On March 25th 1911, New Yorkers were shocked at the spectacle of young women throwing themselves
from the ninth floor of Manhattan's Ash building. The Triangle Shirtwaist
Factory Fire was the deadliest industrial accident in the history of New York City,
and a turning point in the history of the American labor movement that a recent book
on the subject called, Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle
Shirtwaist Factory Fire said, “Pierced the perpetual conscience of citizens everywhere.”
The fire has been the subject of many books and documentaries, and a full accounting of the fire
would be on the scope of a single episode of the History Guy, but recent discoveries regarding
the fire have illustrated the fragile nature of history as some of the most important records,
of one of the most famous events in American history, almost became forgotten history.
The fire started around 4:30 in the afternoon on Saturday March 25th, just as workers were
getting off for the day. Shirtwaists were a type of blouse popular with women office workers in
the late 19th century and early 20th centuries. The U.S Census Bureau notes that at the height of
their popularity the manufacture of shirtwaist employed more than 60 thousand garment workers
in the United States, with the majority in New York and New Jersey. But their popularity meant
to competition in manufacturers like the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, owned by immigrants Max Blanck
and Isaac Harris, which occupied three floors of the 10-story Ash building on the northwest
corner of Green Street and Washington Place, were pressured to keep costs low.
Peter Liebhold of the National Museum of United States History wrote in a 2018 edition of
Smithsonian Magazine, “Today few realize the role that American consumers had played in the tragedy.
At the turn of the century a shopping revolution swept the nation as consumers flocked to downtown
Palace department stores attracted by a wide selection of goods, sold at inexpensive prices in
luxurious environments.” The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory workers made ready to wear clothing,
the shirtwaist that young women in offices and factories wanted to wear. Their labor and low
wages made fashionable clothing affordable. The uncomfortable truth is, consumer demand
for cheap goods had pushed retailers to squeeze manufacturers, who in turn squeezed workers.
Working conditions were certainly strict, in 1911 their employees supposedly worked 52 hours a week,
nine each weekday and seven each Saturday although first-hand accounts state that longer hours were
expected. They made around seven to twelve dollars a week, the equivalent of about two
to three hundred dollars a week in today's currency. They were hired by subcontractors,
the owners didn't know how many people were employed or what their rates were.
Many of the workers were young women and girls, largely new immigrants as young as 14 years old.
Surprisingly however the Triangle Shirtwaist Company was not typical of sweatshops at the time.
Leopold writes, “The Triangle Waistshirt Company was not however a sweatshop by the standards of
1911. What is rarely told, and makes the story far worse, is Triangle was considered a modern
factory for its time. It was a leader in the industry, not a rogue operation.” Fire alarms,
sprinkler systems and fire drills were available but not required. Buildings were required to
have roots of escape, but as the fire would prove, they were insufficient. Edward Croker,
Chief of the New York Fire Department at the time of the fire was quoted in the Great Falls Montana
Tribune in September 1911. “During the last year, New York City paid 8 million dollars in support
of its Fire Department, but less than fifteen thousand dollars was expended in fire prevention.”
Leopold notes that New York business owners had objected to proposed regulations requiring
sprinkler systems as being cumbersome and costly just three weeks prior to the fire.
The event was almost shockingly brief, the fire began on the eighth floor of the factory
surrounded by the highly flammable fabrics it spread and engulfed the building within
15 horrifying minutes. While most of the workers on the 8th and 10th floors escaped, the 9th floor
was hellish. The doors to one side of the building were locked or blocked; this was illegal. Various
explanations were used to explain the reasoning, one account says that it was a method to prevent
workers from being tardy, locking them out if they arrived late. Others suggest that the purpose was
anti-theft precautions put in place by Blanck and Harris; locked doors meant that employees could be
searched before leaving. Yet another explanation is that Blanck and Harris were trying to keep
Union organizers from entering the building. While people on the 10th floor including Blanck
and Harris, and Blanck's two young daughters and a governess escaped to the roof and employees on the
eighth floor escaped down, on the ninth floor the exits were blocked. The fire escape didn't lead to
the ground and it wasn't maintained, eventually collapsing, throwing 20 girls to their deaths.
The victims tried other means of escape, some tried unsuccessfully to slide down the cables of
the elevator shaft or jump through the air shafts. Others waited for rescue but when Ladder Company
20 arrived their ladders couldn't reach the upper floors, and safety nets broke under the weight of
those that jumped. On one side dozens willingly chose to jump, leading onlookers to briefly think
that fabric was being thrown from the building. On another, the women were ablaze and falling.
The account of reporter William Shepard who witnessed the event was reported in the Milwaukee
Journal just two days after the fire on March 27th. “I reached the building before the alarm was
sounded. I witnessed every feature of the tragedy that could be seen from outside the building.
I learned a new sound. A sound more horrible than description can picture,
it is the thud of a speeding, living body, on a stone sidewalk.”
146 workers, 123 women and girls, and 23 men died. Blanck and Harris were indicted for manslaughter
in the trial which occurred the following December featured wrenching testimony from survivors,
but their famous attorney Max Steuer was able to create doubt in the minds of the
jury whether the owners were aware that the doors were locked. The jury deliberated for
an hour and a half before finding them not guilty. They were found guilty of wrongful
death in a civil suit but paid just seventy five dollars per deceased victim. Their fire
insurance, taken to cover their fire losses, amounted to four hundred dollars per victim.
The public outrage invigorated the union movement and resulted in new regulations
both for fire safety and working conditions. The US Department of Labor wrote in the 2021
blog post that the public reaction to the fire eventually resulted in the creation of the
Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The fire is considered a watershed. Historian
David von Drehle's 2011 book on the subject called it, “The fire that changed America.”
And yet for all its fame and importance,
the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire provides a dramatic lesson in how history can be forgotten.
History was lost nearly from the start. Even at the time it was not clear who exactly had died
in the fire. A 2011 edition of The New York Times wrote, “No New York City agencies and
no newspapers at the time produced a complete list of the dead.” That might seem extraordinary today,
but the Times notes, “The obscurity of their names is evidence of the times when lives were
lived quietly and people were forced by economic and familial circumstances to swiftly move on from
tragedies. With no Facebook or reality television cameras to record their every step and thought.”
Many victims who died in the fire could not be identified, and six unidentified bodies
were eventually buried in the Cemetery of the Evergreens between Brooklyn and Queens.
The funeral for the six became a rallying point in which, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote, “On the
day of the procession, thousands of mourners from both Brooklyn and Manhattan were in attendance.”
The paper writes, “The reserves for every police station were out and the crowds were
held in order with difficulty. Women broke through the line screaming, and sobbing,
and crying out against the death of the unfortunate girls.” The procession was
carried out in pouring rain, the Brooklyn Citizen wrote, “The paraders yesterday were mostly women,
young women and older women all with rain soaked garments. Thousands hatless and there's many more
with thin shoes soaked from the rain. All in black or dark colored dripping clothes, many who seem to
need hospital care, many emaciated, all wearing on their white faces the expressions of grief.”
The Central New Jersey Home News wrote that 90 unions were represented at the procession,
that many factories in the city closed while their employees marched in the parade. Newspapers at the
time differed in the reported number buried, and many said that these unidentified were all
girls. The coffins were eventually moved to a different spot in the cemetery where a memorial
was placed, and represented the remains of five women and one man. “However,” the Times wrote,
“almost a century after the fire, the five women and one man, all buried in coffins under
the Evergreens Monument remained unknown to the public at large.” But that changed when an amateur
genealogist named Michael Hirsch was hired as a co-producer for an HBO documentary commemorating
the centenary of the fire. Hirsch spent nearly four years combing primary sources, including
many of them ethnic publications that had to be translated to find previously uncovered names, as
well as Red Cross reports and grave markers. The Times notes that Hirsch was able to reconstruct
what Cornell University's Curtis Lyons described as, “The best ever produced on the question.”
“And so,” The Times wrote, “In 2011 for the first time at the Centennial commemoration of
the fire on March 25th, outside the building in Greenwich Village where the Triangle Shirtwaist
Company occupied the 8th 9th and tenth floors, the names of all 146 dead will finally be read.”
The unidentified whose funeral had represented such an outpouring of grief finally had names.
The newspaper Forward wrote that, “A new stone marker placed in front of the monument at the
cemetery of the Evergreens declares the site to be the final resting place of Max Florin,
Concetta Prestifilippo, Fannie Rosen, Dora Evans, Josephine Cammarata and Maria Lauletta,
names almost forgotten, that deserve to be remembered.” Lauletta’s great-granddaughter
was quoted in The Times, “It means that there's a recognition that she actually died in the fire.
To me that's a finality. She positively can be part of the record of those who died.”
But the names of the dead were not the only details to be lost and then found. A
stunning development demonstrated exactly how fragile the preservation of history can be.
When journalist and author David von Drehle decided to write a
history of the fire in the early 2000s he was caught by surprise.
“I discovered,” he wrote in the 2006 edition of Smithsonian Magazine, “that virtually all the key
documents concerning the Triangle fire had been lost or destroyed. Records of the Fire Marshal's
investigation, long gone. Files of the coroner's special jury vanished. Despite the significance of
the fire to the history of New York City, even the transcript for the famous trial had disappeared.”
Von Drehlei noted that in a 1962 history entitled, The Triangle Fire, author Leon Stein,
who had been editor of the official newspaper of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union,
clearly had access to a full trial transcript. Not only did Stein quote parts of the trial in
his book, but his notes had been preserved and clearly referenced the transcript. Yet when von
Drehle went to access the transcript in the New York State archives it was mysteriously missing.
Sometime around 1970, an archives official explained, New York's John
J. College of Criminal Justice received a grant to transfer important court records to microfilm.
Somewhere between the courthouse and the college, the Triangle record was lost forever.
And yet, Cornell University's website, Remembering the 1911 Triangle Factory fire notes,
it is likely that at least three copies of this transcript originally existed. The copy of the
record maintained by the court, the prosecuting attorney's copy and the defense attorneys copy.
Von Drehle went on an interesting quest searching unsuccessfully through University library and
Museum collections for the lost transcript to one of the most important trials in labor history.
In a footnote at the bottom of a short biography of Max Steuer, the trial attorney who had
successfully defended Blanck and Harris, he found out that many of Steuer's Records had been donated
to a bar association, the New York County Lawyers Association, but the association's librarian told
them that he had no idea where the records may be. But the librarian posted questions on a listserv,
and a former librarian with the organization was able to put them on the right track.
Steuer had at some point had his carbon copy of the trial transcript bound,
and von Drehle and the NYCLA librarian managed to find volumes one and three of a three volume set.
Volume two was still missing. “Still it was an extraordinary effort of Journalism
to find the around 1,300 pages of the 2,000 page transcript even though,”
he writes, “the cheap paper was crumbling between my fingers.”
The transcript has now been digitized and posted online, there's a link in the description. It was
a painstaking process because the transcript was so deteriorated that it had to be painstakingly
proofread and reconstructed by the library's editorial assistant. Portions of the missing
second volume have also been reconstructed using the quotations in Stein's 1962 book and his notes.
Von Drehle’s discovery not only brought back into the record some of the most specific details of
the events surrounding the fire, it led to a specific surprise to 81 year old Boston resident
Martin Abramowitz. Quoted in a 2022 edition of the Jewish Telegraph Agency, Abramowitz notes
that his father, Isador Abramowitz worked at the factory. “Sometime in my young adulthood
in the early 1960s,” he wrote, “my mother casually mentioned that he had been working at the Triangle
Shirtwaist company in 1911, and was lucky enough to be out of the building making a delivery when
the fire hit.” Yet the rediscovered trial transcript uncovered a forgotten bit of
information. The fire started in a scrap bin of a cloth cutter named Isadora Abramowitz.
Abramowitz was called as a witness for the prosecution. His testimonies included in
the rediscovered transcripts where he indicated that he was there when the fire started and was
standing at the end of the table where it started. When asked what he did when he first saw the fire
he responded, “I spilled a pail of water on it.” The transcript doesn't ask how Abramowitz escaped
the fire although he was apparently the first to discover it. It also doesn't say exactly how it
started although von Drehle writes, “At any rate, the Fire Marshal would later conclude that someone
tossed a match or cigarette butt into Abramowitz’s scrap bin before it was completely extinguished.”
That leaves Martin Abramowitz with a difficult possibility. Did his
father start the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire?
His father would have been just 18 at the time, and Abramowitz wondered if he could have reached
the position of a cutter at such a young age, but his research of Census records suggested
that he was in fact a cutter at the time. That however would not have been consistent with what
his mother told him about his father being out making deliveries when the fire started.
“However,” Jewish Telegraph Agency writes, “Martin's older brother Carl,
who was in his early 90s and lives on Long Island told him recently that their father had,
in fact, told him that he had been at the factory, saw the fire erupt, and fled.”
There may have been more than one Isadore Abramowitz serving as a cutter that day.
Abramowitz cannot be sure that his father was the man who testified at the trial. He notes,
“Since the payroll records went up in the blaze there was no way to know.” And if it was his
father, more questions remain. Was his father responsible for the fire, likely caused by an
unextinguished cigarette illicitly smoked, since it was prohibited in the factory, or might someone
else have thrown the careless butt. And did his mother modify the story that his father had been
out on delivery to protect him, or had his father not hold her the truth about his involvement.
In any case, it must have been a shock to hear 100 years after the fire, that his father may have
been its cause. “Although,” he says, “I've never been able to conclusively determine that my father
caused the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.” However he is leveraging this no longer forgotten family
history to help raise funds for a planned Memorial to be placed in the still-standing building
where the fire occurred, now called The Brown building, part of the New York University campus.
“The reason I'm telling the story about my father now,” he said, “is that I'm hoping it will bring
some attention to the plans for the memorial. I owe that to the girls in the name of my father.”
Today is of course Labor Day, which according to the U.S Department of Labor was established as a
national holiday by President Grover Cleveland in 1894 as an annual celebration of the social
and economic achievements of America's workers. It is not uncommon to invoke the Triangle Shirtwaist
Factory Fire when talking about Labor Day as it represented a turning point in the
U.S labor movement, that it shocked the nation and resulted in the establishment of Modern Day
workplace safety standards. In 2021 National Public Radio listed the Triangle Shirtwaist
Factory fire as one of the three pivotal moments in workers history to remember this Labor Day.
yet were not for historian David von Drehle and Michael Hirsch, the transcript of the famous
trial, and even the name of the workers who died, would have faded into forgotten history.
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