The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire -- Part I
March 25, 1911 -- Saturday afternoon. Near the end of their six-day, fifty-two-hour workweek, it was almost quitting time for 275 women at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
On the top three floors of New York's ten-story Asch Building, a modern fireproof structure, men and women (mostly immigrants and mostly women between the ages of thirteen and twenty-three) were gathering their belongings. On the ninth floor, one was teaching a fellow worker a dance step. Nearby, others were sharing a cake -- celebrating one young woman's recent engagement.
Less than half an hour later, many of them -- most from the ninth floor -- lay dead on the sidewalks below. Others died inside the building. The final toll was 146 dead. They were victims of the worst factory fire in the history of New York City.
The fire started shortly after 4:30 p.m. in the eighth-floor cutting room. No one really knows how it began -- perhaps a carelessly dropped match -- but flames suddenly licked out. Paper patterns draped over nearby tables blazed. The fire climbed to the garments hanging overhead. Then, fed by bolts of lightweight fabric, "heaps of scraps, machine oil, cleaning fluid, the wooden floor trim, window frames and shades, chairs, tables -- and then clothes and hair" -- it raced out of control.
The foreman and the tailors frantically tried to douse the flames with buckets of water, but their efforts were futile. So rapid was the spread that many bodies found after the fire were still bent over their sewing machines. Most died within the first ten minutes of the blaze.
Outside, by a little after 4:30 p.m., a crowd began to gather. They had heard a muffled explosion, "like a big puff," and at first they could see only small wisps of smoke drifting from an eighth-floor window. "But within a few moments," wrote New York World reporter James Cooper, "the entire eighth floor was spouting little jets of flame from the windows as if the floor was surrounded by a row of incandescent lights."
At first, onlookers believed they saw bales of fabric being thrown from the windows. But then a breeze caught at the cloth. It "disclosed the form of a girl shooting down to instant death."
On the ninth floor, desperate women headed for the two passenger elevators and a stairway at one end of the loft. The crush of people at the stairway door slammed it shut: The doors opened in, rather than out. Later inquiries found that other doors leading from the shop areas had been locked, presumably to keep the women at their sewing machines or to keep them from stealing.
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