{"id":1819,"date":"2011-03-25T12:58:43","date_gmt":"2011-03-25T18:58:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/asylumeclectica.com\/grim\/?p=1819"},"modified":"2025-08-10T15:25:05","modified_gmt":"2025-08-10T20:25:05","slug":"the-triangle-shirtwaist-fire-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/?p=1819","title":{"rendered":"The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire – Revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, I thought I would repost a summary of the event originally posted in two Morbid Facts on April 2\/3, 2000. Er, enjoy!<\/p>\n

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

William G. Shepherd was an eyewitness to the atrocity:<\/p>\n

As I reached the scene of the fire, a cloud of smoke hung over the building. . . . I looked up to the seventh floor. There was a living picture in each window–four screaming heads of girls waving their arms. ‘Call the firemen,’ they screamed… One girl climbed onto the window sash. Those behind her tried to hold her back. Then she dropped into space. Then came that first thud. I looked up, another girl was climbing onto the window sill; others were crowding behind her. She dropped. I watched her fall, and again the dreadful sound. Two windows away two girls were climbing onto the sill; they were fighting each other and crowding for air. Behind them I saw many screaming heads. They fell almost together, but I heard two distinct thuds. Then the flames burst out through the windows on the floor below them, and curled up into their faces. The firemen… took out a life net and, while they were rushing to the sidewalk with it, two more girls shot down. The firemen held it under them; the bodies broke it; the grotesque simile of a dog jumping through a hoop struck me. Before they could move the net another girl’s body flashed through it.<\/p>\n

As I looked up I saw a love affair in the midst of all the horror. A young man helped a girl to the window sill. Then he held her out, deliberately away from the building and let her drop. He held out a second girl the same way and let her drop. Then he held out a third girl who did not resist. I noticed that. They were as unresisting as if her were helping them onto a streetcar instead of into eternity. Undoubtedly he saw that a terrible death awaited them in the flames, and his was only a terrible chivalry. He brought another girl to the window. Those of us who were looking saw her put her arms about him and kiss him. Then he held her out into space and dropped her. But quick as a flash he was on the window sill himself. His coat fluttered upward–the air filled his trouser legs. I could see that he wore tan shoes and hose. His hat remained on his head. Thud–dead, thud–dead–together they went into eternity.<\/p>\n

\"Police<\/a>

A police officer stands with bodies of victims who leaped to their death. Click on the photo to access a great gallery of fire photos at the Cornell University website.<\/p><\/div>\n

The firemen raised the longest ladder. It reached only to the sixth floor. I saw the last girl jump at it and miss it. And then the faces disappeared from the window. I heard screams around the corner and hurried there. What I had seen before was not so terrible as what had followed. Up in the [ninth] floor girls were burning to death before our very eyes. They were jammed in the windows. No one was lucky enough to be able to jump, it seemed. But, one by one, the jams broke. Down came the bodies in a shower, burning, smoking–flaming bodies, with disheveled hair trailing upward. They had fought each other to die by jumping instead of by fire. The whole, sound, unharmed girls who had jumped on the other side of the building had tried to fall feet down. But these fire torches, suffering ones, fell inertly, only intent that death should come to them on the sidewalk instead of in the furnace behind them.<\/p>\n

On the sidewalk lay heaps of broken bodies. A policeman later went about with tags, which he fastened with wires to the wrists of the dead girls, numbering each with a lead pencil, and I saw him fasten tag no. 54 to the wrist of a girl who wore an engagement ring. A fireman who came downstairs from the building told me that there were at least fifty bodies in the big room on the seventh floor. Another fireman told me that more girls had jumped down an air shaft in the rear of the building. I went back there, into the narrow court, and saw a heap of dead girls… The floods of water from the firemen’s hose that ran into the gutter were actually stained red with blood. I looked upon the heap of dead bodies and I remembered these girls were the shirtwaist makers. I remembered their great strike of last year in which these same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops. These dead bodies were the answer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Culled from: The Triangle Factory Fire
\nGenerously submitted by: Fearless Freya<\/p>\n

Here is my original review of a book chronicling the tragedy.\u00a0 I should re-read it because I might find the second half more interesting these days:<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Triangle Fire<\/a><\/strong>
\nBy Leon Stein<\/strong>
\nCornell University Press<\/strong>
\nThe 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 young women, mostly immigrant girls, in one of the worst factory fire disasters in American history. (Of course, as the book points out, this sort of thing still occurs all the time, it just happens in Thailand, China, Korea, Hong Kong, etc. and we don’t care about it.) Anyway, this book was okay… The first part, about the actual fire itself and how the design of the building (with exit doors that pushed inward, locked exits, one inferior fire escape, and narrow stairways) created a firetrap that resulted in numerous women (and some men too) plunging to their deaths onto the New York sidewalk below, is a compelling read. However, I just couldn’t get in to the second section of the book at all, which deals with the prosecution of the company owner’s for contributing to the deaths through their negligence, the protests and unions that formed in the aftermath, and the new laws that were enacted to protect others. That part had me yawning nearly non-stop. But that’s just me… Perhaps you might find all that very interesting as well.<\/p>\n

*** – Half-Baked<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, I thought I would repost a summary of the event originally posted in two Morbid Facts on April 2\/3, 2000. Er, enjoy! The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Near closing time on Saturday afternoon, March 25, 1911, a fire […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-facts","category-library"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1819"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14094,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1819\/revisions\/14094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}