On March 25, 1911 a fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Manhattan, in the Asch Building on the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street, killed 146 garment workers, most of whom were young Italian and Jewish women. Many New Yorkers know the tragic story of the locked fire exits and women jumping to their deaths from the windows which were too high for the fire department ladders to reach. Years ago, I was sitting in my grandmother’s kitchen enjoying a leisurely Sunday dinner when I asked my great aunt Alice, who was at the table, if she knew about it. Like the rest of my mother’s family, she had migrated to the United States from Naples before World War I. She told me that she had actually worked in the Triangle factory and recounted her memories of that day. She was remembering 65 years back and I’m remembering 35 years back, but within those limits, here is the story.
As a little bit of background, the Triangle factory was well known due to its large size and the fact that the owners had been the most militant anti-union of the anti-union employers during the big garment strikes of 1909 and 1910. The neighborhoods of the time were tight-knit where everyone seemed to know everyone in the Italian sections South of Washington Square Park and Little Italy, and in the Jewish areas of the Lower East Side. The sweatshops of the area were fire traps due to the cloth dust and sputtering oil and sparks from the old sewing machines. There were constant fires, usually put out by the workers and so a big fire was not a complete surprise.
The day of the fire, my aunt was sick. However, as was demanded by the bosses, her cousin went to work as her replacement rather than leave a sewing machine idle. Sometime during the day, she remembered looking out her window and seeing hundreds of people running through the streets with shouts of “Triangle’s on fire!” Everyone had a friend or relative working in the Triangle and the horrors of a big industrial fire were apparent to everyone. Her description was so vivid that I still choke up when I try to tell this story in person. The locked exits and inadequate ladders leading to the deaths were reported in the papers in detail, along with photographs of the dead workers. There were descriptions of hardened police officers with tears in their eyes at the site, even though some of those same officers may have been beating those same young workers when they were on the picket lines just a few years previously.
I don’t remember if my aunt went to the massive funeral for the workers, but I do know that her cousin died in the fire. When the owners were put on trial, they were found not guilty since it could not be proven that they personally knew the exits were blocked. I believe they passed into obscurity and weren’t heard from again. The site of the fire is still standing, as the Brown building owned by NYU. Yet, the tragedy resulted in the enforcement of many safety laws and a tremendous increase in unionization of the garment industry. When my mother spent her 40 years working in the sweatshops of the garment district, she did so in union shops and never had to face the horror of another Triangle Shirtwaist fire.