The Triangle Fire (16 page)

“Even the drop ladder at the bottom of the fire escape was in compliance with the law. The worst feature was that the escape ended in an enclosed court. There is nothing in the law to prevent this,” Ludwig declared.

Ten years earlier, Inspector Miller had considered that ladder arrangement to be faulty. Architect Franke’s explanation, however, indicated that then the danger had not been so great. “When the building was put up,” he said, “there was an opening from the court in which the fire escape ended through an alley about 15 feet wide. Since then, the old buildings in that block have been torn down and new ones put up that have enclosed the court on all sides.”

Time joined the other villainies.

“Even so, the Asch building is the only one on the block with a fire escape,” said Franke.

“If it had only been called to the attention of the Department, we would have ordered a change,” Ludwig asserted.

He had insisted several times that there is “no law governing the dimensions of the stairways.” They needed only to be “of a size we consider sufficient.”

But Fire Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo declared unequivocally that “in the opinion of the Fire Department, the means of exit from the Asch building were not good and sufficient as the law requires.”

“The employees were woefully ignorant of the layout of the building,” Fire Marshal William L. Beers pointed out. “Loft and factory buildings where people speaking different languages are employed should have placards in their languages telling them how to get out in case of fire. There should be fire drills. Quick exit is essential. The heat in the huge room where these girls were trapped became quickly so intense that they dropped where they stood, as flowers might wither under the same influence.”

“Those responsible for buildings,” Chief Croker bitterly remarked, “include the Tenement House Department, the Factory Inspection Department, the Building Department, the Health Department, the Department of Water Supply, Gas and Electricity and the Police Department to see that the orders of the other five departments are carried out. Yet, the Fire Department doesn’t have a word to say about fire escapes or fire exits.”

Who was responsible?

The conscience of an outraged city found voice in Lillian D. Wald. As a member of the Joint Board of Sanitary Control she had helped draw up the report written by Dr. Price, warning of the danger in the shops. She said:

“The conditions as they now exist are hideous and damnable. Our investigations have shown that there are hundreds of buildings which invite disaster just as much as did the Asch structure. The crux of the situation is that there is no direct responsibility. Divided, always divided! The responsibility rests nowhere!”

11. HELP

… dripping is with tears.

—
CANTO XIV
:113

The triangle tragedy set off a chain reaction of misery. In the city, death struck grief into the hearts of more than one hundred families. It also left them without breadwinners in a foreign land. The injured needed help; the dependent were stunned.

Outside the city, in far-distant lands, the slow but welcome flow of help from a relative in America suddenly stopped in scores of families. The horror echoed in homes in Russia, Austria, Palestine, Jamaica, Hungary, Roumania, and England.

The city opened its heart and its pocketbook. Public-spirited citizens quickly launched a massive relief effort through the Red Cross Emergency Relief Committee of the Charity Organization Society. Its chairman was Robert W. de Forest and its treasurer Jacob H. Schiff, the Wall Street investment banker.

The day after the fire, de Forest called on Mayor William J. Gaynor and urged him to issue an immediate appeal for contributions. This the Mayor did, starting the drive with a personal contribution of one hundred dollars. In his message to the citizens of New York he declared:

“The appalling loss of life and personal injuries call for larger measures of relief than our charitable societies can be expected to meet from their ordinary resources. I urge all citizens to give for this purpose by sending their contributions either directly to Jacob H. Schiff or to me for remittance to him.”

The emergency committee rallied notables from New York society. It included on its roster Otto T. Bannard, Cleveland H. Dodge, Mrs. William K. Draper, Lee K. Frankel, Mrs. John M. Glenn, Lloyd C. Griscom, Thomas M. Mulry, Leopold Plaut, Mrs. William B. Rice, and Dr. Antonio Stella. The secretary of the committee was Edward T. Devine.

At eight-thirty Monday morning, the committee opened an office in Room 11 of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building arcade at 1 Madison Avenue. The insurance company donated the space and the furniture. Mr. Devine was in charge.

By ten o’clock a staff of home visitors, clerks, and stenographers was on hand, recruited with the aid of the United Hebrew Charities, the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, and the Charity Organization Society. The Police Department provided the corps of visitors with lists of the dead and the injured.

By noon, the trained visitors were making the rounds of the bereaved homes. By Tuesday morning they were completing a revised card record of the victims; by Wednesday evening, every family on the police lists had been visited.

While the city-wide relief effort was getting under way, the garment workers launched their own aid campaign, in coordination with the drive of the emergency committee. On Sunday afternoon, Local 25 of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union held a meeting of its membership at Clinton Hall in the heart of the lower East Side.

It issued an appeal addressed not only to other units of organized labor but also to the general public:

“Everybody knows that the victims of this terrible catastrophe were poor working people whose families are either left destitute or can ill afford the cost of sickness or death. The sole support of the family in many cases has been swept away. This is an occasion when everyone can give his share and feel assured of assisting a worthy cause.”

The union committee was especially helpful in guiding the Red Cross workers to the stricken families and in overcoming the language barrier. A joint committee that, in addition to Local 25, included the Workmen’s Circle, a Jewish fraternal organization; the Women’s Trade Union League; and the
Jewish Daily Forward
cut across class lines and received the endorsement of such social leaders as Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont, Mrs. James Lees Laidlaw, Mary E. Richmond, Mrs. Henry Ollesheimer, and Mrs. Mary K. Simkhovitch. It received $100 contributions from Mrs. J. P. Morgan, Anne Morgan, and Mrs. Walter Lewisohn. Working with the committee were the Reverend John Haynes Holmes and the Reverend William H. Melish.

When the Red Cross emergency committee opened its doors on Monday morning, it had $5,000 ready for immediate distribution. But nobody came to ask for aid. On Tuesday morning, four relatives of victims turned up. They came not to ask for help but because they had been told to “report themselves.” The teams who visited the homes of the victims had found that the families, in most cases, were too shocked by grief to consider their own economic plight.

“We went into the East Side to look for our people,” says Rose Schneiderman. “Our workers in the Women’s Trade Union League took the volunteers from the Red Cross and together we went to find those who in this moment of great sorrow had become oblivious to their own needs.

“We found them. You could find them by the flowers of mourning nailed to the doors of tenements. You could find them by the wailing in the streets of relatives and friends gathered for the funerals. But sometimes you climbed floor after floor up an old tenement, went down the long, dark hall, knocked on the door and after it was opened found them sitting there—a father and his children or an old mother who had lost her daughter—sitting there silent, crushed.”

According to the Red Cross, the families affected by the tragedy were, for the most part, recent Italian and Jewish immigrants, largely dependent on the earnings of their girls and women working in the seasonal soft-goods industries.

These families had never before received charitable assistance; they did not seek it now. The Red Cross described them as being, in the main, naturally self-reliant. As proof, it cited the fact that “applications for assistance were received from only about half the employees who were in the fire and from very few who had not been physically injured although information about the fund and its great size was widely spread through the papers in their own languages.” In a number of cases, the committee continued, “relief has been declined on the ground that the family resources were sufficient. The committee has respected and honored such self-reliance.”

Meanwhile, money poured in from rich and poor alike. Checks arrived from businessmen with notes of sympathy; coins were wrapped in letters scrawled by children.

The
Times
printed “as received” a letter containing $10 written “in the uncertain hand of a child,” whose name was Morris Butler. It read:

“Dear Mr. Editor: i went down town with my daddy yesterday to see that terrible fire where all the littel girls jumped out of high windows. My littel cousin Beatrice and i are sending you five dollars a piece from our savings bank to help them out of trubbel please give it to the right one to use it for somebody whose littel girl jumped out of a window i wouldent like to jump out of a high window myself.”

Andrew Carnegie sent $5,000 to the Mayor’s office.

Movie producer William Fox announced that receipts on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday at the New York Theatre, Broadway and Forty-fifth Street, would be turned over to the relief fund.

Marcus Loew offered the fund a day’s receipts from his vaudeville theaters on Seventh Avenue, 149th Street and Third Avenue, the Lincoln Square, the Yorkville, the Circle, the Plaza Music Hall; and the Columbia, Bijou, and Liberty Theatres in Brooklyn.

At the Hippodrome, 500 employees raffled off a gold watch at fifty cents a chance and turned the proceeds over to the fund.

The Salvation Army set up coin pots at many places in the midtown part of the city.

Dan Morgan, manager of Valentine “Knockout” Brown, the lightweight boxer, said he and several managers of fight clubs intended to hold a series of benefits for the families of the fire victims.

Louis Roughburg’s newsstand stood at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighteenth Street. On Monday he nailed across the top of the stand a sign painted in heavy black letters: “Will Give Today’s Receipts to the Washington Place Fire Relief Fund.”

The depth to which the public had been stirred could be measured by the action taken by Leopold Hallinger, a wealthy real estate owner. He announced he would turn over his two houses at 322 and 324 East Houston Street for three months of free occupancy to families which had lost their wage earners in the fire. After that they could remain for monthly rents ranging from thirteen to sixteen dollars.

Through its secretary, H. E. Adelman, the Hebrew Free Burial Society warned the Jewish public against giving money to “schnorrers,” professional beggars going from house to house, pretending to gather contributions for the burial of fire victims.

“We are not asking a cent,” said Mr. Adelman. “We’ll stand it all alone. Of course, we need contributions badly but we are not sending around for them.”

The society, made up of five thousand of the East Side’s poor, had buried sixteen victims by late Monday. It announced it would provide in its Staten Island cemetery for Italian victims as well as Jewish because, said Mr. Adelman, “there is at present no Italian organization to take the place the society fills among the East Side Jews.”

New York’s great theatrical community, with traditional speed and generosity, prepared to help. On Sunday, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, director of the Metropolitan Opera Company, announced that the noted opera house was available free for benefit performances. The Musicians’ Union and the Stage Hands’ Union immediately offered to service benefit shows without charge.

Charles H. Burnham, president of the Theatrical Managers’ Association, undertook to arrange a program. More than three hundred performers offered their services. Three program committees were named: Gatti-Casazza, John Brown, and William Hammerstein for opera; Winthrop Ames, Alf Hayman, William and Sam H. Harris for drama; Percy Williams, Arthur Hammerstein, Marcus Loew, and E. D. Miner for vaudeville. The date of the benefit performance was set for Tuesday, April 11.

Not to be outdone, the rival independent theatrical managers were marshaled by Lee and J. J. Shubert for their own benefit performance at the Winter Garden on Friday, April 7, which began at one o’clock in the afternoon and ended at six. Everyone—actors, stage hands, ushers—donated their services. A1 Jolson was master of ceremonies. The benefit performance at the Metropolitan Opera House the following week was an even greater success. With George M. Cohan in charge of the acts, almost $10,000 was raised. With the proceeds of the Winter Garden show and other benefits, the New York stage had raised close to $15,000.

In the days following the fire, the headquarters of Waistmakers’ Local 25, ILGWU, on Clinton Street remained draped in black from roof to the ground floor, and every day it was besieged by bereaved relatives. In the first two days after the fire, the union’s committee provided for the burial of eleven girls. Under the plan worked out by the Joint Relief Committee organized by the union with William Mailly as secretary and Morris Hillquit as treasurer, the larger Red Cross committee referred cases in which the victim had been or still was a member of the union to this group for initial care.

The Red Cross was facing its first large-scale disaster operation in New York. It immediately set a policy aimed not so much at reimbursing financial losses as such but rather at restoring, as quickly as possible, the accustomed standard of living or preventing a serious lowering of that standard. It was also decided, for the first time, to reach across the world to help the families of victims of a local disaster.

The committee was able to do these things because of the size of the fund. The unprecedented liberality of contributions by the public, the committee felt, reflected a “passionate desire to do whatever remained in our power to compensate for the horrible event.”

The grand total contributed was $120,000, a huge sum by contemporary standards. Of this, $103,899.38 was in the Red Cross Emergency Fund; the remainder was in the union’s joint committee fund.

Far from setting a scale to compensate for a lost life, the Red Cross committee gave individual consideration to each case. To expedite this procedure a special conference of experienced social workers was organized, which included Mrs. Glenn, Dr. Frankel, and Mr. Mulry of the emergency committee; Mr. Adelman of the Hebrew Free Burial Society; John A. Kingsbury of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor; William I. Nichols of the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities; W. Frank Persons of the Charity Organization Society; William D. Waldman of the United Hebrew Charities; and William Mailly and Elizabeth Dutcher of the union’s joint committee.

The committee soon discovered that in a number of cases in which it tried to “obviate the lowering of the standard of living, it has been found even easier to facilitate an actual improvement; to grant a lump sum that sets a father up in business, for example.” In all cases, the committee exercised heart-warming compassion.

In the emergency committee’s Case No. 130, the widow of a machine operator was left with two small children. She was given $1,000 in May to enable her to buy a small store in Yonkers. By November, she was doing so well that she had engaged domestic help in order to be able to give more time to “building the business.” Even so, the committee set aside a $3,000 trust fund for the two children.

Similarly, in Case No. 7, a widow was left penniless. But her two children, fourteen and twelve years old, were stranded with grandparents in Russia. The emergency committee made an award of $250 with which the widow bought a share of ownership in a stationery store. Seven months later she was able to send for her children.

But in Case No. 18, the attempt to help in this way failed. The widow, with an eleven-month-old baby, could speak no English. The report describes her as remaining in an hysterically anxious frame of mind for several weeks and as going from agency to agency for advice. Finally, she, too, decided to buy a stationery store. But her health was poor. The emergency fund financed a summer stay in the country. In November, though she was still unable to work, the fund continued its aid.

The Red Cross handled a total of 166 cases. In 94 there had been one or more deaths; in 72 there had been no deaths. A total of $81,126.16 was disbursed for relief. Individual family aid ranged from $10 to $1,000 in families where there had been no deaths and from $50 to $5,167.20 where one or more lives had been lost.