March 25, 1911: The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, 146 Garment Workers Died
Saturday, March 25, 1911 in New York City. 'A Factory Fire & Frances Perkins,' March 25, 2011. Today marks 100 years since the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire—a blaze that lasted 18 minutes and left 146 workers dead. Among the many in New York City who witnessed the tragedy was Frances Perkins, who would later become FDR’s Secretary of Labor, making her the first woman to serve in a Presidential cabinet.
As Secretary of Labor, Perkins was instrumental in creating and implementing the Social Security Act—but she was also intensely interested in the safety and rights of workers. “I came to Washington to work for God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten, plain common workingmen,” she said.
Perkins had a degree from Mount Holyoke College, where her coursework included touring factories. She later earned a master’s degree in in social economics from Columbia University. She had been working as factory inspector in New York at the time of the fire. The fire started in a wastebasket on the eighth floor, and the flames jumped up onto the paper patterns that were hanging from the ceiling...
https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2011/03/25/a-factory-fire-and-francis-perkins/
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, on March 25, 1911, was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in U.S. history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers – 123 women and girls and 23 men – who died from the fire, smoke inhalation, or falling or jumping to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent Italian and Jewish immigrant women and girls aged 14 to 23; of the victims whose ages are known, the oldest victim was 43-year-old Providenza Panno, and the youngest were 14-year-olds Kate Leone and Rosaria "Sara" Maltese.
The factory was located on the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the Asch Building, at 23–29 Washington Place, near Washington Square Park. The 1901 building still stands today and is known as the Brown Building. It is part of and owned by New York University.
Because the doors to the stairwells and exits were locked (a then-common practice to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and to reduce theft), many of the workers who could not escape from the burning building jumped from the high windows. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire
- Bodies on the sidewalk: 62 people jumped or fell out windows to the street pavement below.
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and were fined only $25 as noted in this brief, informational article:
- 'What became of the Triangle factory owners?' Ephemeral New York.
The names Isaac Harris and Max Blanck probably don’t resonate with New Yorkers today. Yet 114 years ago, everyone knew them: Harris and Blanck (below) owned the Triangle Waist Company on Greene Street, where a devastating fire killed 146 employees on March 25, 1911. From that horrific tragedy rose a stronger workers’ rights movement and new city laws mandating safer workplaces. But what happened to Harris and Blanck, both of whom were in the company’s 10th floor offices that warm Saturday afternoon and managed to survive the fire unscathed? Like many of their “operators,” as the girls who worked the rows of sewing machines were known, they were Jewish immigrants.
Blanck and Harris both started as workers in the growing garment industry in the 1890s and then became business owners, making a fortune manufacturing ladies blouses and earning the nickname the Shirtwaist Kings. They certainly were easy targets to blame, and both men were indicted on first and second degree manslaughter charges, thanks to evidence uncovered by detectives that a door on the 9th floor leading to a fire exit had been locked, a violation of law.
Protected by guards and represented by a big-name lawyer at their December 1911 trial, Harris and Blanck each took the stand, countering the testimony of surviving workers who claimed that the door was always locked to prevent theft. On December 27, they were acquitted. “Isaac Harris and Max Blanck dropped limply into their chairs as their wives began quietly sobbing behind them,” wrote David Von Drehle in Triangle. To avoid an angry mob of family members outside the courthouse demanding justice, the two men were smuggled through a side exit away from their waiting limousines. They went into the subway instead.
Immediately they relaunched the Triangle company on Fifth Avenue & 16th Street. But their names made headlines again. “All of their revenue went into paying off their celebrity lawyer, & they were sued in early 1912 over their inability to pay a $206 water bill,” states PBS.org. “Despite these struggles, the 2 men ultimately collected a large chunk of insurance money—$60,000 more than the fire had actually cost them in damages. Harris & Blanck had made a profit from the fire of $400 per victim.” In 1913, at a new factory on 23rd Street, Blanck paid a $25 fine for locking a door during working hours, & he was warned during an inspection that factory was rife with fire hazards. A year later, the 2 were caught sewing fraudulent labels into their shirtwaists that claimed the clothes had been made under sound conditions. *By 1918, after agreeing to pay $75 per deceased employee to families that had brought civil suits against them, they threw in the towel & disbanded the company...
https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2015/03/23/what-became-of-the-triangle-factory-owners/
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(Wiki).. The Insurance Monitor, a leading industry journal, observed that shirtwaists had recently fallen out of fashion, and that insurance for manufacturers of them was "fairly saturated with moral hazard." Although Blanck and Harris were known for having had four previous suspicious fires at their companies, arson was not suspected in this case...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire
