United States Department of Labor www.dol.gov The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911
Introduction
At the turn of the 20th century in the United States, most workers had precious few rights. Few belonged
to unions. And many endured deplorable conditions, dangerous tasks, grueling hours and oppressive
wages.
But events on the Saturday afternoon of March 25, 1911 at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York
City, stirred America to move to protect workers. In less than 20 minutes, 146 people were dead – some
burned to death; others leaped to their deaths from 100 feet up – victims of one of the worst factory fires
in America’s history.
After a successful strike two years earlier by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU)
Local 25 helped deliver better wages and working conditions to 15,000 garment workers in New York
City, the owners of the Triangle factory, Isaac Harris and Max Blanck, continued to refuse to recognize
unions, update any of their safety measures and continued to operate what was described as a
sweatshop, producing the highly popular women’s shirtwaist, a tailored blouse. Coincidentally, the strike
was called when the owners of the Triangle factory fired 150 suspected union sympathizers. While Harris
and Blanck grew rich tapping into the trendy clothing’s popularity, workers languished in deplorable and
unsafe conditions.
Join us as we make our way through Manhattan and visit the places where fate and tragedy met, where
landmarks remind the living of the sacrifices of those who went before us, and where people worked
together to change America’s laws and start the United States on a path where workers are fairly
compensated and protected from undue danger and peril.
About the Fire
At 4:45 in the afternoon of March 25, 1911, the four-month anniversary of a fire in a Newark, N.J., which
killed 25 people, fire broke out in a cutting area on the eighth floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in
Greenwich Village, in New York city. Within minutes, the top three floors of the Asch Building at 23-29
Washington Street were engulfed in flames. Many of the staff, mostly recently immigrated Jewish and
Italian women, some as young as 14, were trapped in a building that claimed to be fireproof. Some began
to fall and jump from the windows. Police and firefighters from nearby stations were impeded by the
bodies on the sidewalk.
The harrowing accounts ring as unnerving and as unsettling today as they were 100 years ago - groups of
young women leaping to their deaths, a man dropping women out the windows, falling bodies ripping
through the fire departments’ nets and gruesome accounts of bodies piling up on the sidewalk and
blocking the fire engines, and inside, skeletal remains slouched over sewing machines and charred bodies
piled up by locked and blocked doorways. A combination of callous management, overcrowding and
hazardous work conditions, and ill-conceived architecture conspired to cut short so many lives.
The architect was given special permission to make only two staircases, instead of three. A flimsy iron
fire escape that stopped at the second floor was passed off as a third staircase. Exit doors opened inward
to the space, making it nearly impossible to open the doors amid the crush of panic-stricken workers.
Managers often locked the exits to prevent workers from sneaking out for a break and to prevent theft.
Those locked doors prevented workers from escaping the flames. Other exits were blocked with boxes of
scrap fabric which had been accumulating for nearly six months.
A steady stream of workers filed out onto the fire escape which before long, collapsed under the weight of
the people and the heat of the fire sending several people to their deaths from a six-story fall. Elevator
operators worked feverishly to bring groups of workers to safety, 10 at a time. Still, some workers flung
themselves down the elevator shaft to escape the flames, their bodies crashing onto the car filled with
terrified escapees. Estimates peg the number of workers on those top three floors at 500 or more.
The fire fighters from local Ladder Company 20 arrived minutes after the flames erupted. Because the
hoses were too weak and the ladders too short to reach above the sixth floor, the men simply sprayed the
building in the hopes the mist from the water would cool the victims trapped above.
At a local police station, a makeshift morgue was quickly overwhelmed. Bodies of the fall victims lay
where they fell, some covered with tarps, others exposed to the elements. Within 25 minutes, burned and
broken bodies alike lined Green Street awaiting a friend or family member to recognize and claim them.
Some would never be identified. Others were found by a mark on their stockings or a ring.
The Bellevue morgue became overrun and a nearby pier was employed as a makeshift morgue. Family
and friends filed by the bodies in an effort to find and claim a loved one.
The Victims
Eventually, most of the victims were identified and buried in cemeteries throughout the city’s five
boroughs. The victims’ identities and histories reflected the face of Manhattan in 1911. Many people
probably knew someone like 15-year-old Ida Brodsky, a Russian Jew who came to the United States only
nine months earlier. She was interred at Mt. Richmond Cemetery. People knew Jacob Klein, a 23-year-old
Jewish man from Russia. He was a member of a labor union and had been in the United States for five
years. He was buried in Montefiore Cemetery. Many people would feel familiar with 43-year-old
Provindenza Panno, a married Catholic woman from Italy. She lived six years in America and was buried
in Calvary Cemetery. People would have known a little girl like 15-year-old Bessie Viviano. She came to
the United States from Italy when she was a year old and was probably as “American” as any turn-of-thecentury teen. She is buried in Calvary Cemetery.
It took nearly 100 years for all of the victims of the fire to be positively identified, with the final six
identifications completed just recently.
Aftermath
While the firefighters got the blaze under control in about
30 minutes, the destruction and devastation burned into
the American public’s mind. Factory owners Harris and
Blanck remained resistant to change and apparently
impervious to the outcries of the pubic and the anguish of
the survivors, the victims and their families. Harris and
Blanck opened another factory a few days later and it was
deemed to have no fire escape and inadequate exits.
Defense attorney Max Steuer successfully defended the men
during their trial in New York City for manslaughter by casting enough doubt on the key factor in the trial
– Did Harris and Blanck know the exits were locked? The trial lasted 23 days and had 150 witnesses.
Three years later, after several civil trials, the men settled at a rate of $75 per life. An insurance policy,
however, paid Harris and Blanck about $400 per life lost. The men pocketed about $60,000 by the end of
the ordeal. Over the next few years, the men were cited and fined numerous times for locking exit doors
during business hours.
While Harris and Blanck remained unchanged, things began to change in the American workforce. One
could believe that the Department of Labor’s seeds sprouted that day. The fire ignited people’s interest in
workers’ safety, in fair wages, in establishing dignity for America’s working men and women.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, one of the nation’s most deadly and horrific, led to some of the
nation’s strongest changes in worker safety in the manufacturing industry. From the ashes of tragedy
rose the phoenix of reform.
New York City and New York State, over the next few years, adopted the country's strongest worker
safety protection laws. Initially addressing fire safety, these laws eventually became model legislation for
the rest of the country and state after stated enacted much more strict worker safety laws.
New York Times February 20, 2011
100 Years Later, the Roll of the Dead in a Factory Fire Is Complete
By JOSEPH BERGER
In the Cemetery of the Evergreens on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, there is a haunting stone
monument to the garment workers who died in the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire of 1911 but were
never identified. It contains the bas-relief figure of a kneeling woman, her head bowed, seemingly
mourning not only the deaths, but also the fact that those buried below were so badly charred that
relatives could not recognize them.
Almost a century after the fire, the five women and one man, all buried in coffins under the Evergreens
monument, remained unknown to the public at large, though relatives and descendants knew that a loved
one had never returned from the burning blouse factory.
Now those six have been identified, largely through the persistence of a researcher, Michael Hirsch, who
became obsessed with learning all he could about the victims after he discovered that one of those killed,
Lizzie Adler, a 24-year-old greenhorn from Romania, had lived on his block in the East Village.
And so, for the first time, at the centennial commemoration of the fire on March 25 outside the building in
Greenwich Village where the Triangle Waist Company occupied the eighth, ninth and 10th floors, the
names of all 146 dead will finally be read.
The fire was a wrenching event in New York’s history, one that had a profound influence on building
codes, labor laws, politics and the beginning of the New Deal two decades later.
Among the most anguishing aspects was the memory of the more than 50 young immigrant women and
men who were forced to leap from the high floors to escape the inferno. However, many of the 146
victims — 129 women and 17 men — burned to death in the loft building, at Washington Place and
Greene Street, and had no telltale jewelry or clothing to help identify them.
The day the six unidentified victims were buried was the culmination of the city’s outpouring of grief;
hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers turned out in a driving rain for a symbolic funeral procession
sponsored by labor unions and other organizations, while hundreds of thousands more watched from the
sidewalks.
A century later, names and even circumstances have finally been attached to those “unknowns.”
“We consider his list to be the best ever produced on the question,” said Curtis Lyons, director of the
Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at Cornell University, which holds one
of the most thorough repositories about the Triangle fire.
Workers United, the garment workers’ union, and David Von Drehle, who wrote “Triangle: The Fire That
Changed America,” a 2003 history of the fire, said they also regarded Mr. Hirsch’s list as the most
authoritative.
Descendants of those who perished, like a great-granddaughter of one 33-year-old victim, Maria Lauletti,
were heartened by the news, though no one interviewed had yet made a decision whether to exhume
bodies from the Evergreens cemetery and attempt a DNA match.
“It means that there’s recognition that she actually died in the fire,” said Mary Ann Lauletti Hacker, 57, of
Fountain Hills, Ariz. “To me, that’s a finality. She positively can be part of the record of those who died.”
No New York City agencies and no newspapers at the time produced a complete list of the dead, Mr.
Hirsch said. The most thorough list — 140 names — was compiled by Mr. Von Drehle when he wrote his
book, and that was largely based on names plucked from accounts in four contemporary newspapers.
The obscurity of their names is evidence of the times, when lives were lived quietly and people were
forced by economic and familial circumstances to swiftly move on from tragedies — with no Facebook or
reality television cameras to record their every step and thought.
Mr. Hirsch, 50, an amateur genealogist and historian who was hired as a co-producer of the coming HBO
documentary “Triangle: Remembering the Fire,” undertook an exhaustive search lasting more than four
years. He returned to the microfilms of mainstream daily newspapers overlooked by researchers before
him and to ethnic publications that he asked to have translated, like the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily
Forward and Il Giornale Italiano. He estimates that he consulted 32 different newspapers.
He looked for articles about people who, in the weeks after the fire, claimed that their relatives were still
missing. He then matched what he discovered with census records, death and burial certificates, marriage
licenses, and reports kept by unions and charities about funeral and “relief” payments made to the
families of the dead. Lastly, he sought out the descendants of three of the unidentified to confirm that the
names he found were still mourned as Triangle victims.
“I’m passionate about the history of this neighborhood,” Mr. Hirsch said of the combined Lower East Side
and East Village, where most of the workers had lived. “From my window, I can see the stairs that Lizzie
Adler had probably walked down to go to the factory the day of the fire.”
Typical of his illuminating morsels was an article in the Forward asking if anyone had seen Max Florin, a
23-year-old immigrant from Russia and one of the six unidentified victims. “We believe that he survived
the fire, but from great fear and being upset he went mad and is wandering the streets,” the article said, in
Mr. Hirsch’s rough paraphrasing. “He is of average height and was wearing a black suit.”
Mr. Hirsch began his quest modestly by trying to confirm existing lists. He found that they contained
misspelled names, names of those who had actually survived and of those who had not worked at the
factory. He was not surprised, given the bureaucratic fumbling and hurried journalism that often follows
tumultuous disasters.
He also learned that a name of one identified victim had been omitted. He found an article bypassed by
earlier compilers in The New York Times from March 31, 1911, about someone named Jacob Dashefsky,
who had come forward six days after the fire to say that his sister Bessie, 25, a Russian immigrant, had
not returned home. Her body was identified through dental records and barely missed being buried at
the funeral for the unidentified on April 5, 1911. That finding convinced him that there were others who
had been omitted for similar reasons.
Mr. Hirsch visited the graves of each of the known victims, who had been buried in 16 cemeteries, to
further ensure a comprehensive list. At Calvary Cemetery in Woodside, Queens, he came across what he
called “my Rosetta Stone.”
He was looking for the monument for Isabella Tortorelli, 17, but instead found a family monument whose
Italian inscription spoke of “due sorelle” — two sisters — who perished in the fire. Mr. Hirsch had never
seen the name of Isabella’s older sister, Maria Giuseppa Lauletti, on any list before. He checked with the
Calvary office and was told that her body was not in the grave.
He located her granddaughter, Mrs. Hacker, in Arizona, who told him that the family had never been able
to single out Ms. Lauletti’s body among the unidentified bodies, suggesting that she was probably buried
at Evergreens. She also informed him that Ms. Lauletti had been an immigrant from Sicily and the mother
of five children, four of whom were put in an orphanage after the fire.
On his own, Mr. Hirsch found a 1912 report by the Red Cross that sought to protect the anonymity of the
families receiving cash payments but whose details matched that of Ms. Lauletti. It also revealed that the
mother of “Number 85,” as Ms. Lauletti had been identified, was “almost crazed with grief” and “did
nothing but moan and weep for weeks.”
Why the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Is Important
Today
Huffington Post
Posted: 03/25/2014 1:10 pm EDT Updated: 03/25/2014
1:59 pm EDT
It may not seem that the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire,
which happened over a century ago in New York City,
would be relevant today -- but it is. It was a tragedy that
opened the nation's eyes to poor working conditions in
garment factories and other workplaces, and set in motion a
historic era of labor reforms. Unfortunately, we haven't
built enough on these gains. Today, too many employers are
failing to obey the labor and workplace safety laws that
were enacted in the years following the tragedy. And in part
because our government is not adequately enforcing these
laws, workers are still needlessly losing their lives on the
job. There is a lot that we can and must do to ensure that
the wellbeing of workers is put above profits.
The Triangle Shirtwaist incident is remembered for its
shocking brutality: On March 25, 1911, a ferocious fire
broke out at a factory on the ninth floor of a building in New York City's Greenwich Village. Some of the
exits and stairwells had been locked to prevent workers from taking breaks or stealing, leaving many
unable to get out. As a result, 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women, died within 20 minutes.
They were burned alive, asphyxiated by smoke or died trying to escape out of the windows and balcony.
The horrific event generated a nationwide outcry about working conditions and spurred efforts to
improve standards. Activists and labor unions like the International Ladies Garment Workers Union
(ILGWU) -- which lost members in the fire -- were at the forefront of this push for reforms. Honoring the
memory of those who died is particularly important to me and others at Amalgamated Bank, which was
founded by a garment worker's union in 1923, and is now majority-owned by Workers United, the
successor to all major garment worker unions, including the ILGWU.
Thanks to the efforts of the ILGWU and all who fought for workplace reforms, real changes got underway
immediately; in 1911, New York State initiated the most comprehensive investigation of factory
conditions in U.S. history. Their conclusions informed new standards that other states across the country
replicated and built upon in subsequent years.
We've come a long way since the fire happened -- but it's clear we still have a long way to go.
After all, workplace safety issues are hardly a thing of the past. It seems like nearly every year, another
workplace disaster happens somewhere in the United States. Like last year, when a fertilizer plant in
Texas exploded, killing 14 and injuring over 160. Or in 2010, when an explosion at a West Virginia coal
mine run by Massey Energy killed 29 miners and the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion left 11
workers dead and caused an enormous environmental disaster.
Thankfully, none of these events matched the human cost of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire -- or the
devastating factory collapse in Bangladesh last year where 1,129 people died -- but they should send a
similar message. No one should lose his or her life because companies are putting profitmaking ahead of
worker protections, and because our government is not performing its critical watchdog role. Experts say
that in each of the cases cited above, proper safety precautions could have prevented the devastating
accidents.
But companies are not consistent in their practices of adhering to worker safety precautions. So it's up to
us -- through pressure on our government and strategically exercising our rights as consumers and
shareholders -- to ensure that the right rules are in place and that companies play by them.
This issue of worker safety is of particular concern for undocumented workers who often receive the
worst treatment of all. While working in some of our most physically demanding and low-paying jobs -from construction to landscaping, and from housekeeping to daycare and nursing -- many of their
employers also cut corners when it comes to their safety, knowing they are less likely than other workers
to stand up for their rights. Immigrants have been crucial contributors to our economy since our nation's
founding. Teenagers from Russia, Italy and Germany worked side-by-side at the Triangle Shirtwaist
factory -- just as immigrants from all over the world do in today's workplaces -- and it's time we treated
them with the fairness and respect they deserve.
How can we avoid these kinds of safety problems and exploitation to begin with? We can start by
reinvigorating the role of unions. While unions continue to do everything they can to curb these abuses,
the proportion of the workforce that is unionized has eroded dramatically since its peak in the 1950s. To
ensure both safety and fairness on the job, workers need to join together on the job to improve their
working conditions.
Institutional investors and other shareholders of publicly traded companies also have an important role
to play. By pursuing corporate governance reforms when needed and lawsuits when companies commit
serious wrongdoing, investors can spur changes from the inside out. Corporate governance actions can't
erase the tragedy, but they can help make sure companies -- and their competitors -- are looking out for
workers going forward.
Government also needs to step up. In so many cases of workplace safety problems or worker
mistreatment, there are laws on the books that just aren't being enforced. Our elected officials need to
fight for resources for workplace inspections through agencies like OSHA -- which has consistently faced
cuts in recent years -- and ensure thorough investigations when problems are brought to their attention.
For citizens, that means making our voices heard about the importance of workplace safety, and voting
for elected officials who represent those views.
We can't undo history and bring back those we've lost. But we can prevent others from suffering similar
fates -- and work to ensure both safety and fairness in the workplace -- now and in the future.