The Triangle Factory fire being extinguished, 1911. Courtesy of New York Magazine.
The triangle shirtwaist factory fire
That door was locked, and the door that opened into it, opened on the inside. - Edward F. Croker, the fire marshal and a witness, at a hearing, 1915. Courtesy of UMKC. 
The collapsed fire escape, 1911. Courtesy of The Everett Collection.
|
On March 25th, 1911, 146 of the 500 Triangle Factory workers walked into work not knowing they would never walk out. Nobody knows how the fire was actually started, but it was speculated that a cigarette flew into a basket of blouses on the eighth floor at approximately 4:30 PM. Workers tried to escape the factory, but there was virtually no way out. The fire escapes could only handle very few people at a time and were starting to collapse. The doors were locked to prevent theft, and the elevators only moved very few people at a time and were staring to fail. The fire was now spreading to the ninth and tenth floors, and people either burned alive or jumped out of the windows. Harris and Blanck escaped.
|
Police officers started attending to the jumper's bodies.
I was walking through Washington Square when a puff of smoke issuing from the factory building caught my eye... I saw every feature of the tragedy visible from outside the building. I learned a new sound--a more horrible sound than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding, living body on a stone sidewalk...Thud-dead, thud-dead, thud-dead, thud-dead. Sixty-two thud-deads.
- William Shepard, an eyewitness, 1911. Courtesy of Milwaukee Journal.
|
|
The firefighters arrived at approximately 4:45 PM and tried to extinguish the flames and save workers. They soon learned that their ladders could only reach 6 stories high and that their hoses could barely spray the 9th and 10th floors. The firemen tried making a net for jumpers, but it fell apart on impact.
|
|
There were so many dead bodies that a makeshift morgue was organized. The morgue was on East 26th Street, which was soon dubbed 'Misery Lane' because of the many families searching for their deceased loved ones.
|
At midnight, the doors opened. The first in a growing line of friends and family members began shuffling up one long row and down the other. Low voices, slow footsteps, the cry of gulls, and the lapping of water punctuated the heavy silence. - David Von Drehle in Triangle: The Fire that Changed America. Courtesy of Ephemeral New York. |
I used to dream I was falling from a window, screaming. I remember I would holler to my mother in the dark, waking everybody up, 'Mama! I just jumped out of a window!' Then I would start crying and I couldn't stop.
- Rose Cohen, a witness, in a Leon Stein interview. Courtesy of "The Triangle Fire" by Leon Stein.