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The Triangle Fire of 1911, Part 2

© Bailey Lowenthal

III

Once the strike was over work went back to nearly normal. In the building that the Triangle company was located in there were two stairways, two passenger elevators, two freight elevators, and a little fire escape in place of the required third stairway. The workers were only allowed to use the freight elevators and the Greene Street stairway and there was always a line to enter work. Most of the young girls working at the company were their families' main support, either their families that lived with them or their families back in the old country to whom they sent their earnings through the mail. The operators sat facing each other with a trough between them for completed garments. To run the machines, they pressed a pedal that got power from a shaft beneath the table. There were a variety of jobs for sewers, body makers who stitched the torsos of blouses, sleeve makers, sleeve setters, cuff setters, collar makers, closers, hemmers, finishers, and pressers. Then there were the cutters who cut cloth from patterns, who were well paid and well treated. This exempted them from the no smoking policy. Sometimes their still burning butts went into the highly flammable scrap bins under the cutting tables, causing a few small fires here and there that were put out in a matter of seconds. In fact fires in the factory were not uncommon. The New York Times sited that "in four recent fires the Triangle building was reported unsafe because of insufficient exits." The owners of the Company had had four fires before, all after hours and each one destroyed extra clothes before the slow season. They prepared for fire by buying more insurance, not by fire drills or installing sprinklers. ¹²

Close to closing time on Saturday March 25, 1911 the pay was being distributed, Monday's work was being laid out on the table, and workers hoping to avoid the rush were moving towards the coat closet moments before the closing bell was to ring. At 4:45 PM the bell rang shutting off all power and signaling the end of the day. Workers got up to leave at a leisurely pace. On the eighth floor someone heard screams and saw smoke and then someone shouted fire. A girl ran to the factory manager, Samuel Bernstein, to tell him. He had put out at least three fires before using the red fire pails full of water that were placed in the factory. He looked towards where she was pointing and saw something bigger than before: the cutting table closest to the Greene Street windows was on fire. This table ran directly in front of the fire escape, so that workers would have to climb over it to reach the escape. It had started in one of the bins underneath the table. The scraps of fabric and tissue paper were highly flammable. The cutters tried putting the fire out with pails to no avail. The fire was near the Greene Street exit where workers were lined up one by one having their handbags searched. The wind from the elevators only enhanced the fire. One hundred eighty people were sent into a panic, rushing to all exits available including the fire escape. Dinah Lipschitz, a secretary, tried to alert the executives on the tenth floor, trying first the telegraph wasting two minutes because it was broken. Then she used the telephone, which rang to the desk of Mary Alter, the switchboard operator, on the tenth floor. She picked up the phone and listened long enough to hear fire and then dropped the phone to alert the bosses, both of whom were in. This made it impossible for Dinah to alert the ninth floor, because all the phone calls had to go through the now unattended switchboard. ¹³