Fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

In the early 1900s, New York City's Triangle Shirtwaist factory was one of the largest blouse factories in the city. It was also incredibly unsafe. Learn how a fire at this factory triggered a national change in attitudes surrounding workplace safety.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Debline, a Chark reboarding, and I'm fair down. And
chances are if you've ever worked outside of the home,
you've probably been introduced to the idea of workplace safety

(00:22):
at one time or another, whether it's been through one
of those workplace safety videos that we all know and love,
or a basic fire drill. We had one just last week.
Yes we did, and we did very well, I think,
I hope so yeah, me too. We're on the fifteenth
floor here, so we need to know to be up
on our fire safety. But it's not a perfect system.
I think most people probably think that, and we saw

(00:44):
that also in a food safety podcast that we did
a couple of weeks ago. But there's at least some
emphasis on safety regulation at most reputable corporations. But that
wasn't always the case, not at all. About a hundred
years ago, it wasn't really unusual at all for worker
to die on the job. There's actually a stat you
see a lot from that period that says that about

(01:05):
one hundred u S workers on average used to die
every single day in minds on ships, trains, and factories. Yeah,
so when you start to think about facts like that
or statistics like that, it's not too difficult to see
how a terrible event like the Triangle Shirtwat factory fire
could occur. It was a fire that spread through three

(01:27):
floors of New York's ash building in Washington Square, and
it really stands out not just because it's a tragic
event a lot of people died, it's one of the
worst US workplace disasters, but also because it instigated a
lot of reforms that were very much needed at the
time in workplace safety standards and led to some real
positive changes in labor unions and women's rights too. Yeah,

(01:51):
and especially since it's the one anniversary of the fire
this year and a frequent listener request. Yeah, people have
really been requesting this topic as long as I've worked
on the podcast. We want to take a look at
what happened on that fateful day Mars nineteen eleven, the
trial that ensued, and the whole events after effects. What happened,

(02:11):
How did it influence workplace safety? Yeah, definitely, But first
we want to take a look at the conditions that
made the fire possible and around this time in the
early nineteen hundreds, there were hundreds of blouse factories in
New York City and they employed mostly immigrants, thousands of immigrants,
and the Triangle Shirt Waste Factory was one of the

(02:32):
largest of these garment operations that employed more than five
hundred people, most of them were Jewish and Italian immigrants,
and most were young women. And it took up the
top three floors of a ten story building, the Ash Building,
which was located on the corner of Green Street and
Washington Place on the northern corner of Washington Square. So

(02:52):
if you've visited that area today, it's now ny US
Brown Building. Yeah. And they made, as we mentioned, shirt
way s, which were women's blouses that were loosely based
on a man's fitted shirt, and they were popularized by
commercial artist Charles Dana Gibson. So he created this image
of the Gibson girl, right, and it was kind of

(03:14):
an iconic twentieth century woman, and she wore shortwaist, so
stylish but practical at the same time, right, And this
became all the rage. So it was big business at
the time for the Triangle Factory owners Max Blanc and
Isaac Harris, who were getting rich off the concept. Yeah,
but the conditions of the factory did not reflect the

(03:34):
wealth in any way. There were long hours, there was
low pay. They're pretty much no breaks for the workers.
Lunch breaks were often shorted so you wouldn't even get
paid for that. The female workers were followed to the
bathroom and then sort of rushed back to work. And
then the factory itself was just a terrible place to work.
It was airless, it was crowded with people and supplies.

(03:56):
Obviously it was the fire trap. There were open bands,
piled of shirt scraps all around, and that's a really
important thing to remember during this podcast. The whole workspace
is filled with cotton scraps. Yeah, it was a full
on sweatshop. And to make matters worse, Block Inhari stood
a few things that weren't exactly up to fire code.
Even at the time, they really feared their employees stealing

(04:17):
from them, so they limited access to the exits and
made the workers take a specific exited closing and that
was the exit that was on the Green Street side
of the building. So there they set up partitions so
that they could funnel one worker through at a time
and have her search for stolen tools, fabric, shirtwaists. So yeah,
obviously this would create a problem if there were a

(04:38):
lot of people trying to get out that one exit
at one time. But there was another stairway. There was
a passenger elevator too, or several passenger elevators on the
other side of the building, but they were reserved for
management and for the public. There was also a third
stairway that was legally required by the city, but unfortunately,
corrupt officials had let the owners count this flimsy fire

(05:01):
escape on the back side of the building as the
third set of stairs. It wasn't really a realistic escape route, right.
So women finally unionized and they participated in a strike
led by the Women's Trade Union League in late nineteen
o nine. They were fed up with these conditions. They
knew they weren't working in a safe environment, and so
they wanted to fight back a little bit. The owners

(05:22):
that were stubborn, they had the backing of Tammany Hall,
and so they were able to get strike breakers from
street gangs and they got thugs to break up the strike. Eventually, though,
in nineteen ten, Blanc and Harris finally relented and they
agreed to some minor concessions, higher wages, shorter hours, but
still after that not really much changed. Factory conditions were

(05:42):
still deplorable. Yeah, so they were still in a bad spot.
And Saturday March nineteen eleven, a cutter on the eighth
floor named Isidore abrama Witz noticed flames coming up from
his scrap bin. And this was around four or forty
at night, so it was right before closing. I think
he mentioned earlier he had put on his coat when

(06:03):
he he saw these flames. He was ready to go.
He was ready to get out of there, but then
he noticed this fire. And just as a side note,
nobody really knows exactly how the fire started. He says
he just noticed it spontaneously. It may have been a
match or smoldering cigarette or cigar thrown into the bend,
maybe by him, maybe by someone else, we don't know.
But the fire marshal thought later that that was probably

(06:24):
how it started, as from a cigarette. But yeah, but cotton,
of course as very flammable, as we've already mentioned. So
the fire, which seemed pretty small at first, was blazing
within just a few seconds, and so bram Woods grabbed
a red fire pail and dumped it on the flames,
trying to quench this thing quickly, and others did the same,
but it didn't do any good. The fire was just

(06:45):
too strong already, and so the flames started to just
spread all over the factory floor, and the factory manager,
Samuel Bernstein, told the workers to get out the fire hoses.
So they were still working on trying to contain this
thing before abandoning ship. But that didn't help either, and
that's because the hoses, which hadn't been inspected, turned out
to just be completely useless. They didn't have any water pressure,

(07:08):
so it was just wasted precious seconds in what turned
out to be a really fast paced disaster. Right at
that point, there was really nothing for them to do
but try and find a way out, and people went
about that in different ways, but basically a lot of
it came down to luck of the draw. How close
was your station to an exit, which direction did you

(07:29):
choose to run in? It was all these split second
decision There weren't second chances either, right, whatever you decided
in that moment would determine your faith. So we're just
going to go through a few different scenarios. Decisions that
people made places they went to try to escape. So
in a panic, many of the workers ran to the
doors on the Washington Street side, but the doors were
inward opening because the stairway landings were supposedly too narrow

(07:53):
to accommodate outward opening doors. So with the mob pressing
up against these swinging doors, they wouldn't open, and every
one was just sort of crushing the people on the
front because they were trying so frantically to get out. Yeah,
so other workers tried to get out on the Green
Street side, and they were slowed down by that security
check funneling partition that we mentioned earlier, And besides the

(08:14):
stairway and the elevators were jammed, so not much luck
there either. So some other people also tried to escape
by the passenger elevators. According to an article by Charles
Phillips in American History, elevator operators Joseph Cito and Gaspou
Mortillo risked their lives by making trips to get some
of the workers. But it's still unclear exactly which floors

(08:35):
they visited and when they visited them. So what people
have determined is that it's likely that they visited the
eighth and the tenth floors. Zero later guessed that they
went up to the tenth floor twice actually, but the
second time they went up the floor was empty. Yeah,
And the tenth floor is pretty key here too, because
it's where management was working. So Blanc and a couple
of his daughters and Harris were on the tenth floor

(08:55):
at the time of the fire, and they and all
of the seventy workers who were on that floor managed
to escape, and some of them got out by the
elevator and some took stairs to the roof and from
there they were helped by n y U law students
who extended ladders from adjacent buildings, which sounds absolutely terrifying
climbing over ladders ten floors up between buildings. And some

(09:18):
people also tried to take the fire escape, which is
probably even more terrifying than that because it was so rickety,
and then only went from the tenth floor to the
second floor and stopped above a courtyard. At that point,
it was so flimsy. Apparently the architect had promised to
fix it previously but never did so when people tried
to take it, it detached and fell I think exactly.

(09:40):
I think too A few people fell down at first,
and then finally the whole thing gave way and just
kind of crumpled. But of all of the floors, the
ninth floor definitely did the worst. The doors to the
Washington Place stairwell were found to be locked, or at
least we're going to talk about that a little more.
Survivors claimed that several of the doors were locked, and
that turned out to be pretty cruise in the after

(10:01):
effects of this fire. But aside from the doors potentially
being locked, the elevator was packed with those tenth floor folks,
so it would come down to the ninth floor and open,
but nobody else could get on, and then the Green
Street exit was jammed, so there was just hardly any
way out of the building if you were stuck on
the ninth floor right. Some escaped by making it to
the Green Street stairs and getting to the roof. A

(10:23):
few others slid down elevator cables, some more successfully than others.
If you see stories of some people who slid down
the elevator cables and they made it, and some people
when you mentioned a woman who woke up in the hospital, yeah,
I read an article from that time of a woman
recounting how she slid down the cables and she kind
of lost consciousness around the sixth floor and woke up

(10:44):
in the hospital. But she survived. That's amazing. But unfortunately,
about eighty of the people who were stuck on that
floor did the unthinkable, and they jumped out of the
window onto the street. And logically, we can assume that
the people who jumped didn't think that they were going
to make it. They were just desperate to escape the
burning building. But a lot of people by this time,

(11:05):
we're down on the streets below watching it all happen, yea.
And I mean, with our recent history in September eleventh,
I think we don't have to try too hard to
imagine how horrifying this was to watch. And some of
the people who were watching from the street actually tried
to prevent the workers, who were mostly young girls. As
we mentioned, some of them were as young as fourteen

(11:26):
years old. They tried to prevent them from jumping, telling them, hey, wait,
the fire department's coming, don't jump. But even when the
fire department got there, their ladders would only reach the
sixth floor. Well in their nets didn't work either. They
put up a safety net about a hundred feet below
the windows, but the weight of the jumpers would just
tear right through the net. And we also have to
consider not all of these girls were actively choosing to jump.

(11:50):
Some of them were just being pushed out by the
masses of people struggling inside the building. Um, just to
give you an idea of what this was like to
watch from street, William Shephard, a United Press reporter, happened
to be in the area, and he kind of described
the horror of watching this. He said, the first ten
shocked me. I looked up and saw that there were

(12:11):
scores of girls at the windows. The flames from the
floor below we're beating in their faces. Somehow I knew
that they too must come down, and something within me,
something I didn't know was there, stealed me. Yeah. So
I think this is sort of the hardest part of
this podcast to take. And all of this happened in
only about fifteen minutes, which again that's just so you

(12:34):
have one second to make a decision about what you're
gonna do. That's a really scary part of this whole thing.
And then it's all over by about four or fifty
seven hundred and forty six of the five hundred Triangle
Factory employees were dead, and almost immediately after people started
looking for somebody to blame. If you have a tragedy
of this magnitude, somebody's got to get down for it, it

(12:57):
it seems. Yeah. One person who was really on the
warpath about this was District Attorney Charles Whitman, and he
was determined to find somebody to blame. He convinced a
grand jury to eventually charge Block and Harris with manslaughter
caused by willful negligence. And the trial of these two
owners started about nine months or so after the fire,
and it lasted for three weeks. Block and Harris were

(13:19):
represented by a guy named Max Steyer. He was a
renowned lawyer at the time. I think he was like
the premier trial lawyer in New York. And there were
a hundred and fifty five witnesses involved in the case.
So if you can imagine like all these survivors coming
forth and recounting the stories of their escape and just
the harring tale of what they had gone through so recently. Yeah,

(13:39):
but the whole case, the whole trial, hinged around whether
or not the owners knew that that Washington Place door
was locked, and they, of course, we're saying, no, it's
not locked during working hours, but even a fire prevention
expert testified to the contrary. So there were different opinions
going on here. But the judge had instructed the jury

(14:01):
that they must be convinced not only that the door
was locked and that the owners knew it was, but
the more people would have survived if it was unlocked,
which is a really hard thing to do. So the
jury acquitted the owners after less than two hours of
deliberation and they went free. So the two owners didn't
take the blame for the fire, but there were still

(14:23):
some major reforms that came out of the whole thing. Yeah,
there was a Factory Investigating Commission established and they looked
into the Triangle factory and they realized that there were
no sprinklers, no firewalls, no fire doors. Even though those
things were available at the time, the owners had just
chosen not to feature them in their own factory. Yeah,
but in their defense, I guess um or to at

(14:45):
least give you the whole picture. Most factories didn't have them.
So over the next few years, there were many new
laws concerning the labor environment and labor protection for women
and children that came into play. Yeah, and reforms like
these also became a major part of the platform for
a lot of progressive politicians, including Francis Perkins, who later

(15:06):
famously went on to become the first female cabinet member
UM under FDR. And she actually had seen the fire firsthand. Yeah,
she was there in the neighborhood with a friend having
tea or something, I think, and she saw it and
she later pointed to that day as the birth of
the New Deal. So it's interesting, I think to see

(15:27):
kind of how her story played out after having seen
the fire Phoenix situation, I guess. And throughout the years,
people have continued to follow the stories of people who
were there, people who witnessed the fire, and people who
were a part of it, who were part of that
terrible experience. Rose Friedman, the last living survivor, died in
two thousand one at the age of one seven, and

(15:48):
there were a lot of stories about her at the time.
I mean, her account is really interesting to read to
and it kind of gives you a sense of what
we were discussing earlier, that you had that one split
second decision to make. She had she knew the management
was going to get out, or that they had the
best chances, and had decided to go up instead of down. Yeah,
she went up to the tenth floor and it turned
out to be a great choice. She went up to

(16:09):
the roof and she survived. Unfortunately, not everyone did, as
we know, and a lot of the people who died
were identified by their family members. Later. They set up
this temporary morgue and family members would come by and
identify their kin and that's how they came up with
this long list of the deceased. But there were six
people who weren't identified um in those years immediately following

(16:32):
and just this year, researcher Michael Hirsch finally identified those
six unclaimed people who were burned so badly that they
couldn't be recognized after the fire. So at the centennial
commemoration outside of the building this year on March, the
names of all one forty six people were read for
the first time. So it's I guess it's good that

(16:52):
they're finally all recognized and can be memorialized. Yeah, and
you can still find out a lot about them and
kind of read about their stories. There are lots of
articles out there, I think that you can look into
and we didn't get to go too much into them today,
which I know I was kind of complaining about that
to say earlier, I was like, I wish we had
tons and tons of time to just talk about some

(17:14):
of these personal stories and you know, not just the victims,
but the survivors and how they got out and um
lifts a tale to tale and all this influence the
rest of their lives too. Yeah. And so I guess
if you guys have any stories out there that you
know of the Triangle Fire or some of the survivors
that you want to share with us, UM, maybe a
personal connection or a little known story that's not really

(17:37):
out there, please send it to us. You can write
us at history podcast at how stuff works dot com,
or you can hit us up on Facebook or on
Twitter at Myston History. Yeah. And if you want to
learn a little bit more about labor unions, we have
an article on that. You can find it by going
to our homepage and searching for labor unions at www
dot com, step works dot com, m h H. For

(18:03):
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
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