The Triangle Fire (25 page)

“The so-called unavoidable or unpreventable accidents which, it has been said, were once believed to be the result of the inscrutable decrees of Divine Providence are now seen to be the result in many cases of unscrupulous greed or human improvidence. It is the duty of the state to safeguard the worker not only against the occasional accidents but also the daily incidents of industry; not only against the accidents which are extraordinary but also against the incidents which are the ordinary occurrences of industrial life,” Elkus concluded.

Twenty years before she became the Secretary of Labor in the cabinet of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the post she held until his death, Frances Perkins, on the day of the Triangle fire, was visiting friends “on the other side of the Square.”

“It was a fine, bright spring afternoon” she remembers. “We heard the fire engines and rushed into the Square to see what was going on. We saw the smoke pouring out of the building. We got there just as they started to jump. I shall never forget the frozen horror which came over us as we stood with our hands on our throats watching that horrible sight, knowing that there was no help. They came down in twos and threes, jumping together in a kind of desperate hope.

“The life nets were broken. The firemen kept shouting for them not to jump. But they had no choice; the flames were right behind them for by this time the fire was far gone.

“Out of that terrible episode came a self-examination of stricken conscience in which the people of this state saw for the first time the individual worth and value of each of those 146 people who fell or were burned in that great fire. And we saw, too, the great human value of every individual who was injured in an accident by a machine.

“There was a stricken conscience of public guilt and we all felt that we had been wrong, that something was wrong with that building which we had accepted or the tragedy never would have happened. Moved by this sense of stricken guilt, we banded ourselves together to find a way by law to prevent this kind of disaster.

“And so it was that the Factory Commission that sprang out of the ashes of the tragedy made an investigation that took four years to complete, four years of searching, of public hearings, of legislative formulations, of pressuring through the legislature the greatest battery of bills to prevent disasters and hardships affecting working people, of passing laws the likes of which has never been seen in any four sessions of any state legislature.

“It was the beginning of a new and important drive to bring the humanities to the life of the brothers and sisters we all had in the working groups of these United States. The stirring up of the public conscience and the act of the people in penitence brought about not only these laws which make New York State to this day the best state in relation to factory laws; it was also that stirring of conscience which brought about in 1932 the introduction of a new element into the life of the whole United States.

“We had in the election of Franklin Roosevelt the beginning of what has come to be called a New Deal for the United States. But it was based really upon the experiences that we had had in New York State and upon the sacrifices of those who, we faithfully remember with affection and respect, died in that terrible fire on March 25, 1911. They did not die in vain and we will never forget them.”

18. FIRE

Truly I wept …

—
CANTO XX
:25

On March 19, 1958, in the late afternoon of a miserable rainy day, I was checking out proofs of a special feature marking the forty-seventh anniversary of the Triangle fire in the pages of
Justice
, the ILGWU publication.

A call came in from the city desk of a local newspaper. The voice at the other end asked how many had died in the Triangle fire. I answered 146 and asked why he wanted to know.

“They’re coming out of the windows again!” was what I heard. He told me where.

I rushed to Houston Street and Broadway.

I stood there in the rain and, as if in a nightmare, watched a re-enactment of the Triangle horror, which had occurred not more than five city blocks away.

This was no new building such as the Asch had been at the time of its fire. 623 Broadway was already thirty years old at the time of the Triangle fire. Now, it was seventy-seven years old. It was six floors high, had no sprinklers, its fire escape was worthless, there had been no fire drills. It was shaped like a 90-foot-long wind tunnel, and in the middle of the floor areas were glass blocks, overlaid with wood in some forgotten and unrecorded time when the structure was converted from a warehouse to a factory building.

The fire had started on the third floor in a textile finishing firm using an oven box which blew up. It burned for seven minutes before an alarm was turned in—from the street. Almost until that moment, the workers on the fourth floor, busy making women’s undergarments in a clean, well-run, union shop, were unaware of the hell burning beneath them.

Then the smoke came. A courageous boss cautioned against panic, stayed with his workers, died with them.

For soon the glass blocks worked loose and the entire middle section of the fourth floor collapsed—flat, like a falling pancake. Twenty-four died.

My friend Josephine Nicolosi still lives in the neighborhood she called home in that distant time when she almost lost her life on the eighth floor of the Triangle shop. The rear windows of her top-floor tenement apartment on Second Avenue just above Houston Street face west. In the late afternoon of March 19 she had seen a pillar of black smoke rising in the sky. She grabbed her coat and hurried to the street.

Transfixed by the sight of the bodies being lowered in the baskets, we almost missed each other, and when I saw her suddenly, her face was wet with rain and tears. She gripped me by the wrists and shaking me demanded with anger and despair:

“What good have been all the years? The fire still burns.”

POSTSCRIPT

My chief sources of help in gathering the material for this book have been Steward Liddell, the newspaper reporters of New York City in 1911, and a group of survivors and witnesses of the Triangle fire.

Throughout the trial of Harris and Blanck, in December, 1911, Steward Liddell, court stenographer, kept the record straight. It is from that record that many who were trapped in the Asch building but somehow managed to escape speak directly in the pages of this book with sworn veracity.

In a time of personalized but anonymous journalism, the reporters of that day filled many columns about the fire with facts encased in unashamed emotion. One among them merits special mention.

Purely by chance, William Gunn Shepherd of the United Press was at the scene of the fire from its start. From behind a store front window across the street from the Asch building, he watched its progress and described the horror over the telephone to his city editor, Roy W. Howard, later head of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, who received it in the old World building on Park Row.

Until relief arrived, Shepherd stayed on the telephone, told the story as he saw it happen, his voice cracking time and again. In the newsroom, deserted on Saturday afternoon except for the four men working the telegraph trunk lines to the country, Howard cleared the lines with a stand-by order.

Shepherd returned to the newsroom worn and tired as were also the four men who had sweated it out at the receiving end of the phone. Howard broke the silence with the finest compliment he could give—a request to Shepherd to get to his desk to do a by-lined rewrite of the story.

Sometimes with quotation marks and at times without them, I have retained the words that first appeared in the New York
American
, the New York
Call
, the New York
Herald
, the New York
Evening Journal
, the New York
Sun
, the New York
Times
, the New York
Tribune
, the New York
World
and the
Jewish Daily Forward
. I have also drawn material from these magazines: the
American Federationist, Collier’s, Independent, Justice, Life and Labor, McClure’s, Outlook,
and
Survey
.

But my most treasured collaborators have been the survivors and witnesses of the fire, who have been kind enough to open their hearts to me. They had the right to refuse to talk about their painful memories. Some had lost dear ones in the fire. Not one of them, in almost fifty years, had ever returned to the scene of the tragedy.

That was true of the aged couple—Ercole Montanare and his wife—who came to my office. He had come with her to tell me how on the day of the fire, he and a friend, leaving their shop on Fourth Avenue, had decided to walk in the welcome sunshine to Canal Street only to be intercepted by the horror of the falling bodies.

On the way to my office, they had stopped to see if they could locate the Asch building. They weren’t certain, and at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place they went into stores and asked storekeepers which had been the Triangle building. No one knew.

Back on the sidewalk, they moved about slowly, two fragile old people looking up. Others looked at them and then lifted their own gaze upward, seeing nothing but the tall buildings. Then Montanare recognized it. “I knew it was the right building,” he told me, “because I could see again the bodies falling, I could hear again their screaming.”

The tragic day returned in full vividness. “That night, many years ago, I couldn’t sleep. The burnt and bleeding bodies kept falling. In the morning I took the elevated at Chatham Square and rode on the open platform to Bronx Park. I thought my chest would burst. The whole day I ran along the river in that park like a wild animal, spitting and screaming and swallowing big mouthfuls of the clean, sweet air.”

Some had not spoken of the fire in almost fifty years. Two refused to speak of it even now. A frequent pattern of the interviews was an initial reluctance to speak, then a sudden emotional outpouring of memories subsiding into a lengthy, calm series of recollections.

There were also humor and strange twists of fate in these visits. In Jersey City, one evening, I sat drinking tea with an elderly couple. Then Rose Cohen Indursky told me of the little girl she remembered who had come running up to the roof of the burning building wrapped in fabric caught by the flames. She had helped the youngster beat out the flames.

Three weeks earlier, in Brooklyn, Ida Nelson Kornweiser had told me she had never been able to learn the name of the girl who had saved her life by slapping out the flames eating the fabric she had wrapped herself in to run to the roof. There were tears in Rose Indursky’s eyes when I promised to arrange a reunion.

There were tears also one night in Hackensack, New Jersey, when bitter memory pierced the dignity of lovely Anna Gullo Pidone. At the start of our interview, she brought into the room and placed on the table before us, where it remained throughout the evening, a tintype of her sister in her confirmation dress—the sister who had died in the fire.

But there was also another evening filled with joy and excitement when my wife and I visited Ethel Monick Feigen and found her surrounded by a dozen children and grandchildren.

Soon after our arrival she took me aside and whispered to me that from the time of her first-born she had made it a practice to tell each of them, when they reached the age of twelve, about the big fire in which she had almost lost her life. Then she added, “They have all listened to me politely. But, you know, I think not one of them has ever really believed me. Now, you please tell them.” I did.

I looked a long time for Joseph P. Meehan, the heroic mounted policeman I first met in the newspaper accounts. Five days before the start of the demolition of the 8th Precinct Police Station on Mercer Street I asked the officer in charge for the day book for March 25, 1911.

He came around from behind the high desk and I followed him down into a deep subbasement with one bare bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling. The walls were lined with precinct record books starting at a pre-Civil War date. We found the book for March, 1911, and excitedly I turned the pages, running my finger down the timed entries until I found him again.

He had come into the station house at 6:30 that fateful Saturday and had wearily reported that in putting a victim into an automobile he had ripped the tail of the coat of his uniform.

I located him last year living in Manhattan’s mid-Sixties. Forty-nine years after his great gallop up Washington Place I came to him to talk about it. Every wall of his spacious apartment was covered with pictures, photographs, paintings, drawings—of horses.

He had been on horses for more than four decades, retiring as a high-ranking officer of the mounted police. Yes, he remembered the name of the horse he rode that day. “It was Yale, and I was the only one who could manage him.” No, he had never been compensated for his damaged uniform: “the entire skirt had been ripped off.”

Time ran out for some interviews. I would have talked, if I could, with Edward F. Croker. On December 10, 1929, ten persons lost their lives in the Pathé Studio fire at Park Avenue and 134th Street, where there was more film than the law allowed, where there were fewer fire extinguishers than the law required, and no sprinklers because Croker’s fire prevention company, on an annual $500 retainer, had advised appeal against an order to install them.

These have been the friends who have helped tell this story: Joseph Brenman, Sarah Friedman Dworetz, Ethel Monick Feigen, Joseph Flecher, Celia Walker Friedman, Sigmund Gelbart, Abe Gordon, Joseph Granick, Rose Glantz Hauser, Max Hochfield, Rose Cohen Indursky, Elias Kanter, Sylvia Riegler Kimmeldorf, Ida Nelson Kornweiser, Kate Weiner Lubliner, Dora Maisler, James P. Meehan, Josephine Nicolosi, Anna Gullo Pidone, Celia Saltz Pollack, Frank Rubino, Dora Appel Skalka, Sarah Cammerstein Stern, Joseph Wexler, Isidore Wegodner. Others were Mary Abrams, Mrs. Charles F. Bostwick, Jr., Daniel Charnin, Ercole Montanare, and Elmer E. Wigg.

I am indebted to YIVO (Yiddish Scientific Institute) for the use of Bernard Baum’s excellent memoir on preconflagration life at Triangle that has now been published by him in Yiddish.

Sigmund Arywitz, California State Commissioner of Labor, taped interviews with Triangle survivors in that state; by inviting me to broadcast on his radio program in the days following the Monarch fire, Tex McCrary made it possible for me to locate a number of the survivors of the earlier tragedy; New York Fire Commissioner Edward F. Cavanagh, Jr., and other officers of the New York Fire Department have helped educate me on technical matters pertaining to industrial fires. I have also used the “Preliminary Report of the Factory Investigation Commission, Albany, N.Y., 1912” and the “Report on Relief of Triangle Fire Victims, Special Committee, American Red Cross, New York, 1912.”

I have been a member of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union since 1928; until I joined the staff of its publication,
Justice
, in 1942, I worked as a garment cutter. In these last twenty years, close and constant association with ILGWU President David Dubinsky has been a source of unending insight and inspiration. My wife has patiently shared the throes of composition, aiding with her vetoes and applause. My colleague, Meyer Miller, was helpful with a critical reading of the first draft.

I owe a special debt to three great ladies who helped turn the Triangle tragedy into a force for change and reform. Eleanor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins, and Rose Schneiderman graced with their presence the Fiftieth Anniversary Memorial Meeting of the Triangle Fire which the ILGWU, together with New York University and the New York Fire Department, sponsored on Saturday, March 25, 1961. Fourteen survivors shared the platform with them.

The irony of history was evident in the fact that on that day there lay on the desk of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, awaiting his signature, a bill that would have in effect rescinded long overdue safety measures enacted following the Monarch fire. To some on the platform and to the old-timers in the audience gathered at the foot of what was once the Asch building, it must have seemed, indeed, that the passing years had made no difference.

David Dubinsky charged that if signed the bill would restore conditions as they were at the time of the Triangle fire, and Eleanor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins, and Rose Schneiderman helped picture the human meaning of such a reversal. The huge fire bell tolled for those who had died, a special corps of uniformed firemen along with Commissioner Cavanagh gave the salute, there were tears.

After the meeting I introduced the survivors to the three special guests, to Esther Peterson, now Assistant Secretary of Labor, and to Dubinsky. I saved three for the last.

They had met before but never formally. On the platform in the shadow of the Asch building I introduced to each other Sarah Cammerstein Stern, Sarah Friedman Dworetz, and Celia Walker Friedman, who fifty years earlier, almost to the hour, had lain bleeding and battered at the bottom of the elevator shaft down which each had leaped from the open ninth-floor elevator door.