle shirtwaist factory were leaving what the New York Fire Department had called a “fire trap” when someone shouted, “Fire!”
On Saturday, March 25, 1911, about 500 women and 30 men worked behind locked doors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory which took up the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the Asch building in New York City. About 180 of the women worked on the eighth floor, 250 on the ninth floor, and 70 on the tenth floor. The Asch Building was located on the northwest corner of Washington Place and Greene Streets, a block away from Washington Square Park. Christened after its owner and builder, Joseph J. Asch, the ten story building was completed in 1901 at a cost of about $400,000.
A Six Day a Week, 12 Hour a Day Work Week
The women were making shirtwaists. A shirtwaist was a tailored, fitted shirt made of lightweight fabric, usually worn with a simple skirt. Advertising pioneer and illustrator Charles Dana Gibson drew his Gibson Girl wearing a shirtwaist as the uniform of choice for modern women, and shirtwaists were so popular that more and more workers had to be employed to insure an ample supply of them.
Most of the workers were Jewish and Italian immigrants. Many of them couldn’t speak English and their employers considered them to be of inferior intelligence. Often, they were the sole support of their families and earned about six dollars a week for toiling six days a week, 12 hours a day to produce the shirtwaists that were transforming the world of women’s fashions.
"Old Women" and "New Women"
The immigrant women themselves weren’t part of the transformation in the world of women at the turn of the 19th century. Their American sisters played leading roles in the drama of women becoming aware of themselves as women. Many American women were getting involved in politics, and many were entering the work force. Women’s fashions were changing with their changing attitudes and the shirtwaist was a badge identifying the “new woman,” even though the “old women” made them. The “old women” workers weren’t expected to show the independence of spirit that the “new women” did. Their employers expected them to be placid, patient and docile, and they were.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Wasn't Safe
The workers were so docile that they didn’t question the physical conditions at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory which invited tragedy. It was a loft factory which was a common type in the early part of the 20th century. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory wasn’t a safe place to work. The New York City Fire Department had long attempted to conduct fire drills at the factory, which it considered a fire trap, but the two managers of the factory, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, refused to allow fire drills.
The Washington Place stairs reached only to the 10th floor and the single fire escape in the rear of the building went only to the second floor. Underneath the fire escape where it ended on the second floor, was a glass skylight from a ground floor extension that jutted from the Asch Building into a paved and enclosed courtyard. All of the doors to the Asch Building opened inwardly and since Mr. Asch had declared the building to be fire proof, he hadn’t thought it all necessary to spend the additional $5,000 it would cost to install a sprinkler system.
The Exits Were Dangerously Narrow and the Windows a Hazard
The long narrow passageways on the eighth and ninth floors that the workers had to pass through before they could reach the Greene Street freight elevators and stairs were significant hazards to the factory workers. These normally would have been sufficiently wide exits, but one of the managers, Mr. Harris, was obsessed with the stealing that supposedly went on in the factory.
He considered this to be such a serious problem that he required all of the workers to walk down the passageways one by one and open their purses so the watchman could make sure that no shirtwaists or other company property went out of the building. In subsequent hearings, Mr. Harris admitted that the amount of thefts totaled less than $25.00, but still the worker must be searched so the exits were dangerously narrow.
The factory windows were another hazard. Windows on the eighth floor opened in the back to the single fire escape and there were also windows on the Greene Street and Washington Street sides. All of the windows were covered with sheet iron, a lethal death factor in the fire.
A Flammable Inventory
Even the nature of the materials the workers were using made the factory a tinder box. Throughout the eighth and ninth floors were long cutting tables. Underneath these tables were rag bins for scraps from cutting and above these were wires that were strung to hold patterns once they were cut out. Shirtwaists in various stages of completion were piled about and rows and rows of sewing machines and wicker work baskets completed the flammable inventory. All of these items would combine to make a Viking-like funeral pyre at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
On Saturday, March 25, 1911, at 4:45 p.m., the end of the 56 hour, six day week approached and many of the workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, including Rose Rosenfeld, were preparing to go home. A few of the women on the eighth floor pushed back their chairs and started to walk towards the inspection station. Then one of the women smelled smoke. She looked back at the cutting tables and spied flames darting through the openings beneath the tables.
The Fire Advances and the Fire Hose Doesn't Work
“Fire!” she cried in a horrified voice. Soon, many voices took up the cry. Cutters emptied buckets of water on the flames, but they already had too much fuel in the material scraps and patterns. The line of flaming patterns burned and fell unto the sewing machines. The flames danced to the ceiling and windows popped from the inside pressure.
Someone found a fire hose and tried to use it, but it had rotted and the valves controlling the water supply were rusted. When someone finally got a valve to turn, no water came out of it. The worker’s tables were burning now. Screaming people rushed to the exits and surged against the elevator doors.
The Shepherd of the Eighth Floor
Many people on the eighth floor ran to the Washington Place staircase. They tumbled down it and reached safety without realizing how they had done it. A policeman came onto the fire scene and raced up the stairs, past the clusters of panic stricken women trying to get downstairs. He saw the flames enveloping the women attempting to reach the staircase, and with the help of an eighth floor machinist, helped many of them to safety.
A few more people on the eighth floor found the fire escape. The fire escape stairs were narrow, dangerous, and very close to the burning building, but the people tried to use them anyway. Some managed to reach the sixth floor and climbed into a broken window. Then they piled behind a locked door on the Washington Place stairwell.
The same policeman who had been the shepherd of the eighth floor heard their screams from the other side of the sixth floor landing. He unbolted the door, but he was barely able to open it because the door opened inwardly and there were many people jammed against it Finally, he wrenched it open and helped the women continue their exodus from the building.
The Warning Comes Too Late for the Ninth Floor
A woman on the eighth floor tried to warn the people on the ninth and tenth floors. She reached the tenth floor by telephone, but she couldn’t get through to the ninth floor. The first inkling that the people on the ninth floor had that there was a fire was when they saw smoke seeping into their work room.
The approximately 250 workers on the ninth floor began pushing to the Greene Street stairwell exit, but here too, they could only go one at a time and soon, confused, panicky women were fighting to get out.
The Tenth Floor Fares Better
The approximately 70 people on the tenth floor fared better than their fellow workers. They rushed to the elevator, but the flames blocked it. Max Blanck, one of Triangle’s owners, was on the tenth floor with two of his children. He and the others decided that the best and safest way out was to use the Greene Street stairs to the roof. The women wrapped coats and muffs around them and climbed the staircase. Flames licked at them and many had burned hair and clothes when they reached the roof, but all of them got there except one.
The Fire Escape Offers No Escape
The workers from the eighth and ninth floors trying to use the fire escape stairs weren’t as fortunate. The fire escape was covered with people trying desperately to escape the flames. As they climbed down, flames leaped at them through the windows and set their hair and clothes on fire.
When they got down as far as the second floor where the fire escape ended, they ran into another deathtrap. The intense heat from the fire caused the metal on the fire escape to bend and it loosened from the warm walls of the building. The women who managed to get to the second floor where the fire escape ended smashed through the skylight as they tried to jump to the ground. The courtyard was a death bed for many.
The Fire Escape Collapses into the Courtyard
For the women still on the fire escape, the situation was hopeless. As the building burned, the shuttered windows bent outward, blocking the already bent stairway. The fire escape was so full of people that some of the workers turned back to climb up to the roof. Flames lit up all of the windows now and finally the fire escape buckled and swung away from the building, hurtling its human torches into the courtyard.
No Escape from the Ninth Floor
It was also impossible to escape from the ninth floor. Fire blocked the entrance to the Greene Street stairs. The Washington Place stair door was locked and someone smashed a window which only brought in more flames. There was a solid wall of flame on the ninth floor and the workers were trapped in the long, narrow aisles between machines. The fire pushed them back toward the Washington Place windows, and then there was no place to go. Rather than burning to death in the inferno, many jumped from the building nine floors above the ground.
On Saturday, March 25, 1911, Frances Perkins sat at a restaurant a few blocks away, watching in horrified disbelief as young women jumped from the burning Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
Rose Rosenfeld Friedman didn't jump. On the day of the fire, she escaped the inferno by stopping to consider what the executives were doing. She went up to the 10th floor were their offices were and discovered that they were taking the freight elevator to the roof, where firefighters pulled them to safety on the roof of the adjacent building. She did the same thing.
Young Women Jumped Out of the Triangle Factory Windows
Years later she described the scene for a Public Broadcasting System documentary called "The Living Century." "Girls in shirtwaists which were aflame went flying out of the building so that you saw these young women literally ablaze flying out of the windows," she said.
Just as people began to jump from the burning factory, the first alarm was turned in to the New York City Fire Department and firemen arrived on the scene. The firemen tried to use ladders to rescue the trapped people, but the ladders reached only to the sixth floor. They stretched life nets, but the nets were too fragile to hold up under the impact of bodies falling from narrow ledges nine floors up.
The Triangle Factory Mangers Tried, but Found Not Guilty
Altogether, it took eighteen minutes for the firemen to bring the blaze under control, but it was eighteen minutes too late for 146 of the Triangle Shirtwaist workers.
The impact of the fire reached far beyond New York City and the families of the victims. In fact, many of the victims still had strong ties with their families in other countries so the impact of the tragedy reached around the world.
The two factory managers, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, were tried on charges of first and second degree manslaughter. They were found not guilty. In 1914, relatives of 23 of the victims brought civil suits and they were awarded payments of $75 to each of the families.
The interior of the Asch Building was gutted and the building rebuilt. Today it is the Brown Building and houses the science department at New York University.
The Triangle Fire Energizes Labor Reform and Frances Perkins
As a result of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union increased its demands for safer working conditions. A large crowd of sympathizers paraded to the arch in Washington Square Park. Hearings were held and by the end of 1911, the city of New York had established a Bureau of Fire Investigation with future senator Robert F. Wagner heading it.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire motivated Frances Perkins to act. She had graduated from Columbia University in 1910 with a master’s degree in economics and sociology and was working as secretary of the New York Consumer’s League. Cooperating closely with Florence Kelley, she successfully lobbied the state legislature for a bill that limited the workweek for women and children to 54 hours. She also was active in the women’s suffrage movement.
Frances Perkins Never Forgot the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
Watching the young women jumping from the burning Triangle Shirtwaist factory shaped her political career. She said that it “seared on my mind as well as my heart – a never to be forgotten remainder of why I had to spend my life fighting conditions that could permit such a tragedy.”
While she worked on the Committee on Safety, Frances Perkins met New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and he became familiar with her work. Frances Perkins impressed him enough that in 1932 he appointed her as Secretary of Labor, the first woman to be appointed to a cabinet position. Frances Perkins called the day of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire “the day the New Deal began.”
Rose Rosenfeld Friedman Also Becomes An ActivistRose Rosenfeld Friedman attended labor rallies the rest of her life and always expressed rage that the factory doors had been locked, either to keep workers at their machines or to prevent them from stealing scraps of cloth. She often told of how one of the owners tried to bribe her to say that the doors were not locked and she refused.
Life after the fire proved to be just as eventful for Rose Friedman. In World War I, she saved the life of a spy in Austria. After her husband died in 1959, she went back to work to support her three children and she nursed two of them through polio. Lying about her age, she worked for a Manhattan insurance company until she was 79.
Rose Rosenfeld Friedman died in February 2001 in Beverly Hills, California at the age of 107, the last survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. She was always passionate about the attitude of the owners of the factory that had almost claimed her life. "That's the biggest mistake - that a person doesn't count much when he hasn't got money. What good is a rich man if he hasn't got a heart?I don't pretend. I feel it. Still."
References
John F. McClymer, The Triangle Strike and Fire: American Stories Series, Volume I, Wadsworth Publishing, 1997
Jo Ann Argersinger, The Triangle Fire: A Brief History with Documents, Bedford-St. Martin's, 2009
Suzanne Lieurance, The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and Sweatshop, Enslow Publishing, 2003
On Saturday, March 25, 1911, about 500 women and 30 men worked behind locked doors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory which took up the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the Asch building in New York City. About 180 of the women worked on the eighth floor, 250 on the ninth floor, and 70 on the tenth floor. The Asch Building was located on the northwest corner of Washington Place and Greene Streets, a block away from Washington Square Park. Christened after its owner and builder, Joseph J. Asch, the ten story building was completed in 1901 at a cost of about $400,000.
A Six Day a Week, 12 Hour a Day Work Week
The women were making shirtwaists. A shirtwaist was a tailored, fitted shirt made of lightweight fabric, usually worn with a simple skirt. Advertising pioneer and illustrator Charles Dana Gibson drew his Gibson Girl wearing a shirtwaist as the uniform of choice for modern women, and shirtwaists were so popular that more and more workers had to be employed to insure an ample supply of them.
Most of the workers were Jewish and Italian immigrants. Many of them couldn’t speak English and their employers considered them to be of inferior intelligence. Often, they were the sole support of their families and earned about six dollars a week for toiling six days a week, 12 hours a day to produce the shirtwaists that were transforming the world of women’s fashions.
"Old Women" and "New Women"
The immigrant women themselves weren’t part of the transformation in the world of women at the turn of the 19th century. Their American sisters played leading roles in the drama of women becoming aware of themselves as women. Many American women were getting involved in politics, and many were entering the work force. Women’s fashions were changing with their changing attitudes and the shirtwaist was a badge identifying the “new woman,” even though the “old women” made them. The “old women” workers weren’t expected to show the independence of spirit that the “new women” did. Their employers expected them to be placid, patient and docile, and they were.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Wasn't Safe
The workers were so docile that they didn’t question the physical conditions at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory which invited tragedy. It was a loft factory which was a common type in the early part of the 20th century. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory wasn’t a safe place to work. The New York City Fire Department had long attempted to conduct fire drills at the factory, which it considered a fire trap, but the two managers of the factory, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, refused to allow fire drills.
The Washington Place stairs reached only to the 10th floor and the single fire escape in the rear of the building went only to the second floor. Underneath the fire escape where it ended on the second floor, was a glass skylight from a ground floor extension that jutted from the Asch Building into a paved and enclosed courtyard. All of the doors to the Asch Building opened inwardly and since Mr. Asch had declared the building to be fire proof, he hadn’t thought it all necessary to spend the additional $5,000 it would cost to install a sprinkler system.
The Exits Were Dangerously Narrow and the Windows a Hazard
The long narrow passageways on the eighth and ninth floors that the workers had to pass through before they could reach the Greene Street freight elevators and stairs were significant hazards to the factory workers. These normally would have been sufficiently wide exits, but one of the managers, Mr. Harris, was obsessed with the stealing that supposedly went on in the factory.
He considered this to be such a serious problem that he required all of the workers to walk down the passageways one by one and open their purses so the watchman could make sure that no shirtwaists or other company property went out of the building. In subsequent hearings, Mr. Harris admitted that the amount of thefts totaled less than $25.00, but still the worker must be searched so the exits were dangerously narrow.
The factory windows were another hazard. Windows on the eighth floor opened in the back to the single fire escape and there were also windows on the Greene Street and Washington Street sides. All of the windows were covered with sheet iron, a lethal death factor in the fire.
A Flammable Inventory
Even the nature of the materials the workers were using made the factory a tinder box. Throughout the eighth and ninth floors were long cutting tables. Underneath these tables were rag bins for scraps from cutting and above these were wires that were strung to hold patterns once they were cut out. Shirtwaists in various stages of completion were piled about and rows and rows of sewing machines and wicker work baskets completed the flammable inventory. All of these items would combine to make a Viking-like funeral pyre at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
On Saturday, March 25, 1911, at 4:45 p.m., the end of the 56 hour, six day week approached and many of the workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, including Rose Rosenfeld, were preparing to go home. A few of the women on the eighth floor pushed back their chairs and started to walk towards the inspection station. Then one of the women smelled smoke. She looked back at the cutting tables and spied flames darting through the openings beneath the tables.
The Fire Advances and the Fire Hose Doesn't Work
“Fire!” she cried in a horrified voice. Soon, many voices took up the cry. Cutters emptied buckets of water on the flames, but they already had too much fuel in the material scraps and patterns. The line of flaming patterns burned and fell unto the sewing machines. The flames danced to the ceiling and windows popped from the inside pressure.
Someone found a fire hose and tried to use it, but it had rotted and the valves controlling the water supply were rusted. When someone finally got a valve to turn, no water came out of it. The worker’s tables were burning now. Screaming people rushed to the exits and surged against the elevator doors.
The Shepherd of the Eighth Floor
Many people on the eighth floor ran to the Washington Place staircase. They tumbled down it and reached safety without realizing how they had done it. A policeman came onto the fire scene and raced up the stairs, past the clusters of panic stricken women trying to get downstairs. He saw the flames enveloping the women attempting to reach the staircase, and with the help of an eighth floor machinist, helped many of them to safety.
A few more people on the eighth floor found the fire escape. The fire escape stairs were narrow, dangerous, and very close to the burning building, but the people tried to use them anyway. Some managed to reach the sixth floor and climbed into a broken window. Then they piled behind a locked door on the Washington Place stairwell.
The same policeman who had been the shepherd of the eighth floor heard their screams from the other side of the sixth floor landing. He unbolted the door, but he was barely able to open it because the door opened inwardly and there were many people jammed against it Finally, he wrenched it open and helped the women continue their exodus from the building.
The Warning Comes Too Late for the Ninth Floor
A woman on the eighth floor tried to warn the people on the ninth and tenth floors. She reached the tenth floor by telephone, but she couldn’t get through to the ninth floor. The first inkling that the people on the ninth floor had that there was a fire was when they saw smoke seeping into their work room.
The approximately 250 workers on the ninth floor began pushing to the Greene Street stairwell exit, but here too, they could only go one at a time and soon, confused, panicky women were fighting to get out.
The Tenth Floor Fares Better
The approximately 70 people on the tenth floor fared better than their fellow workers. They rushed to the elevator, but the flames blocked it. Max Blanck, one of Triangle’s owners, was on the tenth floor with two of his children. He and the others decided that the best and safest way out was to use the Greene Street stairs to the roof. The women wrapped coats and muffs around them and climbed the staircase. Flames licked at them and many had burned hair and clothes when they reached the roof, but all of them got there except one.
The Fire Escape Offers No Escape
The workers from the eighth and ninth floors trying to use the fire escape stairs weren’t as fortunate. The fire escape was covered with people trying desperately to escape the flames. As they climbed down, flames leaped at them through the windows and set their hair and clothes on fire.
When they got down as far as the second floor where the fire escape ended, they ran into another deathtrap. The intense heat from the fire caused the metal on the fire escape to bend and it loosened from the warm walls of the building. The women who managed to get to the second floor where the fire escape ended smashed through the skylight as they tried to jump to the ground. The courtyard was a death bed for many.
The Fire Escape Collapses into the Courtyard
For the women still on the fire escape, the situation was hopeless. As the building burned, the shuttered windows bent outward, blocking the already bent stairway. The fire escape was so full of people that some of the workers turned back to climb up to the roof. Flames lit up all of the windows now and finally the fire escape buckled and swung away from the building, hurtling its human torches into the courtyard.
No Escape from the Ninth Floor
It was also impossible to escape from the ninth floor. Fire blocked the entrance to the Greene Street stairs. The Washington Place stair door was locked and someone smashed a window which only brought in more flames. There was a solid wall of flame on the ninth floor and the workers were trapped in the long, narrow aisles between machines. The fire pushed them back toward the Washington Place windows, and then there was no place to go. Rather than burning to death in the inferno, many jumped from the building nine floors above the ground.
On Saturday, March 25, 1911, Frances Perkins sat at a restaurant a few blocks away, watching in horrified disbelief as young women jumped from the burning Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
Rose Rosenfeld Friedman didn't jump. On the day of the fire, she escaped the inferno by stopping to consider what the executives were doing. She went up to the 10th floor were their offices were and discovered that they were taking the freight elevator to the roof, where firefighters pulled them to safety on the roof of the adjacent building. She did the same thing.
Young Women Jumped Out of the Triangle Factory Windows
Years later she described the scene for a Public Broadcasting System documentary called "The Living Century." "Girls in shirtwaists which were aflame went flying out of the building so that you saw these young women literally ablaze flying out of the windows," she said.
Just as people began to jump from the burning factory, the first alarm was turned in to the New York City Fire Department and firemen arrived on the scene. The firemen tried to use ladders to rescue the trapped people, but the ladders reached only to the sixth floor. They stretched life nets, but the nets were too fragile to hold up under the impact of bodies falling from narrow ledges nine floors up.
The Triangle Factory Mangers Tried, but Found Not Guilty
Altogether, it took eighteen minutes for the firemen to bring the blaze under control, but it was eighteen minutes too late for 146 of the Triangle Shirtwaist workers.
The impact of the fire reached far beyond New York City and the families of the victims. In fact, many of the victims still had strong ties with their families in other countries so the impact of the tragedy reached around the world.
The two factory managers, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, were tried on charges of first and second degree manslaughter. They were found not guilty. In 1914, relatives of 23 of the victims brought civil suits and they were awarded payments of $75 to each of the families.
The interior of the Asch Building was gutted and the building rebuilt. Today it is the Brown Building and houses the science department at New York University.
The Triangle Fire Energizes Labor Reform and Frances Perkins
As a result of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union increased its demands for safer working conditions. A large crowd of sympathizers paraded to the arch in Washington Square Park. Hearings were held and by the end of 1911, the city of New York had established a Bureau of Fire Investigation with future senator Robert F. Wagner heading it.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire motivated Frances Perkins to act. She had graduated from Columbia University in 1910 with a master’s degree in economics and sociology and was working as secretary of the New York Consumer’s League. Cooperating closely with Florence Kelley, she successfully lobbied the state legislature for a bill that limited the workweek for women and children to 54 hours. She also was active in the women’s suffrage movement.
Frances Perkins Never Forgot the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
Watching the young women jumping from the burning Triangle Shirtwaist factory shaped her political career. She said that it “seared on my mind as well as my heart – a never to be forgotten remainder of why I had to spend my life fighting conditions that could permit such a tragedy.”
While she worked on the Committee on Safety, Frances Perkins met New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and he became familiar with her work. Frances Perkins impressed him enough that in 1932 he appointed her as Secretary of Labor, the first woman to be appointed to a cabinet position. Frances Perkins called the day of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire “the day the New Deal began.”
Rose Rosenfeld Friedman Also Becomes An ActivistRose Rosenfeld Friedman attended labor rallies the rest of her life and always expressed rage that the factory doors had been locked, either to keep workers at their machines or to prevent them from stealing scraps of cloth. She often told of how one of the owners tried to bribe her to say that the doors were not locked and she refused.
Life after the fire proved to be just as eventful for Rose Friedman. In World War I, she saved the life of a spy in Austria. After her husband died in 1959, she went back to work to support her three children and she nursed two of them through polio. Lying about her age, she worked for a Manhattan insurance company until she was 79.
Rose Rosenfeld Friedman died in February 2001 in Beverly Hills, California at the age of 107, the last survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. She was always passionate about the attitude of the owners of the factory that had almost claimed her life. "That's the biggest mistake - that a person doesn't count much when he hasn't got money. What good is a rich man if he hasn't got a heart?I don't pretend. I feel it. Still."
References
John F. McClymer, The Triangle Strike and Fire: American Stories Series, Volume I, Wadsworth Publishing, 1997
Jo Ann Argersinger, The Triangle Fire: A Brief History with Documents, Bedford-St. Martin's, 2009
Suzanne Lieurance, The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and Sweatshop, Enslow Publishing, 2003