The Triangle Fire (5 page)

And that is why, high above the city’s streets, beyond the reach of fire-fighting equipment, without benefit of fire sprinklers, proper fire ecapes, or fire drills, 500 employees of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company on that March 25, having heard the bell marking the end of their work day, began to rise from their machines and their work tables with the utmost confidence in their own security and safety.

3. EIGHTH

Now we descend by stairways such as these.

—
CANTO XVII
:82

“I rang the bell,” said Joseph Wexler, eighth-floor watchman for the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. He stood beside the time clock attached to the Greene Street partition, near the single exit on that side of the shop. “I was supposed to look in the girls’ pocketbooks, every girl’s pocketbook. I got ready. I rang the bell.”

What time was it?

Quitting time on Saturday was 4:45
p.m
. But Triangle, like Congress, sometimes manipulated its control clock in order to keep working.

On that Saturday, Fire Department Central received the first alarm from Box 289 at 4:45
p.m
. At 4:45½
p.m
., two telephone calls from 23 Washington Place reported a fire. But the first entry on the matter in the daybook of the Eighth Precinct reads: “Sgt. James Cain and eight patrolmen left for duty at Washington Place fire—4:30
p.m
.”

What time was it?

It was the time before sundown when bearded Jews in the East Side tenements were beginning to chant the prayer marking the end of the Sabbath. It is called the Havdallah, which means “the great divide.” Its joyous words praise the Lord for creating the Sabbath and setting it apart from all the other days of the week.

Crossing back over “the great divide” and returning to the stretch of ordinary days is marked by the performance of an act forbidden during the holy day. As the sun sets, he who prays pours a small portion of ritual wine into a platter and touches fire to it. The Sabbath ends. And the flames flare up.

Those Jewish workers who had brought a strong religious faith with them to the New World—and had held on to it—paid for their piety. While others remained bent over their sewing machines on Friday afternoon, these stole glances at the sun and when it began to dip, pushed back their chairs, rose from their work and departed—losing time and earnings.

For those on whom the grip of faith had loosened, the sundown meant little. At Triangle, the Sabbath was not set apart. There was work for those who wished to work on Saturdays, and often even on Sundays.

Wexler rang the quitting bell. From where he stood, he could survey the entire shop floor, a huge square measuring about 100 feet on each side. The upper right-hand, northeast, corner of the square was separated from the rest of the shop by a wooden partition, making a vestibule 15 feet long. Behind that partition were the doors to two freight elevators and to the single staircase leading down to Greene Street and up to the roof.

“When we stepped out of the freight elevators in the morning,” says Joseph Granick, who worked at Triangle as a garment cutter, “we turned to the right, walked past the staircase door and came into the shop through the single door in the narrow side of the partition. Only one person at a time could pass through that door opening. This is where the watchman stood every night to search the girls’ pocketbooks.”

Through the door and straight ahead was the back-yard wall. It had eight windows, the two center ones opening onto the single fire escape. Two tables on which cutters worked ran parallel to this northern wall.

The east wall of the shop had ten windows facing Greene Street, one of them behind the partition. Along its length were five more cutting tables, three of them 66 feet long, the other two about half that length, and all of them ending at the Washington Place, southern, wall of the shop. This wall had twelve windows providing plenty of light for the battery of special stitching and sewing machines lined along its length.

The fourth, or west wall, was back to back with the building housing New York University and the American Book Company. Ten feet from where it angled into the Washington Place wall, this side of the square had two passenger elevator doors and to the right of these the single door into the staircase leading to the Washington Place lobby and up to the tenth floor.

A wooden partition to the right of the stairway door enclosed the dressing room, and beyond this were the washrooms. The wall ended with three windows opening on the short wing of the L-shaped back yard across which they faced windows of the University building.

Production of Triangle’s shirtwaists began on the cutting tables, where the basic economy of factory methods was achieved. It lay in the ability of the skilled craftsmen to cut many layers of fabric—several dozen at a time—with a single slicing motion.

The tables on which they worked were 40 inches wide, stood 42 inches high, and were separated by aisles that were 30 inches wide. Forty cutters, a closely knit group, were stationed in this department.

Granick remembers that his mother paid one of them, Morris Goldfarb, $25 to get her son a job at Triangle. (Goldfarb was one of Triangle’s “toughies” who fought the strikers during the 1909 walkout and helped pass strikebreakers through their lines.)

He had expected to work for nothing at the start. But the $25 had worked magic, and he was hired at $3 a week plus 15 cents an hour for overtime.

Granick was working on lot number 1180 that day, cutting linings and trimmings from a thin fabric called lawn, though sometimes given a fancier name like “longerine.” A cutter would pile up many layers of fabric. Then he would place his patterns on top of the pile. This was his main skill. He arranged his patterns to make the shortest possible jig-saw when he first laid them out to get the length for cutting each layer from the roll.

The less yardage he took, the more money he saved for the boss. He had to have a good eye and a strong arm because when he had all of his patterns laid out on top of the layers of fabric, minding the grain of the goods and making certain that no part of the garment was missing, he would start to cut with a short knife that looked like something fishermen use to clean fish. It had a stubby handle and a blade as sharp as a razor. With his left hand the cutter pressed palm down on the pattern while his right hand, grasping the knife, rode around the edge of the pattern, which was bound with metal to prevent nicking.

The tables were boarded up from the floor to about 6 inches below their tops, thus providing large, continuous bins. A long wire with pendant small hooks stretched directly over the full length of each table.

As he sliced out a sleeve or a bodice front, the cutter would set aside the part, hanging the pattern on the overhead wire. From time to time, he would take the cutaway fabric remaining on the table—like dough remaining after the cookies have been stamped out—sweep it together by hand, and fling it through the 6-inch slot on the underside of the table.

There was by-product value for Triangle’s proprietors in the cutaways that accumulated under the tables. They were purchased regularly by a dealer named Louis Levy. Between March 25, 1910, and March 25, 1911, he removed the accumulated cutaways six times.

“I waited for an accumulation,” said Levy. “The last time I removed the rags before the fire was on January 15, 1911. They came from the eighth floor. Altogether, it was 2,252 pounds.”

Granick had received his week’s pay and was walking toward the Greene Street exit where Wexler was stationed when he encountered Eva Harris, the sister of Isaac Harris, one of Triangle’s two owners. “Eva Harris said she smelled something burning. I looked to the cutting tables. At the second table, through the slot under the top, I saw the red flames.”

Eva Harris turned and ran toward Dinah Lifschitz sitting at her desk in the corner of the shop near the three western windows. Dinah handed out the work to the special machine operators on the eighth floor. Next to her desk stood short, stocky Samuel Bernstein, Triangle’s production manager, who was related by marriage to both of its owners.

“I heard a cry,” Bernstein said. “It was Eva Harris. She was running toward me from the middle of the shop. She was hollering, ‘There is a fire, Mr. Bernstein.’ I turned around. I saw a blaze and some smoke at the second table from the Greene Street windows. As I ran across the shop toward the fire, some cutters were throwing pails of water.”

Another Bernstein, William, a cutter, had grabbed a pail of water that stood near the last window and had thrown it on the fire. “But it didn’t do any good,” he asserted. “The rags and the table were burning. I went around the partition into the freight elevator vestibule to get another pail of water. But when I tried to go back in, the narrow doorway was blocked with people rushing to the stairs.”

Cutter Max Rothen had just hung his patterns on the long overhead wire, having finished the day, when he felt a punch in the back. He turned around and there was Bernstein the manager, “his face white from fright.”

“At the same time there were cries of ‘fire’ from all sides. The line of hanging patterns began to burn. Some of the cutters jumped up and tried to tear the patterns from the line but the fire was ahead of them. The patterns were burning. They began to fall on the layers of thin goods underneath them. Every time another piece dropped, light scraps of burning fabric began to fly around the room. They came down on the other tables and they fell on the machines. Then the line broke and the whole string of burning patterns fell down.”

The smoke grew thicker. Those still in the loft began to choke and cough. A half dozen men continued to fling pails of water at the fire.

“But the flames seemed to push up from under the table right to the top,” Granick recalls. “I began to look for more water. I thought there might be more pails on the Washington Place side. I began to run there, then I stopped and looked back. I saw in a flash I could never make it. The flames were beginning to reach the ceiling.”

Now the flames were everywhere, consuming the fabric and beginning to feed on the wooden floor trim, the sewing tables, the partitions. The heat and the pressure were rising. The windows began to pop, and down in Greene Street, Dominick Cardiane heard a sound “like a big puff.”

Samuel Bernstein stood near the flames and cried out for more pails of water. One of the elevator operators came running with a pail. “He left the elevator door open. It made a terrible draft. The wind blew right through the place. We found it was impossible to put the fire out with pails.”

Then Bernstein remembered there were hoselines hanging in the stairwells. “I saw Louis Senderman, the assistant shipping clerk from the tenth floor. I hollered, ‘Louis, get me a hose!’”

Somehow Senderman managed to reach a hose in the Greene Street stairwell. He fought his way back into the loft, dragging the hose behind him. He reached out the nozzle to Bernstein. “As I took the hose from him, I said, ‘Is it open?’ But it didn’t work. No pressure. No water. I tried it. I opened it. I turned the nozzle one way and then another. It didn’t work. I threw it away.”

Senderman tried to work the hose. So did Solly Cohen, another shipping clerk. They had as little success as Bernstein. Then a third man tried.

“He was a little fellow, I don’t even remember his name, he was an assistant machinist, new in the factory. He came toward me dragging the hose. He handed it to me,” Bernstein continued. “I tried it again. I hollered, ‘Where is the water? where is the water?’ He answered, ‘No pressure, nothing coming.’

“Who was the boy? All I know is that he was lost in the fire. He was pulling me by the hand and screaming. I turned around and I looked at him and the boy was burning. He ran away from me into the smoke.”

The machinist, Louis Brown, was in the men’s room just north of the dressing room when he heard the cry of “Fire.” He dropped the soap with which he was washing his hands and ran into the shop. The first thing he saw was Bernstein standing on one of the tables with a pail of water. He ran to join him.

“When Mr. Bernstein saw me he hollered, ‘Brown, you can’t do anything here. Try to get the girls out!’ I saw the girls all clustered at the door to the Washington Place stairway and I ran in that direction.”

Realizing that the fire was now beyond control, Bernstein jumped down from the table and hurried to the Greene Street vestibule, where he concentrated on getting the girls out.

“I wouldn’t let them go for their clothes even though it was Spring and many of them had new outfits. One of the girls I slapped across the face because she was fainting. I got her out. I drove them out.”

Bernstein worked now at saving the girls with the same drive and force he had used to work those same girls for the benefit of their employers.

On his way to the Washington Place door, Brown had opened the back-yard window leading to the fire escape. Rose Reiner had come screaming out of the dressing room, where she had been giving herself a last inspection in the full-length mirror before going home, when she heard the cries of “Fire!”

"I saw Dinah and she shouted I should go to the fire escape. As I climbed through the window I saw Mr. Brown trying to open the Washington Place door. I went out onto the fire escape.”

Filled with terror, Rose slipped and stumbled down the narrow, slatted stairs from floor to floor until she followed the girl ahead of her back into the building through the smashed window at the sixth floor. “I went down. More I don’t remember.”

She was one of the “clawing” women Patrolman Meehan found behind the locked door he broke down.

The flames crept nearer to her desk, but Dinah Lifschitz held her post. On her desk was a telephone and a telautograph—a duplicating script writer for sending messages—that had recently been installed by the firm. Both connected directly with the executive offices on the tenth floor.

“I right away sent a message to the tenth floor on the telautograph,” Dinah said. “But they apparently didn’t get the message because I didn’t get an answer.

“Then I used the telephone. I called the tenth floor and I heard Mary Alter’s voice on the other end. I told her there was a fire on the eighth floor, to tell Mr. Blanck. ‘All right, all right,’ she answered me.”

Dinah stayed at the phone. She shouted to the switchboard operator to connect with the ninth floor. She was getting no answer.

But her call had given the alarm to the people on the tenth floor. They began to ring for the passenger elevators, and the operators responded to the buzzing from the executive floor. The cars began to pass the eighth floor.