The story
On the afternoon of March 25, 1911, fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Asch Building in Manhattan, home to the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Fed by fabric scraps, it killed 146 workers in about eighteen minutes, 123 women and girls and 23 men, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrants. A ninth-floor exit door was locked, a fire escape collapsed, and fire ladders reached only the sixth floor. The owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, were acquitted of manslaughter in December 1911.
The sewing machine had made garment-making a major industry, and mass immigration had supplied its workforce on the Lower East Side. Triangle's workers had joined the 1909 'Uprising of the 20,000' for safer conditions, but lost at Triangle. After the fire about 100,000 people marched in a funeral procession, and New York created a Factory Investigating Commission under legislators Robert Wagner and Alfred E. Smith, with Frances Perkins, a witness to the fire, as a key advocate. It produced dozens of laws on exits, sprinklers, hours and machinery. In 2011 researchers named the last six unidentified victims.
Why it mattered
- New York passed over thirty workplace safety and labor laws after the Factory Investigating Commission, a model for other states.
- Frances Perkins and Robert Wagner carried their experience into the New Deal's labor and social laws of the 1930s.
- Fire codes and building regulations, including mandatory unlocked exits and sprinklers, became standard.
- The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union grew in strength, and the fire became a symbol of the case for union protection and regulation.
Sources
- The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Cornell University Kheel Center
- Triangle fire victims identified after a century of uncertainty Cornell Chronicle
- Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire Jewish Women's Archive
- Legislative Reform (Remembering the Triangle Factory Fire) Cornell ILR Kheel Center
Community notes
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