The Triangle Fire (15 page)

Wednesday night, sixteen bodies remained to be identified.

On Thursday, Sarah Kupla, sixteen, died at St. Vincent’s Hospital. She had leaped from the ninth floor and had never regained consciousness.

The aged mother of Antonina Colletti complained at the coroner’s office that the body of her daughter, just returned to her, had been robbed of $1,600 sewn into the hem of her skirt. It represented six years of her earnings. The coroner had no record of the money.

Salvatore Maltese told the police that his wife, Catherine, had not been seen since the fire. He had been to the morgue every day. He could not identify her.

By evening of Thursday, the band of unidentified had been reduced to fourteen.

Little Esther Rosen had identified her mother on Monday. On Friday, she identified her brother, Israel, seventeen, by a signet ring.

Joseph Levin of Newark, New Jersey, had a sister who boarded with a family on Delancy Street. They called him on Thursday to tell him that she had not been home or heard from since the fire. He came to New York Friday morning.

His sister’s name was Jennie. She was nineteen. He found her easily. She was the pretty one, the untouched one, the Italian-looking one in Box 74.

Ten victims remained to be identified.

Joseph Brenman identified his beloved sister, Sarah—Surka, as he had called her during the ninth-floor turmoil. Anna Ardito was identified. Gussie Rosenfeld was identified.

One week after the fire, of the 146 dead, only 7 remained without names.

PART TWO

10. GUILT

Whereby the heavens were scorched.

—
CANTO XVII
:108

At 11:20
P.M.
on the day of the fire, Coroner Holtzhauser and Deputy Fire Commissioner Arthur J. O’Keefe stood among the last bodies on the Greene Street sidewalk waiting to be transported to the morgue.

“The Fire Department will have to meet a terrible responsibility,” said Holtzhauser.

“And so will some other departments,” was O’Keefe’s quick reply. “Fire Commissioner Waldo reported this place to the Building Department within the past three months as a building unsafe to use as a factory.”

The great debate had begun. Who was to blame for the tragedy?

Politicians and bureau officials, anticipating public wrath, searched for the language and logic with which to justify themselves and escape blame.

On Sunday, scores of city officials inspected the Asch building. Starting Monday, the city’s newspapers set up a clamor for the quick determination of responsibility. Political axes were sharpened. Four separate investigations were launched: by the Coroner’s Office, the District Attorney, Fire Commissioner Waldo, and Acting Building Department Superintendent Albert Ludwig.

The
Tribune
began to carry on its front page a standing box on the fire. One of the first of these read: “If any individual is guilty, by negligence or greed, he should be punished. Chief Croker warned New York after the Newark disaster. His warning was ignored.”

The
Evening Journal
, on the other hand, disdained such restraint and instead daily published on its front page the drawing of a gallows with the caption: “This Ought To Fit Somebody; Who Is He?”

From highest to lowest, public officials expressed themselves as appalled by the tragedy. With the same unanimity, all denied individual fault or departmental responsibility.

Among the first to insist he was appalled but also without responsibility was Governor John A. Dix, who declared: “I am appalled by the terrible disaster in New York. I find that I am powerless to take the initiative in an inquiry. My advices are that the city authorities alone are the ones to deal with this problem. They possess all the jurisdictions needed. I must refrain from discussing the question of placing Borough President McAneny on trial in the absence of charges formally made. It is hard to believe that such a thing could happen in this day and age.”

W. W. Walling had been, until March 1, the First Deputy State Labor Commissioner and had authorized an investigation of the Triangle factory because his department had received a complaint. He explained:

“The State Labor Department has no supervision in the matter of fire escapes in Manhattan. At the time of the shirtwaist strike, we investigated strikers’ complaints that too many persons were working on a floor in the factory of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. The complaint was unwarranted. Under the law, each worker must have 250 cubic feet of air space and this the Triangle employees had.”

The First Deputy State Labor Commissioner had stared at the killer and had not seen it, for at Asch, the proud modern fireproof building, the ceilings were sufficiently high to supply the air space required by law—while the crowding on the floor of the shop could be that much greater, and more dangerous.

State Labor Commissioner John Williams also “deeply deplored the tragedy.” In the next breath he added, “I am glad that my conscience does not have to bear the burden of responsibility for it.”

The Commissioner then pointed out that the courts had held the State Labor Department had no jurisdiction in the matter of fire escapes. In City of New York versus Sailors’ Snug Harbor, the Court of Appeals had declared in 1903: “We think it was the intention of the legislature to leave with the City of New York jurisdiction for the proper officers of that city over the subject of fire escapes upon factories.”

The state was unable to act. “When our inspector finds there is no fire escape, we send to the Superintendent of Buildings of the proper borough a special blank calling his attention to the matter with a request to advise us what has been done about it,” the State Commissioner of Labor added.

In the case of Triangle, the proper borough, of course, was Manhattan, and the proper Superintendent of Buildings was Rudolph P. Miller—the same Miller who a decade earlier had found fault with the Asch building plans. He was absent from the city when the tragedy occurred. But he could have found no stauncher defender than Borough President George McAneny, who stated:

“While it is true that I am responsible for the Department of Buildings, I am sure that no person expects that I shall personally go out and inspect each building to see that all provisions of the building code are complied with.”

Miller had been appointed superintendent of the department because the Borough President “believed him the best qualified man in New York City for the post…. He has worked for the city steadily for fourteen months, early and late, with no rest whatever. He has been at his desk up to nine and ten o’clock, night after night, working over problems.”

Unfortunately, the dynamo of public service was out of the country. McAneny continued: “He was invited by the government to inspect new methods of steel and concrete work in the Panama Canal and I urged him to go as we in New York City are vitally interested in the most advanced methods in the use of reinforced concrete.”

But others were not as ready to compliment Superintendent Miller or the department he headed. District Attorney Charles S. Whitman was another in the great army of civil servants who “was appalled by what I saw when I arrived at the fire.” He had ordered “an immediate and rigid” investigation for the purpose of “determining whether or not the Building Department had complied with the law.”

Coroner Holtzhauser went further and insisted that “the matter rests entirely with the Building Department. The Civil Service is rotten. Any drygoods clerk or anyone else can pass the examination and they are appointed inspectors. Hardly any one of them has any knowledge of buildings. What should be done is to appoint men who know something about the construction of buildings and how they should be equipped.”

But to Acting Building Superintendent Ludwig, “the inadequate force of the Building Department is not our only trouble.” The Department, he pointed out, had no power to police and “we must enforce all our rulings through the civil courts. When we bring an action there is invariably a long fight. The record will show the owner is usually the victor.”

Ludwig also emphasized the fact that the Department had only forty-seven inspectors with approximately fifty thousand buildings to inspect in Manhattan alone. In February, 13,603 buildings were listed as dangerous by the Fire Department, but the Building Department’s inspectors had been able to visit only 2,051.

With more than $100,000,000 worth of new construction annually in the area of its jurisdiction, it is impossible, Ludwig added, “for us, with our limited number of inspectors, to make regular examinations of the buildings that have once been passed as filling the terms of the law. The best we can do is to look into specific complaints that are brought to us from outside sources.”

The Acting Superintendent admitted, “It is quite true that the Asch building conformed to the law at the time that it was built and that there are many changes that would be demanded at the present time. It is also true that the department has the power to order any changes it sees fit to make a building conform to the law as it is at present.”

Nevertheless, he insisted that “we do not hear of violations of the law in old buildings unless they are particularly called to our attention.” Furthermore, “It would often work a great hardship on the owners of the building to require extensive changes. This is especially true of fire escapes.”

After viewing the twisted fire escape Coroner Holtzhauser had come out of the lobby of the Asch building “sobbing like a child,” the
Times
reported. Angrily he declared:

“Only one little fire escape! I shall proceed against the Building Department along with the others. They are as guilty as any. They haven’t been insistent enough and these poor girls who were carried up in the elevator to work in the morning, came down in the evening at the end of a fireman’s rope.”

Acting Superintendent Ludwig again admitted that the “fire escape was undoubtedly of the size and style ordered by the department at the time the building was put up but it would not be passed today.”

But this was no fault of Superintendent Miller, said Ira H. Woolson, spokesman for the National Board of Fire Underwriters. “There is no question that the emergency exits from the building were foolishly inadequate,” Woolson admitted. But there was no evidence to show that “this condition was attributable to the neglect or inefficiency of Mr. Miller.” On the contrary, said Woolson, Miller could neither make laws nor control such matters. “He must confine his efforts to the limits of the city statutes as he finds them.”

Borough President McAneny was even more insistent in his defense of Miller. It was “outrageously unfair” to attempt to place the blame on the Building Superintendent. The Borough President declared that he wished to state, “—and I cannot put it too strongly—that the present officers of the department have no responsibility in the matter whatever.”

Again, he pointed out that the judgment as to whether the exits in a building are proper and sufficient is made at the time building plans are filed. In the case of the Asch building, this was in 1900, and the plans “were acceptable then as complying fully with the law.”

This was, in fact, not true. Miller himself, when he was only an inspector, had found fault with the Asch plans and had called for a structural change in the fire escape. And even as the law stood in 1900, the building should have had three staircases.

McAneny acknowledged that the city code gave the Superintendent power to direct that fire escapes and “other means of egress” be added to buildings of the Asch type “where they are found lacking.” But the Building Department, as far as McAneny said he could learn, had “never attempted to go back to the original approval of plans or to order changes except in particular cases in which there was evidence of failure to comply with the law.”

The Building Department relied on the Fire Department to inspect for such evidence. No report about the Asch building had been forwarded by the Fire Department.

Speaking for the Fire Department, Chief Croker replied that he had long predicted such a loss of life as had occurred in the Asch building “unless fire escapes are put on all buildings in which there are a large number of persons.” He stressed the fact that “at the present time there is no law compelling the construction of such fire escapes,” and clearly located the responsibility for ordering them: “The matter is entirely within the discretion of the Building Department Superintendent.”

The Chief also said irritably, “There wasn’t a fire escape anywhere fronting on the street by which these unfortunate girls could escape. I have been arguing, complaining and grumbling about this very thing for a long time. But every time I raised the point some of these architects and ‘City Beautiful’ people would pop up and declare that to place trappings of iron and steel upon the front of buildings would destroy the beauty of the city. My answer to their argument is this fire.”

One of “these architects” was Francis H. Kimball, who readily admitted that Chief Croker was probably hitting at him. Kimball declared that his own objection to fire escapes on the fronts was not because “they would be unsightly, for a fire escape can be planned along good lines and made a really artistic adjunct to any building.” He preferred, he said, the type of fire-staircase required by law in Philadelphia. This he described as an entirely separate stairway leading to the street, which has no doors opening into the interior of the building and leads on each floor to outside iron balconies.

“Outside fire escapes,” Kimball noted, “while they may save a few lives, usually fail in high buildings. Who would want to go down a fire escape on the outside of a twenty-story building? Chief Croker isn’t afraid to go anywhere but we are not all like him. I climb about a good deal but I feel uneasy on a fire escape up in the air. And when you get frightened women and have flames and smoke pouring out of lower windows, outside fire escapes are not much protection.”

District Attorney Whitman also expressed sharp concern with the fact that the stairway doors opened inward. He said he was under the “impression” that this was a violation of the law and that inward-opening doors had been the cause of the terrible loss of life in the Chicago Iroquois fire in 1903.

Both Acting Superintendent Ludwig and Architect Julius Franke, who had worked on the original plans for the Asch building, gave the answer. Ludwig cited the “where practicable” condition modifying the directive that factory doors be made to open outward.

But Architect Franke was even stronger in his insistence that “the building was put up in strict compliance with the law.” Concerning the stairs, he said the law prescribed no “particular” width so that it bore no relation to either the square footage of each floor or the height of the building. Secondly, said Franke, it was considered that the stairs in the Asch building would be sufficient “to accommodate what it was supposed would be the traffic of the building.”

“When it was put up,” Franke added, “it was only intended for a loft and business building,” with apparently no thought, according to the architect, that it would become a tower of factories.

Acting Superintendent Ludwig had this in mind when he declared that Building Department Commissioner Brady had approved the plans in 1900 and that the completed building also was favorably considered by the Fire Department, the Department of Water Supply, Gas and Electricity, the Health Department, “and all other departments charged with inspection and approval. Since that time there has never been one complaint made against the Asch building.