The Triangle Fire (4 page)

Then the men stopped cranking. The ladder stopped rising.

The crowd yelled in one voice: “Raise the ladders!”

“But the ladder had been raised,” Rubino says. “It was raised to its fullest length. It reached only to the sixth floor.”

The crowd continued to shout. On the ledge, the girl stopped waving her handkerchief. A flame caught the edge of her skirt. She leaped for the top of the ladder almost 30 feet below her, missed, hit the sidewalk like a flaming comet.

Chief Worth had arrived at the scene at 4:46½, had ordered the second alarm to be transmitted at 4:48. Two more alarms were called, one at 4:55 and a fourth at 5:10.

In the first two minutes after his arrival, the Chief had assessed the situation. He directed his men to aim high water pressure hoses on the wall above the heads of those trapped on the ledge. “We hoped it would cool off the building close to them and reassure them. It was about the only reassurance we could give. The men did the best they could. But there is no apparatus in the department to cope with this kind of fire.”

The crowd watched one girl on the ledge inch away from the window through which she had climbed as the flames licked after her. As deliberately as though she were standing before her own mirror at home, she removed her wide-brimmed hat and sent it sailing through the air. Then slowly, carefully, she opened her handbag.

Out of it she extracted a few bills and a handful of coins—her pay. These she flung out into space. The bills floated slowly downward. The coins hit the cobblestones, ringing as she jumped.

Three windows away one girl seemed to be trying to restrain another from jumping. Both stood on the window ledge. The first one tried to reach her arm around the other.

But the second girl twisted loose and fell. The first one now stood alone on the ledge and seemed oblivious to everything around her. Like a tightrope walker, she looked straight ahead and balanced herself with her hands on hips hugging the wall.

Then she raised her hands. For a moment she gestured, and to the staring crowd it seemed as if she were addressing some invisible audience suspended there before her. Then she fell forward.

They found her later, buried under a pile of bodies. She was Celia Weintraub and lived on Henry Street. Life was still in her after two hours in which she had lain among the dead.

William Shepherd, the United Press reporter and the only newspaperman on the scene at the height of the tragedy, had found a telephone in a store and dictated his story as he watched it happen through a plate-glass window. He counted sixty-two falling bodies, less than half the final total.

“Thud—dead! Thud—dead! Thud—dead!” Shepherd began his story. “I call them that because the sound and the thought of death came to me each time at the same instant.”

As he watched, Shepherd saw “a love affair in the midst of all the horror.

“A young man helped a girl to the window sill on the ninth floor. Then he held her out deliberately, away from the building, and let her drop. He held out a second girl the same way and let her drop.

“He held out a third girl who did not resist. I noticed that. They were all as unresisting as if he were helping them into a street car instead of into eternity. He saw that a terrible death awaited them in the flames and his was only a terrible chivalry.”

Then came the love affair.

“He brought another girl to the window. I saw her put her arms around him and kiss him. Then he held her into space—and dropped her. Quick as a flash, he was on the window sill himself. His coat fluttered upwards—the air filled his trouser legs as he came down. I could see he wore tan shoes.

“Together they went into eternity. Later I saw his face. You could see he was a real man. He had done his best. We found later that in the room in which he stood, many girls were burning to death. He chose the easiest way and was brave enough to help the girl he loved to an easier death.”

Bill Shepherd’s voice kept cracking. But he was first of all a newspaper reporter, and he steeled himself to see and to report what untrained eyes might miss.

He noticed that those still in the windows watched the others jump. “They watched them every inch of the way down.” Then he compared the different manner in which they were jumping on the two fronts of the Asch building.

On the Washington Place side they “tried to fall feet down. I watched one girl falling. She waved her arms, trying to keep her body upright until the very instant she struck the sidewalk.”

But on the Greene Street side “they were jammed into the windows. They were burning to death in the windows. One by one the window jams broke. Down came the bodies in a shower, burning, smoking, flaming bodies, with disheveled hair trailing upward. These torches, suffering ones, fell inertly.

“The floods of water from the firemen’s hoses that ran into the gutter were actually red with blood,” he wrote. “I looked upon the heap of dead bodies and I remembered these girls were the shirtwaist makers. I remembered their great strike of last year in which these same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops. These dead bodies were the answer.”

At 4:57 a body in burning clothes dropped from the ninth floor ledge, caught on a twisted iron hook protruding at the sixth floor. For a minute it hung there, burning. Then it dropped to the sidewalk. No more fell.

2. TRAP

With sad announcement of impending doom.

—
CANTO XIII
:12

“My building is fireproof,” Joseph J. Asch insisted.

He talked to reporters in the sitting room of his suite in the Hotel Belmont, a grave-looking man of fifty, sun-tanned and sporting a white mustache. He and his wife had just arrived in the city en route from St. Augustine, Florida, to their home in Saugatuck, Connecticut. He first learned of the fire when he read about it in the Sunday morning papers.

“I was overcome by the horror of it,” he emphasized for the reporters. “The architects claimed my building was ahead of any other building of its kind which had previously been constructed.”

First plans for the construction of a building at Greene Street and Washington Place were filed in April, 1900, by an architect named John Wooley. He was acting for Ole H. Olsen of the Bronx who owned a 25- by 100-foot lot on the site and had acquired from Asch the adjoining 75- by 100-foot lot.

But Asch changed his mind, took over the combined site from Olsen, and decided to build for himself. His architect, Julius Franke, filed new plans with the Building Department on April 28, 1900. The plans were finally approved on July 13 of that year. The Asch building, representing a cost of about $400,000, was completed January 15, 1901.

The structure was 135 feet high. At 150 feet—or with one additional story—it would have had, as required by law, metal trim, metal window frames, and stone or concrete floors. At 135 feet its wooden trim, wooden window frames, and wooden floors were legal.

The law required only a single staircase in a building in which the floor space at each level was less than 2,500 square feet; if the single floor measured more than that but less than 5,000 square feet the building was required to have two staircases; there would be an additional stairway for each additional 5,000 square feet.

By this measure, the Asch building with an interior area of 10,000 square feet per floor should have had three staircases. This flaw was noted by Rudolph P. Miller, then an inspector for the Building Department over which he had risen to be director by 1911. On May 7, 1900, he wrote to architect Franke that “an additional continuous line of stairway should be provided.”

The architect asked for an exception because “the staircases are remote from each other and, as there is a fire escape in the court, it practically makes three staircases, which in my opinion is sufficient.”

Miller also insisted that the “fire escape in the rear must lead down to something more substantial than a skylight.” The architect replied with the promise that “the fire escape will lead to the yard and an additional balcony will be put in where designated on the plan.”

Both staircases were in vertical wells with their steps winding once around a center between floors. The steps were of slate set in metal and measured 2 feet 9 inches in width but were tapered at the turns. The walls were of terra cotta.

Only the Greene Street staircase, with windows between floors facing the backyard, had an exit to the roof. The windowless Washington Place stairs ended at the tenth floor.

At each floor, a wooden door with a wired glass window, opened into the loft. Section 80 of the State Labor Law required that factory doors “shall be so constructed as to open outwardly, where practicable, and shall not be locked, bolted or fastened during working hours.”

But in the Asch building, the last step at each landing was only one stair’s width away from the door. Therefore it was not “practicable” for the doors to open outward. Therefore all of them opened in.

The Asch building’s “third staircase”—its single fire escape—ended at the second floor, despite Miller’s requests. But, as Manhattan Borough President George McAneny pointed out after the fire, the law “doesn’t compel any sort of building to have fire escapes. It leaves enormous discretionary power with the Building Department.”

The dangers implicit in this situation were underscored by Arthur E. McFarlane, an expert in fire prevention and fire insurance. He charged that in many instances speculative builders “decided to build their loft buildings without any fire escapes at all. Others put them in the air shaft which, in case of fire, becomes its natural flue. Others bolted on the antique, all but vertical, 18-inch ladder escapes such as could not legally have been placed upon even a three-story tenement house.”

The City’s Board of Aldermen was aware of the danger. In 1909 it spent time studying the problem and ended up with proposed revisions of the building code, one of which would have required street-side fire escapes on buildings of the Asch type.

The entire effort, however, was tripped up by a fight that started with rival interests controlling the production and sale of fireproof materials. The Board divided along parallel lines and stalemated all action on the matter.

“I have never received any request or demand from any department or bureau for alteration to the building nor has any request or demand been received by me for additional fire escapes nor has the fire escape on the building ever been unfavorably criticized to me by any official,” Mr. Asch continued in his Belmont Hotel suite. And, slicing the air with his right hand, he added, “I never gave the matter any thought.”

There was no law requiring fire sprinklers in New York City factory buildings.

Fire Chief Edward F. Croker argued that there had never been a loss of life in a sprinkler-equipped building. These devices, attached to the ceiling, had heat fuses which automatically could set off an alarm and at the same time release heavy sprays of water in the area where heat from a fire had accumulated.

Chief Croker admitted that installation of sprinklers would add about 4 per cent to construction costs. But he stressed his opinion that “sprinklers increase the renting value of a building and so decrease the price of insurance as to pay for themselves within five years.”

Sharing this opinion, and on the basis of his own investigations, Fire Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo had ordered sprinklers to be installed in a number of warehouses. Three weeks before the Triangle conflagration, the Protective League of Property Owners held an indignation meeting. The League’s counsel, Pendleton Dudley, then issued a statement charging that the Fire Department was seeking to force the use of “cumbersome and costly” apparatus.

The League insisted that the order was arbitrary and imposed a burden of unnecessary expense and that the action was unreasonable, mischievous, and misleading, the
Tribune
reported. And the
Herald
noted that the owners claimed the order amounted to “a confiscation of property and that it operates in the interest of a small coterie of automatic sprinkler manufacturers to the exclusion of all others.”

Chief Croker restrained his anger. “If the manufacturers of certain sprinkler systems have formed a combination,” he replied, “there are other sprinkler systems that are not controlled by a combination. Nine sprinklers in all have been tested and approved by the National Board of Underwriters.”

There was no law requiring fire drills to be held in New York City factory buildings.

In the fall of 1910, the New York Joint Board of Sanitary Control, a labor-management group that included a number of cooperating public-spirited citizens, investigated work conditions in 1,243 coat and suit shops in the city. The Board had been created after a strike by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union in the summer of 1910.

Nine days before the Triangle fire—on March 16—the New York
Call
published excerpts from the report of Dr. George M. Price, the Board’s director. Copies of the full report on the investigation had already been sent to the Building, Fire, and Police Departments. In addition, the Board’s secretary, Henry Moskowitz, had sent a long list of shops with hazards to Mayor William J. Gaynor.

Dr. Price noted that the coat and suit shops were not the worst offenders in the matter of safety. “Yet,” he declared, “our investigation into the conditions in these shops clearly shows that fire prevention facilities are very much below even the most indispensable precautions necessary.”

Ninety-nine per cent of the shops were found to be defective in respect to safety: 14 had no fire escapes; 101 had defective drop ladders; 491 had only one exit; 23 had locked doors during the day; 58 had dark hallways; 78 had obstructed approaches to fire escapes; and 1,172, or 94 per cent, had doors opening in instead of out.

Only one had ever had a fire drill.

But at Triangle there had been a warning. In 1909, when the firm was adding to its insurance coverage, P. J. McKeon, an expert and lecturer on fire prevention at Columbia University, was commissioned to make an inspection of the shop.

He was concerned immediately with the crowding of so many people into the top three floors of the building. Upon inquiring, he learned that the firm had never held a fire drill. He noted that without previous instruction on how to handle themselves in such an emergency a fire would panic the girls.

McKeon found that the door to the Washington Place stairway was “usually kept locked,” and was told this was because “it was difficult to keep track of so many girls.” He thought he had impressed management with the need to hold fire drills. Accordingly, he recommended that Mr. H. F. J. Porter, one of the ablest fire prevention experts in the city, be called in to set up the drills.

On June 19, 1909, Porter wrote to Triangle at McKeon’s suggestion, offering to call at management’s convenience. He never received a reply to his letter.

There were other portents.

Exactly four months before the Triangle tragedy—on November 25, 1910—fire broke out in an old four-story building at Orange and High Streets in Newark, New Jersey. In minutes, twenty-five factory workers, most of them young women, were dead. Of these, six were burned to death, nineteen jumped to death.

The disaster just across the Hudson River shocked New York and the next day Chief Croker warned:

“This city may have a fire as deadly as the one in Newark at any time. There are buildings in New York where the danger is every bit as great as in the building destroyed in Newark. A fire in the daytime would be accompanied by a terrible loss of life.”

Professor Francis W. Aymar of the New York University Law School read Chief Croker’s warning. He immediately wrote a letter to the city Building Department saying that from the windows of his classroom he could see the crowded and dangerous conditions in the Asch building across the yard. His letter was acknowledged and assurance of an investigation was given.

Following the Newark fire, the Women’s Trade Union League assigned Miss Ida Rauh to study the disaster and draw up a set of conclusions and recommendations. This she did and then, on behalf of the League, Miss Rauh wrote to the January Grand Jury asking to be heard.

Her hearing was short, and fruitless. She was practically dismissed by the foreman of the Grand Jury when she had identified herself. He warned her that “unless you have a complaint of criminal negligence on the part of an official, you had better take your stories to the Corporation Counsel and have him prosecute for violations.”

The lesson of the Newark fire was not lost on Alderman Ralph Folks. He introduced a resolution in the Board calling on the Superintendent of the Building Department to investigate and determine if additional legislation were needed to protect the lives of factory workers in New York. Four months before the Triangle fire the resolution was passed.

The day after the Asch building disaster, the
Times
sought out Alderman Folks and asked him what had come of the investigation he had requested in his resolution.

“I don’t know. I never heard of it again,” he replied.

The
Times
also found Mr. H. F. J. Porter, who had written to Triangle for an appointment on the matter of fire drills.

“There are only two or three factories in the city where fire drills are in use,” he declared ruefully. “In some of them where I have installed the system myself, the owners have discontinued it.

“The neglect of factory owners in the matter of safety of their employees is absolutely criminal. One man whom I advised to install a fire drill replied to me: ‘Let ’em burn. They’re a lot of cattle, anyway.’”

On October 15, 1910—a little more than five months before the tragedy—Fireman Edward F. O’Connor of Engine Company 72 made a routine inspection of the Asch building. Under the definitions of the existing codes, he had to report that the fire escape was “good,” the stairways were “good,” the building was “fireproof.” He noted that an 8- by 10-foot tank on the roof had a capacity of 5,000 gallons of water and that there were 259 water pails distributed over the building’s ten floors for emergency use.

In the decade since the construction of the Asch building, about $150,000,000 had gone into the building of similar structures in lower Manhattan. Greater height meant greater returns on land values.

By September, 1909, the greater city had 612,000 employees in 30,000 factories—50,000 more workers than in all of Massachusetts at that time. And, early in 1911, the Women’s Trade Union League reported that about half the total number was employed above the seventh floor.

That was just about the height beyond which the finest fire-fighting force in the country could not deal successfully with a fire.

Yet so strong was the feeling of safety in the new buildings that not a single new building or factory law was enacted in the entire decade. Even the number of required stairways, for example, continued to be geared to the area of a single floor with no regard to the number of floors in the structure or the number of workers in the building.

Indeed, the day after the Triangle fire, Albert G. Ludwig, Chief Inspector and Deputy Superintendent of the Building Department, inspected the Asch building. Then he declared: “This building could be worse and come within the requirements of the law.”

Joseph J. Asch was right. In his hotel suite, he leaned forward and assured the reporters: “I have obeyed the law to the letter. There was not one detail of the construction of my building that was not submitted to the Building and Fire Departments. Every detail was approved and the Fire Marshal congratulated me.”