March 25, 2007
"THEN SHE DROPPED INTO SPACE"
Looking at the image to the right, it is not hard to think of bystanders watching the World Trade Center towers burning: heads tilted upwards in dumb disbelieving shock, even as bodies began to pile at their feet. This was March 25, 1911 though, and the bodies were those of the women who worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in the Asch Building (now the Brown Building) at 23-29 Washington Place. A fire broke out on the factory floor at 4:45 p.m. that day and quickly spread. Finding that they were locked in to the factory (a move to improve productivity by management), women fled to the fire escapes to make their way down from the 7th and 8th floors. Although the Asch Building was only ten years old, the fire escapes gave way under the combined weight of too many women and collapsed. 146 women died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, many choosing to leap to their deaths instead of burning.
Cornell University has a superb site with information and resources concerning many aspects of the fire and its aftermath. Matthew Shepherd was a United Press reporter who phoned in his account from the scene. Here is part of it:
I was walking through Washington Square when a puff of smoke issuing from the factory building caught my eye. I reached the building before the alarm was turned in. I saw every feature of the tragedy visible from outside the building. I learned a new sound--a more horrible sound than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding, living body on a stone sidewalk.
Thud—dead, thud—dead, thud—dead, thud—dead. Sixty-two thud—deads. I call them that, because the sound and the thought of death came to me each time, at the same instant. There was plenty of chance to watch them as they came down. The height was eighty feet.
The first ten thud—deads shocked me. I looked up—saw that there were scores of girls at the windows. The flames from the floor below were beating in their faces. Somehow I knew that they, too, must come down, and something within me—something that I didn't know was there—steeled me.
I even watched one girl falling. Waving her arms, trying to keep her body upright until the very instant she struck the sidewalk, she was trying to balance herself. Then came the thud--then a silent, unmoving pile of clothing and twisted, broken limbs.
The fire occurred a little less than a year and a half after an address given by Clara Lemlich to hundreds of assembled workers at Cooper Union. She passionately proposed a general strike for better and safer working conditions for shirtwaist workers, and nearly two out of every three of the 32,000 workers followed her. The strike of 20,000 women was eventually ended in February 1910 with concessions on wages and working conditions. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company was not an adherent to the settlement. It was only until after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire that workers' conditions began to improve on a larger scale. Assemblyman Al Smith, representative of the Lower East Side in Albany, was part of the commission that investigated working conditions in the aftermath of the fire. He began a crusade for improved working conditions and with the support of Tammany Hall was eventually swept into the Governor's office.
Standing on the corner of Washington Place and Greene St. today, there is little to indicate it was the site of a castrophe that left firehoses washing a river of blood down the street's gutters. But on a spring evening not that unlike today's, 96 years ago, onlookers witnessed sights so horrible, that it changed the course of New York history.
NB: Concidentally, today is also the 17th anniversary of the Happy Land Social Club Fire in the Bronx. 87 people died in a fire that swept through a crowded club. It was set by a man after he argued with his girlfriend.
Tagged: al smith, clara lemlich, triangle shirtwaist firePosted by Lexiphane at March 25, 2007 1:50 PM
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