According to survivor Yetta Lubitz, the first warning of the fire on the 9th floor arrived at the same time as the fire itself. People and horses draped in black walk in procession in memory of the victims.Ī bookkeeper on the 8th floor was able to warn employees on the 10th floor via telephone, but there was no audible alarm and no way to contact staff on the 9th floor. Problems playing this file? See media help. Bodies of the victims being placed in coffins on the sidewalk The building's south side, with windows marked X from which 50 women jumped 62 people jumped or fell from windows. Although Blanck and Harris were known for having had four previous suspicious fires at their companies, arson was not suspected in this case. The Insurance Monitor, a leading industry journal, observed that shirtwaists had recently fallen out of fashion, and that insurance for manufacturers of them was "fairly saturated with moral hazard". A series of articles in Collier's noted a pattern of arson among certain sectors of the garment industry whenever their particular product fell out of fashion or had excess inventory in order to collect insurance. A New York Times article suggested that the fire had been started by the engines running the sewing machines. Īlthough smoking was banned in the factory, cutters were known to sneak cigarettes, exhaling the smoke through their lapels to avoid detection. The scraps piled up from the last time the bin was emptied, coupled with the hanging fabrics that surrounded it the steel trim was the only thing that was not highly flammable. Beneath the table in the wooden bin were hundreds of pounds of scraps left over from the several thousand shirtwaists that had been cut at that table. The Fire Marshal concluded that the likely cause of the fire was the disposal of an unextinguished match or cigarette butt in a scrap bin containing two months' worth of accumulated cuttings. Both owners of the factory were in attendance and had invited their children to the factory on that afternoon. The first fire alarm was sent at 4:45 pm by a passerby on Washington Place who saw smoke coming from the 8th floor. Fire A horse-drawn fire engine on the way to the burning factoryĪt approximately 4:40 pm on Saturday, March 25, 1911, as the workday was ending, a fire flared up in a scrap bin under one of the cutter's tables at the northeast corner of the 8th floor. The factory normally employed about 500 workers, mostly young Italian and Jewish immigrant women and girls, who worked nine hours a day on weekdays plus seven hours on Saturdays, earning for their 52 hours of work between $7 and $12 a week, the equivalent of $191 to $327 a week in 2018 currency, or $3.67 to $6.29 per hour. Under the ownership of Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, the factory produced women's blouses, known as " shirtwaists". The Triangle Waist Company factory occupied the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the 10-story Asch Building on the northwest corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, just east of Washington Square Park, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers. ![]() īecause the doors to the stairwells and exits were locked – a common practice at the time to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and to reduce theft – many of the workers could not escape from the burning building and jumped from the high windows. The building has been designated a National Historic Landmark and a New York City landmark. Later renamed the " Brown Building", it still stands at 23–29 Washington Place near Washington Square Park, on the New York University (NYU) campus. The factory was located on the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the Asch Building, which had been built in 1901. ![]() Most of the victims were recent Italian or Jewish immigrant women and girls aged 14 to 23 of the victims whose ages are known, the oldest victim was 43-year-old Providenza Panno, and the youngest were 14-year-olds Kate Leone and Rosaria "Sara" Maltese. ![]() The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers – 123 women and girls and 23 men – who died from the fire, smoke inhalation, falling, or jumping to their deaths. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, on Saturday, March 25, 1911, was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in U.S.
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