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| Scene at the morgue |
Sitting there in the motorman’s class, I listened intently to the instructor as he attempted to impress upon us the importance of safety in the workplace. Picking up a soft cover book about the size of a notebook, he waved it in front of the class, trying to garner the attention of the know-it-alls who invariably find such lectures boring.
“This is a copy of New York City Transit’s code of safety rules.” he loudly announced. “We have a saying about this book: ‘This is a book written in blood!’ When I first came on this job, this book had only four pages. As you can see, this book is now a lot thicker. Every time someone was killed on this job, another page was added to this book.” Suddenly he had everyone’s attention. His grim meaning was abundantly clear to all: the job of transit worker is not an easy one. In fact, it’s a very dangerous one!
Sitting here in front of my computer, I realize it’s been years since I heard that lecture. I didn’t stay with MTA New York City Transit (long, boring story). Yet the memory of that instructor’s words still lingers in my mind. Even though people to this day still get injured (even killed) on the job, we as Americans nonetheless have a tendency to take for granted the fact workplace safety has improved dramatically since our parents and grandparents earned a living.
The word “sweatshop” conjures up images of a place where people work long, hard hours for little pay under unsafe working conditions. Though sweatshops today are most often associated with Third World nations, it wasn’t that long ago the landscape of these United States was dotted with them. In fact, despite numerous Federal, state and local laws prohibiting them, quite a number of them still exist in shadows. Whereas today’s sweatshop worker in America is typically an illegal alien, in times past legal immigrants (and occasionally native-born Americans) were most commonly exploited.
As one can imagine, the potential for abuse and tragedy exists in such places. This article deals with one such tragedy, and the way it helped shape workplace safety in America today.
The Triangle Shirtwaist factory was located in the Asch building on the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street in Manhattan. The Asch building was a ten-story structure, with the factory occupying the top three floors. The building was owned by two partners: Max Blanck and Isaac Harris. It produced women’s blouses or “shirtwaists” as they were known at the time. The factory employed almost 500 people with the vast majority of them being either Southern Italian/Sicilian immigrants from Italy or Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. The typical employee was a female between the ages of 13 to 23. Though Blanck and Harris owned the building, work was subcontracted out to individuals who in turn hired the girls and women.
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| (L-R) Bodies being laid out on the sidewalk. Inside the Triangle Shirtwaist factory after the fire. The bodies of seamstresses, who jumped from the factory floors to avoid being burned alive, outside the building. Relatives identifying bodies in the morgue. |
There had been labor problems at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory prior to the fire. The ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union) had been founded only 11 years earlier to combat exploitation of skilled female employees of garment factories. In 1909 an incident at the factory triggered a walk-out by the employees. The ILGWU helped them stage a protest while simultaneously helping them avoid trouble with union-busting thugs and the police.
The following year thousands of garment workers city-wide staged a general strike, forcing concessions from employers to allow workers to establish a grievance system. Since there was little if any oversight at the time by the government, owners frequently disregarded the concessions and continued operating their factories under exploitative and unsafe conditions. Though some of the Triangle factory’s employees by 1911 were members of the ILGWU, the place was still a non-union shop.
At 4:45 PM on Saturday, March 25, 1911 hundreds of girls and young women were finishing up their shift and preparing to go home for the day. They had been working overtime to fill up backorders. The floors of the factory were littered with containers of flammable liquids (used in clothing manufacture) and piles of garments. To this day, no one is quite sure how the fire started, but start it did. Literally within a matter of minutes it engulfed the top three floors of the Asch building.
A bookkeeper on the eighth floor was able to use a phone to warn workers on the tenth floor of the inferno. Many of these people were able to flee to the roof. Among these people were Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, who survived the fire. The people on the ninth floor, however, were not so lucky. They were tipped off to the conflagration by the fire itself! Pandemonium quickly erupted as terrified girls charged en masse towards the available exits, only to discover most of them locked! The single exterior fire escape quickly buckled under the weight of all the workers trying to flee simultaneously, causing them to tumble headlong onto the pavement over 100 feet below.
Two heroic elevator operators, Joseph Zito and Gaspar Mortillalo, are credited with saving many lives by bringing their elevators up to the ninth floor three times each. Unfortunately, Mortillalo’s elevator soon buckled under the intense heat. In Zito’s case, desperate workers pried the doors to the elevator open and jumped to their deaths down the shaft. The weight of all the bodies made it impossible for him to make another trip.
The workers still trapped on the ninth floor rushed to the windows hoping to be rescued by firefighters who had arrived on the scene. In a cruel twist of fate, however, they saw the ladders of the fire trucks were unable to reach the top floors of the building. Water from their fire hoses was also unable to reach the fire on the top floors. In what would become the most unforgettable scene of the Triangle factory fire, scores of workers (most of them girls!), many on fire, made the conscious decision to leap to their deaths in order to avoid being burned alive! Others, in a last, desperate hope for salvation, tried jumping into the safety nets of firefighters, which shredded due to the crush of the falling bodies. All this witnessed by hundreds of horrified onlookers!
Future New York State Assemblyman Louis Waldman, who was a witness to the nightmare, described it thusly:
“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.” – Louis Waldman: Labor Lawyer, E.P. Dutton & co. pp. 32-33.
Whoever was unable to escape or did not choose to leap to their deaths was eventually overcome by smoke or fire. In total, 146 people, most of them young women and girls, were killed that day. In a moving scene, 25 of the dead were found huddled together in a cloakroom.
The Bellevue Morgue was so jammed with bodies that a makeshift morgue had to be set up on an adjoining pier by the East River to allow family members to identify their lost loved ones. Six unidentified victims were buried in the Cemetery of the Evergreens, a non-denominational cemetery, in Brooklyn.
Outrage quickly followed the fire. The ILGWU proposed a day of mourning for the victims. On April 5th approximately 500,000 people lined the streets of 5th Avenue in Manhattan to watch 75,000-100,000 people march in protest. Many called for Max Blanck and Isaac Harris to be brought up on criminal charges, which they eventually were, in fact.
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| The defendants: Max Blanck and Issac Harris |
In a sick injustice, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were paid $60,000 more than their reported losses by the insurance company. Two years after the Triangle Factory fire Blanck would again be arrested for locking the factory door during working hours. He would be forced a pay a big fat fine of $20!
Most of those who perished in the fire were Jewish, but scanning the list of the deceased I counted what looked like 43 Italian-sounding names. Unquestionably most of those were from Il Mezzogiorno. Their sad fate forever woven into the tapestry of our people’s experiences here in America.
The Asch building has been renamed the Brown Building of Science and is now owned by New York University. It stands as a mute reminder of that horrifying day over a lifetime ago.
Though the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire was not the first workplace disaster in American history, the disgust the sight that so many dead girls elicited would greatly add impetus to the already burgeoning labor movement here. The fire was invoked by labor activists and their supporters who were now able to force ever greater government oversight into the workplace to protect the rights of workers and their safety. It would remain the greatest workplace disaster in New York City history until September 11th, 2001.
Further reading:
- http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/narrative1.html
- David von Drehle: Triangle: The Fire That Changed America; NY Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003.
