The Third Gate: Fire at the Triangle

One year after the "great uprising," conditions at the garment factories were arguably no better than before. At most shops, employers had broken their agreements with unions and were finding other ways to victimize workers: employees were fined for petty offenses, and experienced craftswomen were forced to teach others what they knew before being dismissed and replaced by the lower-paid individuals they had tutored. In addition, a new worry lay heavily on the minds of employees. As proven by a 1910 disaster at a cotton underwear facility in Newark, New Jersey, the threat of experiencing a catastrophic fire in the workplace was very real.

The science of firefighting and fire prevention was fairly advanced by the year 1911. The Fire Department of the City of New York boasted a top-notch, professional firefighting force, with all the latest in equipment. Automatic sprinklers had just been invented and were common in New England schools and cotton mills. Fire drills were held regularly in many places to teach workers to get away from a conflagration in an efficient and orderly manner. Sadly, these well-known protections were not widely utilized in New York for the simple reason that they took away from company profits; labor was callously regarded as expendable. Also, in the corrupt atmosphere of the city, arson by unscrupulous owners for the purpose of collecting on insurance policies was "a big business." Sprinklers would interfere if owners intended to one day burn their shops, and conducting fire drills might raise suspicions about their intentions.

The Asch Building, which housed the Triangle Waist Company, was a modern skyscraper—an essentially fireproof structure. Its layout, however, and the materials used in the manufacturing of shirtwaists were such that a fire would spread with extreme rapidity. The people inside would have no adequate means of escape. Long tables stretching from one end of the room to the other would hinder employees from reaching exits in a timely manner. Cotton pieces piled on and under the tables and from lines hanging up above were extremely flammable.

At 4:40 p.m. on Saturday, March 25, smoke began pouring from beneath a cutting table on the eighth floor of the building. Within seconds, flames were roaring everywhere, as panic-stricken workers rushed for the two passenger elevators and two narrow, unlit stairways leading to the ground floor. In addition, there was a rickety fire escape fastened to the outside wall of the building. It was not meant for use by great numbers of people, however, and collapsed under the weight of scores of individuals rushing to safety.

Even though the fire department was on the scene within five minutes, their ladders were not long enough to reach to the top stories of the Asch Building. Chaos reigned on the top three floors housing the Triangle Waist Company. Terrified workers met gory deaths at exit doors locked to prevent latecomers from entering; some were crushed in stairwells crammed with broken bodies; others died after jumping from eight or more stories.

Within thirty-five minutes after the fire first began, firemen had brought the blaze under control. As expected, the structural integrity of the building itself had not been compromised, but everything inside was destroyed. Five-hundred people had reported for work that day, and in a little over thirty minutes, one-hundred and forty-six of them had died. It was New York's worst workplace disaster up to that time. To this day, it is eclipsed only by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, which killed twenty-five thousand people.