The Triangle Fire (8 page)

“I just stood there crying,” Yetta recounted. “The young man, the same dark one, was near me and he snapped, ‘Oh, keep quiet; what’s the use of crying?’ So I felt ashamed and stopped it. But when he was gone, I started to scream again.

“Then I saw the girls were running to the Greene Street side and I started to run, too. The fire was burning in the aisle at the fire escape.”

Unable to pass through the rear area, Yetta climbed up onto a machine table. These were 30 inches high, and the machine heads added another 12 inches. Yetta climbed over two plants of machines, past the fire in the rear area. “I looked back and I saw one old Italian woman who couldn’t jump down from the machine table. She took a few steps back and forth and she was looking down. But she couldn’t get down.

“I covered my face with my skirt and ran into the Greene Street passage. I got to the roof and then it occurred to me that I had forgotten to take my time card out of the clock.”

The dressing room, adjacent to the door to the Washington Place stairs, became for some the final place of decision, for others a temporary refuge before death.

Lena Yaller remembered it as being “filled with smoke; everybody was talking or screaming; some in Jewish and some in Italian were crying about their children.”

When Ethel Monick looked up from her machine, she saw “fire coming in all around us. I saw women at other machines become frozen with fear. They never moved.”

But Ethel, only sixteen, moved. She ran to the Washington Place stairway door, and when she saw it was locked, backtracked into the dressing room. “I was looking for something with which to smash the door. It was wired glass on top.

“In the dressing room men and women were laughing but in a strange way I could not understand at that time. I yelled at them to stop laughing and to help me find an unused machine head to smash the door.”

When she left the dressing room, Ethel ran to a window, resolved to jump. “Then I saw in my mind how I would look lying there on the sidewalk and I got ashamed. I moved back from the window.” Ethel headed back to the elevators.

The escape routes were closing off. Ida Nelson, clutching her week’s pay in her hand, ran to the fire escape windows. She looked out and all she could see was heavy smoke laced with flames.

“I don’t know what made me do it but I bent over and pushed my pay into the top of my stocking. Then I ran to the Greene Street side and tried to get into the staircase.”

In the few minutes since Anna Gullo had gone down the stairs, that route had been cut off by fire. Now Ida Nelson saw that “I couldn’t get through. The heat was too intense.

“I ran back into the shop and found part of a roll of piece goods. I think it was lawn; it was on the bookkeeper’s desk. I wrapped it around and around me until only my face showed.

“Then I ran right into the fire on the stairway and up toward the roof. I couldn’t breathe. The lawn caught fire. As I ran, I tried to keep peeling off the burning lawn, twisting and turning as I ran. By the time I passed the tenth floor and got to the roof, I had left most of the lawn in ashes behind me. But I still had one end of it under my arm. That was the arm that got burned.”

Rose Cohen had already reached the roof by the time Ida came through the door. Both were sleeve setters, but in the huge ninth-floor factory they had never spoken to each other. However, Rose recalls that “there was one little girl who, like me, saved herself by running to the roof. She had wrapped white goods all around herself and one piece was still burning. I ran to her and helped her beat out the flames. Then I tried to hold back another girl who tore herself away from us and ran back into the stairway to look for her sister.”

Rose had been on her way to the dressing room when she heard the cry of fire. She remembers that many of the girls still in the aisles were “caged in by the wicker work baskets.” As she ran she tried to down the rising panic in her heart with the thought of what, she says, “all greenhorn immigrants like my parents used to say: ‘In America, they don’t let you burn.’

“I ran into the dressing room with the machinist and some of the others. The walls of the dressing room began to smoke. We ran back into the shop. Girls were lying on the floor—fainted. People were stepping on them. Other girls were trying to climb over the machines. Some were running with their hair burning.

“I followed the machinist to a window and he smashed the glass with his hand to let the smoke out—it was choking us. Instead, the flames rushed in. For a few seconds I stood at that window. My hair was smoldering. My clothes were torn. I turned and ran to the Greene Street exit.

“I put my hands on my smoldering, long hair and I started up the stairs. On the tenth floor, I went in through the door. The place was empty. All I could hear was the fire burning. Here, I thought, I would die—here was the end. I didn’t realize that right above me—one more floor—was the roof.

“Then I heard some one calling, ‘Come to the roof! Come to the roof!’ I turned and saw him in a corner near the staircase holding an armful of record books. If not for him I would have died there on the tenth floor. My life was saved by a bookkeeper.”

The red flames had raced across the big room, feeding on the flimsy fabric, the wicker baskets, the oil-soaked machines and floor. The machine tables were burning. Solid fire now pushed forward from the rear of the shop, including the Greene Street stairway. It divided the trapped ones into two groups.

One group remained cornered in the areaway in front of the Washington Place elevator doors and staircase. The stairway door remained closed, the girls clawing at it and screaming.

The second group was trapped, scattered, in the aisles between the sewing plants. Now the advancing flames forced them back down the aisles toward the windows facing Washington Place. Some climbed over the rows of machines only to get caught in the last aisle running along the Greene Street windows. The fire backed them into the windows. And in the street the crowds watched helplessly as they plunged into space.

Only the little passenger elevators continued to scoop some of the dying back to life. The Washington Place elevators measured 4 feet 9 inches by 5 feet 9 inches. They were designed to carry about fifteen passengers. Yet Gaspar Mortillalo, one of the two operators, was certain that in his last trips down from the inferno he carried twice that number.

He and Joseph Zito, both in their twenties, had been sitting in their cars at street level, waiting for Triangle—the only firm in the building still working at that hour—to check out. Suddenly, the bells in both cars began to ring insistently. They heard frantic banging up above, the sound of glass smashing, then screams.

“Gaspar didn’t say anything to me and I didn’t say anything to Gaspar. We both started our cars right up,” said Zito.

In these elevators the cable ran through the cage. To start the car moving up, the operator reached up, took a firm grip on the cable and sharply pulled down; he reversed the procedure to descend.

It was Zito’s recollection that he must have made seven or eight trips altogether. “Two of them went to the tenth floor, one to the eighth floor and the rest to the ninth. Gaspar and I must have brought down a couple of hundred girls. Twice, I went through smoke and flames that came right into the car.

“When I first opened the elevator door on the ninth floor all I could see was a crowd of girls and men with great flames and smoke right behind them. When I came to the floor the third time, the girls were standing on the window sills with the fire all around them.”

Now the elevators became the last link with life. The struggle to get into them became desperate. On their last trips Zito and his partner fought to close the doors before descending.

Fannie Selmanowitz pushed herself into one of the cars as it started to move down. “There wasn’t enough room for a pin in that elevator. All the way down I was being pressed through the open door of the car against the side of the shaft.”

The last person to get into the last car to leave the ninth floor was Katie Weiner. “I was searching for my sister Rose but I could not find her. Then I found myself crushed against the elevator door, knocking and crying like the others for him to come up.

“He didn’t come up. I was choking with the smoke. I went to a window and put my face out to get some fresh air and I calmed down. Suddenly, the elevator came up and the girls rushed to it. I was pushed back to the staircase door. I was crying, ‘Girls, girls, help me!’ But they kept pushing me back.

“The elevator started to go down. The flames were coming toward me and I was being left behind. I felt the elevator was leaving the ninth floor for the last time. I got hold of the cable that went through the car and swung myself in, landing on the girls’ heads.

“All the way down,” Katie Weiner remembers, “I was on the people’s heads. I was facing downward and my feet were extending out into the shaft. As we went down, my feet were hurting horribly, my ankles were hitting the doors and I was crying, ‘Girls, my feet, my feet!’”

Crushed in that elevator on that last trip was Josephine Panno. She screamed all the way down. Through all of the panicked rush to the elevators she had held firmly to the skirt of her daughter, Mrs. Jane Bucalo. But in the final surge that carried her into the car, her grip had broken.

As the elevator began its descent, she caught sight of her daughter’s fear-torn face in the crowd being left behind. She screamed and struggled to raise an arm in an effort to reach out to her daughter. But her arms were pinned to her side by the crush.

“When we got to the bottom,” she remembered, “girls were crying all around me as they trampled each other to get out. But I could not hear the cries of my daughter.” She tried to run up the stairs and fought the policemen in the lobby until she fainted.

Where the elevator had been, there was now only a gaping hole. Sarah Cammerstein stood at the edge and watched the car slip slowly downward. “I thought the elevator was falling. It didn’t seem to be driving down but only sinking slowly under too much weight. That’s why I hesitated.

“But when I saw it was still at the seventh floor I knew it wasn’t falling. I made the decision of my life. I threw my coat down onto the roof of the elevator and jumped for it.”

Sarah Cammerstein blacked out. When she opened her eyes again she was lying face up on the roof of the elevator.

“I was alone,” she says. “I was spread out on my coat and I looked straight up into the elevator shaft. I could see the flames coming out of the eighth floor. I couldn’t move.

“But the elevator was moving. It was going up, straight to the flames. I began to scream. I found the strength to bang my fist on the top of the elevator.”

The car stopped. For a moment it was motionless. Then it slowly descended to put its roof on a level with the exit to the lobby and Sarah Cammerstein was lifted out.

Both elevators began their final ascent. The right-hand elevator reached to just below the eighth floor where the heat of the flames pushing into the shaft had bent its tracks. It returned to the lobby. The elevator on the left, Zito’s car on which Sarah Cammerstein had been lowered, never rose above the lobby. Falling bodies began to crush in its roof.

Celia Walker stood at the ninth floor opening above Zito’s car, afraid of falling, seeking the courage to jump. She was proud of the fact that the other immigrant girls at Triangle considered her “a real Yankee.” Celia had come to America with her parents when she was five years old. Bright and zestful, she spoke with what she liked to consider “a true American accent.” Her job was to examine finished garments and to return them for cleaning or repair, if needed.

In the terror touched off by the cry of fire, Celia felt panic challenging her usual self-sufficiency. “The girls were climbing over the machine tables. So was I. The aisles were narrow and blocked by the chairs and the baskets which were beginning to burn. I jumped from one table to the next without getting down. I was twenty years old and I could jump.

“The first time I saw the elevator come up, the girls rushed in and it was filled in a second. When it came up again, the girls were all squeezing against the door and the minute it opened, they all rushed in again. This time I thought I was going to be lucky enough to make it, but just as I got to the door, the elevator began to drop down. Somebody in front of me jumped.

“Soon I found myself standing at the edge, trying to hold myself back from falling into the shaft. I gripped the sides of the open door. Behind me the girls were screaming. I could feel them pushing more and more.

“I knew that in a few seconds I would be pushed into the shaft. I had to make a quick decision. I jumped for the center cable. I began to slide down. I remember passing the floor numbers up to five. Then something falling hit me.

“The next thing I knew was when I opened my eyes and looked up into the faces of a priest and a nun. They were trying to help me. I was in a bed in St. Vincent’s Hospital.

“They had found me at the bottom of the shaft on the elevator. Others had fallen on top of me. My head was injured. I had a broken arm and a broken finger. Down the middle of my body I felt the burning of the cable which had torn right through my clothes.

“One of the nurses told me she thought it was wonderful that I had enough presence of mind when I jumped to wrap something around my hands in order to save them from injury as I grasped the cable. But it wasn’t presence of mind. It was a new fur muff for which I had saved many weeks. Fire or no fire, I wasn’t going to lose that muff. I think the right word for my presence of mind is vanity.”

Others jumped or fell through the 2½-foot opening into the left elevator shaft. Sarah Friedman had seen the elevator slide away on its last descent. She grabbed the cable at the side of the shaft. “I slid all the way down and ended up on top of the car where I lost consciousness. One of my hands was burned by the friction. When I opened my eyes I was lying in the street—among the dead.”

One of the last to jump—and survive—was May Caliandro Levantini, a mother of three children. She tried to stop her fearful, relentless progress toward the elevator pit. Her hands scratched for a hold on the grating alongside the shaft opening.