The Triangle Fire (11 page)

Those who came there returned to it as a last resort, knowing that it contained none of the dead, yet hoping desperately that they might now recognize a ring or watch or purse and return with the knowledge of its number to identify a loved one at the morgue.

“Many turned away from the morgue and the Mercer Street station house to take positions again in the lines surrounding the factory building when they found there was no trace of their lost ones among the bodies in the morgue and no trinket at the station house which would enable them to claim some body burned beyond recognition,” the
Times
wrote. “Broadway, at midnight, in the vicinity of Washington Place, was thronged with women walking up and down and wringing their hands while calling the names of their kinfolk whom they had lost.”

The vigil continued through the night.

At dawn, the area was flooded by tens of thousands of the bereaved and the curious. The former were easy to recognize for they were “wan and weary, having tramped from morgue to hospital to police station and everywhere getting the same answer, ‘Only God knows.’ At dawn they found their way back to the blackened building that had proven a mausoleum for so many young lives.”

A soft-spoken priest wandered through the crowd. “This sorrow is economic as well as sentimental,” he told a reporter. When he turned from the priest, the same reporter saw an old woman, standing away from the crowd, take a small phial from her pocketbook. It had a death’s head on it. He sprang forward and wrenched it from her fingers, at the same time calling a policeman who stood nearby.

“This is the sixth that tried that trick,” the officer told the reporter for the
American
.

As the early morning sun began to rise, a Salvation Army trio standing in the Square opposite Washington Place struck up “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Few sang. Few even wept; there were no tears left.

A block away, on Waverly Place, a dozen desperate relatives stormed the police line and rushed forward toward a huge plate-glass window on the street level of the building that shared the backyard with the Asch structure. Their plan was to crash through the glass, rush to the roof and lower themselves down to the Asch ruins. The police drove them back, “begging them with tears in their eyes to be patient,” said the
American
.

Early in the morning, after pumping engines had drawn the water out of the flooded basement, the search for the missing was resumed in that area of the building. Two more bodies were discovered hanging over the steampipes behind the boiler.

They were the bodies of two young women who had crashed through the Greene Street sidewalk. Both bodies were mangled beyond recognition. On the right arm of one was a gold bracelet with a heart-shaped locket initialed “L. T.” The other still wore small diamond-set earrings.

Now, in the morning, Chief Croker was on the ninth floor for the fourth time since the fire. He spotted a mouse stirring in a corner. It was half drowned.

He picked it up and stroked it. Then he put it in his pocket, telling the two firemen with him he would take the creature home.

“It’s alive,” he said. “At least, it’s alive.”

8. DAY

A death by violence, and painful wounds,

Are to our neighbor given.

—
CANTO XI
:34

Starting early Sunday morning, great throngs of men and women, many with children, descended from all parts of the city upon the area around the Asch building. Thousands began to form into a slowly moving parade around the city blocks closest to the burned building.

In Washington Square, others settled down for the day, selecting a place to stand, a tree against which to lean, a railing on which to sit, remaining there, immovable, even after it was announced that no more bodies could be found in the building.

Shortly before ten o’clock, Inspector Max Schmittberger drove up to where Washington Place branches off from the Square and conferred with Deputy Police Commissioner Driscoll. The throng was growing larger by the minute, and the after-church and postprandial crowds were still to come.

A decision was made and the police whistles shrilled as the patrolmen firmly and steadily pushed back the crowd on all sides. When they were finished they had cleared the area bounded by Waverly Place on the north, Mercer Street on the east, West Fourth Street on the south, and the edge of Washington Square on the west.

The reporter for the
Tribune
studied the crowd, moving against the stream and at times picking a group or an individual for closer scrutiny. Occasionally, where four or five were huddled together, he heard a sob of despair and the replying murmur of consolation. Others stood conferring and pointing, trying to read from the distance the marks and signs of the disaster on the face of the building.

But there were also those on whom the impact of the tragedy was lost—“irresponsible young fellows with giggling girls on their arms who seemed to regard the whole affair as a festival.”

The privilege accorded the press enabled him to move within the area that had been cleared. For several moments he stood in the middle of the crossing of Washington Place and Greene Street where he could not hear the throng but could only see it down all the four directions—“as in a battle square formation.”

It seemed strangely silent from his vantage point. Silently, firemen and policemen hurried through their cleanup assignments. Even orders and signals from man to man were given in low voices as if in respect for those who had been carried away so short a time ago.

But when he walked down the middle of Washington Place toward the police line at the Square, the color and sound of the crowd came alive again. He spied in the Square a bright-colored hat, a small boy perched in one of the old trees. He passed through the police line and moving through the crowd crossed the street and entered the Square. “Every place of vantage from which any angle of the building could be seen was occupied.”

He continued his walk westward toward Washington Arch at the foot of Fifth Avenue. Had he not known of the toll of death the fire had taken his “journey through these people in the park would have been most misleading. The general atmosphere was that of a country circus or of a Vanity Fair.”

At the intersection of two footpaths stood a vendor of hot jellied apples, leaning on his small pushcart, calling his wares in a strident voice. “If those who passed close by him did not heed his voice he had recourse to his small bell which he tinkled energetically as he extolled the virtues of his stock.”

When the
Tribune
reporter came to the Washington Arch he saw a procession of “unwieldy Fifth Avenue stage buses,” heard the “resonant blowing of their horns and the rumble of their heavy wheels.” Atop the open buses, he noted, were gaily dressed men and women. “The hats of the women would form a gaudy bit of coloring against the dull green of the bus, like flowers in a bit of greensward, and the high silk hats of the men would add a touch of smartness to the effect.”

Now he turned and walked again in the direction of Waverly Place. Even the ringing of the conductor’s bell atop the buses jarred him.

At Waverly Place he fell in with the crowd on its mournful march. He found it easy to distinguish the curious from the stricken. Those for whom some part of their world had ended “walked slowly—as slowly, that is, as the police would allow them, with a curious halting step. Many of them kept their hands folded across their breasts—the women—and there was piteous appeal in their eyes.”

At Greene Street he left the parade, walking down the block again to Washington Place, finding again the center where the two streets crossed. “In the center of this square of sorrowing humanity, rising like a giant tombstone, the blackened and scarred building reared skyward.”

And around and around and around it, in a kind of macabre Maypole procession, the mourners moved. At the corner of Greene Street and Waverly Place they could see that corner of the building where the fire had started. Then they would cross narrow Greene Street, and the next building cut them off from the reporter’s view. He had made a mental mark of three of them—the old woman in the full skirt with the apron over it, the apron she had forgotten to remove as she started to run, yesterday; the old man with the short beard, the bowler hat, and a jacket with a sleeve that had ripped loose at the back shoulder; the boy young enough to be wearing short pants and ribbed black stockings.

In less than five minutes he spotted them again, this time slowly crossing Washington Place at the Mercer Street side of the cleared area. Again, they had slowed their pace, walking forward but with their eyes fixed on the building at this new angle from which they could see the place where the girls had plunged to their deaths in groups.

Early in the afternoon the man from the
Tribune
and a reporter from the
Times
were allowed to tour the Asch building.

The reporter for the
Times
found that on the top three floors, “the walls, floors and ceilings were intact as were the pillars which support the ceiling. Only the woodwork was burned away.”

On the tenth floor, in the area of the Triangle offices, he noticed a heavy safe and reported that officials took this as proof of the strong construction of the building for “had the flames been able to weaken the floors the safe would have gone crashing down through the building.”

Not a stick of furniture, except the iron structural parts of the machines, had been able to resist the flames. “The flames must have swept the great square rooms from side to side, leaving not one little corner in which refuge could be found.”

He inventoried the smaller links with life. “On the eighth and ninth floors were found more than two dozen rings, at least 14 of which the police say were engagement rings. Almost a bushel of pocketbooks and handbags were taken out of the debris.”

The
Tribune
reporter found the roof of the Asch building undamaged and concluded that there would have been no loss of life if all had been able to reach it. Two skylights had been shattered by the heat from below. There were a few small pools of water on the cement and gravel surface of the roof. He saw the marks and scratches on the side of the adjoining Greene Street building where many had climbed to safety.

Across the smaller narrow court on the west side of the building he saw the iron shutters of the New York University Law Library “hanging twisted and torn from their hinges while the glass of the windows was gone and the furniture inside seemed scorched and scarred by the terrible heat of the flames that had not penetrated the school building.”

He examined the Washington Place staircase, noting that “the walls of the stairway shaft were unscorched and unmarked by any sign of fire except immediately around the doors where, as the fire burned its way through the doors, the whitened walls had blackened for two or three feet only. The fire had not entered the stairway shaft.”

On this staircase he carefully examined the hoses and reported that in no instance had a hose been attached to the standpipe system. On every floor, the hose still hung next to the standpipe “and the couplings had never been put in place for use while the doors were closed between the hose and those whom it might have saved.”

He checked the elevators on the Washington Place side. On all three floors, the doors to the right-hand elevator shaft were closed. The doors to the left-hand elevator shaft were closed on the eighth and tenth floor but open on the ninth “and the elevator at the bottom of the shaft showed for what terrible purpose it had been torn open.”

The
Tribune
reporter returned to the tenth floor and went down on the Greene Street side. He found that “like the staircase on the Washington Place side this one, too, was wide enough for only one person to pass at a time. To pass another person, one had to wait on one of the wider steps which occurred at every sixth step where the stairs turned in the narrow shaft.”

On each of the three floors he found the freight elevators closed behind heavy iron doors. “On the ninth floor there was a heavy iron bar before them. There was no sign that the doors had been opened on any of the floors during the time of the fire.”

As the darkness deepened late on that Sunday afternoon, the crowd began to thin. Tomorrow would be a workday. By ten o’clock the last stragglers had left and only the firemen working in the building and the small group of policemen guarding it remained. The bereaved had carried their sorrow home or to the morgue.

Deputy Police Commissioner Driscoll estimated that during the day after the fire more than fifty thousand persons had visited the scene.

But early Monday morning there was a crowd again. Many had postponed a view of the burned building, planning to view it on the way to work. During the noon hour, when hundreds poured out of the nearby factories, there were nearly as many as on the day before.

In the afternoon, a small group of well-dressed young women, said the
Herald
, began to gather under the canopy of the New York University building on the Washington Place side.

The police had allowed them to pass through the lines. They were Triangle employees.

Each newcomer was warmly greeted, as if she had just returned from a long journey. In whispers and with tears “this one or that related for the hundredth time how narrow had been her escape from the flames and how poor Sadie or Esther or Mamie might have escaped too if she had only done thus and so.”

Not all of the reunions were happy ones. The
Herald
told of the young woman who said her name was Jennie Detora of Brooklyn who came through the police line and ran to a group of girls, asking if any had seen or heard of her cousin Alberta.

“One of the girls remembered having seen Alberta in a perilous situation on the ninth floor. While she was telling her story, Jennie Detora threw up her hands and collapsed on the sidewalk in a swoon. An ambulance took her to St. Vincent’s.”

And all the while, hawkers moved through the crowds. These enterprising fakers found eager customers. They had quickly assembled a stock of penny rings, glass jewelry, cuff links, and other trinkets. These they packaged in small match boxes and envelopes.

Up and down the streets they went, crying:

“Here they are! Get ’em while they last! Souvenirs of the big fire! Get a dead girl’s earrings! Get a ring from the finger of a dead girl!”