The Triangle Fire of 1911, Part 2

By the eleventh minute of the fire only two escape routes on the ninth floor remained, one of which was the Washington Place elevators. The two elevators came to the ninth floor two or three times, filling with at least 24 people each time. They rescued approximately 150 people. The other way was the Greene Street exit to the roof, which was quickly gone due to the uniting fires. After the elevators left for the final time people got desperate and they started to jump for the top of the elevator, or slide down its cables, or even when the top was out of sight, so rather then burn they jumped down the shaft. One elevator became stuck under the weight of 19 bodies and the rails for the other were distorted by heat. By the time they gave up on the nets, eighty or ninety workers remained trapped on the ninth floor. They began to jump. A young man held four women, one after the other, out the window and let them drop. The fourth one was his lover who he kissed, and then jumped after her. Some jumped toward the ladder, none making it. They came down in groups or 'showers' as large as 33 at once. The last body fell at 4:57 PM. Her dress got caught on a steel hook and she hung there until her clothing burned away and she dropped. ¹⁹

IV

The fire was under control a half hour after it started. The New York Times believed it to be the worst workplace incident NYC had ever seen. The firemen, police, and paramedics were left to carry down the dead. They used the rig and pulley method, the corpses coming down stacked on boards. Thousands gathered to watch. A heap of corpses laid on the sidewalk for more then an hour. They started lowering bodies at eight and continued past midnight. Fifty-four people had jumped or fallen to their deaths. One hundred twenty-five girls burned to death and needed to be lowered down on the boards. ²⁰ Officers inspected, described, and tagged each victim, placed them in their boxes and stacked them in wagons to be taken to Manhattan's Charities Pier, a.k.a "Misery Lane," the makeshift morgue. Bodies were piled thickly, and the pavement was strewn with victims' possessions, which were collected in large baskets to be claimed at the morgue.²¹

At midnight the doors to the makeshift morgue opened. The lights didn't provide enough light to see into the coffins, so policemen stood with lanterns every few feet. When someone paused to look the policemen would move to the box and shine the light on it. This went on for four days. 100,000 people lined up to see the bodies. Eventually a nurse was stationed at the entrance in order to weed out the pickpockets and grave robbers from those actually grieving. Most of the bodies were identified by hair clips, teeth, shoes, or personal effects because, as the New York Times put it, the bodies that were burned were burned beyond recognition. On some the family members couldn't even recognize the remains as being human. Some corpses were just pieces, like a torso, or limbs had burned off. One teenager identified her boyfriend by a pocket watch with her picture inside of it. Thirty-five thousand people marching in the funeral procession and a quarter of a million lined up to watch, all in black. ²²