Most of the several hundred Triangle Shirtwaist employees were teenage girls. Most were recent immigrants. Many spoke only a little English. Just then somebody on the eighth floor shouted, "Fire! Triangle employee William Bernstein grabbed pails of water and vainly attempted to put the fire out. As a line of hanging patterns began to burn, cries of "fire" erupted from all over the floor.
In the thickening smoke, as several men continued to fling water at the fire, the fire spread everywhere--to the tables, the wooden floor trim, the partitions, the ceiling. A shipping clerk dragged a hose in the stairwell into the rapidly heating room, but nothing came--no pressure.
Terrified and screaming, girls streamed down the narrow fire escape and Washington Place stairway or jammed into the single passenger elevator. Dinah Lifschitz, at her eighth-floor post, telephoned the tenth floor headquarters of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory: "I heard Mary Alter's voice on the other end. I told her there was a fire on the eighth floor, to tell Mr.
She got no answer. I can't get anyone! On the eighth floor, only Lifschitz and Samuel Bernstein remained in the gathering smoke and flames. Bernstein told Lifschitz to escape, while he attempted a daring dash through the blaze into the Greene Street staircase. He ran up to the ninth floor, but found the fire so intense he could not enter. He continued up to the tenth floor where he found panicked employees "running around like wildcats.
Assistant cashier Joseph Flecher looked down from the tenth floor roof to see "my girls, my pretty ones, going down through the air. They hit the sidewalk spread out and still. Fifteen feet above the Asch building roof, Professor Frank Sommer was teaching his class at the New York University Law School when he saw dozens of hysterical Shirtwaist workers stumbling around on the roof below. Sommer and his students found ladders left by painters and placed them so as to allow the escaping employees to climb to the school roof.
The last tenth-floor worker saved was an unconscious girl with smoldering hair who was dragged up the ladder. Of the approximately seventy workers on the tenth floor, all but one survived.
In the hell of the ninth-floor, employees, mostly young women, would die. Those that acted quickly made it through the Greene Street stairs, climbed down a rickety fire escape before it collapsed, or squeezed into the small Washington Place elevators before they stopped running. The last person on the last elevator to leave the ninth floor was Katie Weiner, who grabbed a cable that ran through the elevator and swung in, landing on the heads of other girls. A few other girls survived by jumping into the elevator shaft, and landing on the roof of the elevator compartment as it made its final descent.
The weight of the girls caused the car to sink to the bottom of the shaft, leaving it immobile. Regrettably, despite the lessons learned from the Triangle Shirtwaist trial and its significance to American history , exploitative companies are still there today. Undoubtedly, despite the existence of worker safety and minimum pay laws, there will always be desperate employees willing to work for little pay. Therefore, the lessons we could learn from the trial and the prevailing factory conditions of present-day workers teach us that workplace safety is an ongoing and complex issue.
Having a long-term solution to the problem requires a careful understanding of the underlying social, economic, and political issues that have prevented the realization of a lasting solution to the problem. Council for Economic Education. Lange, Brenda. Laye, Adam. Linder, Doug. Marsico, Katie. Von-Drehle, David. Need a custom Essay sample written from scratch by professional specifically for you?
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Removal Request. If you are the copyright owner of this paper and no longer wish to have your work published on IvyPanda. Cite This paper. Copy to Clipboard Copied! Reference IvyPanda. Bibliography IvyPanda. The th anniversary of the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire, which killed workers in a New York City garment factory, marks a century of reforms that make up the core of OSHA's mission. Use this page to learn more about a tragic event that led to a "general awakening" that continues to drive OSHA's commitment to workers.
One hundred years ago on March 25, fire spread through the cramped Triangle Waist Company garment factory on the 8th, 9th and 10th floors of the Asch Building in lower Manhattan. Workers in the factory, many of whom were young women recently arrived from Europe, had little time or opportunity to escape. The rapidly spreading fire killed workers. The building had only one fire escape, which collapsed during the rescue effort.
Long tables and bulky machines trapped many of the victims. The last tenth-floor worker saved was an unconscious girl with smoldering hair who was dragged up the ladder. Of the approximately seventy workers on the tenth floor, all but one survived.
In the hell of the ninth-floor, employees, mostly young women, would die. Those that acted quickly made it through the Greene Street stairs, climbed down a rickety fire escape before it collapsed, or squeezed into the small Washington Place elevators before they stopped running. The last person on the last elevator to leave the ninth floor was Katie Weiner, who grabbed a cable that ran through the elevator and swung in, landing on the heads of other girls.
A few other girls survived by jumping into the elevator shaft, and landing on the roof of the elevator compartment as it made its final descent. The weight of the girls caused the car to sink to the bottom of the shaft, leaving it immobile. For those left on the ninth floor, forced to choose between an advancing inferno and jumping to the sidewalks below, many would jump.
Others, according to survivor Ethel Monick, became "frozen with fear" and "never moved. The bodies of seamstresses, who jumped from the factory floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company to avoid being burned alive, lie outside the building.
It took only eighteen minutes to bring the fire under control, and in ten minutes more it was practically "all over. Doctors pawed through heaps of humanity looking for signs of life. Police tried desperately to keep crowds of hysterical relatives from overrunning the disaster scene. Officers filled coffins and loaded them into patrol wagons and ambulances. The bodies were taken to a temporary morgue set up on a covered pier at the foot of East Twenty-sixth Street.
Firemen searched the burned-out floors of the Asch building, hoping to find survivors. What they mostly found were, according to Chief Edward Croker, "bodies burned to bare bones, skeletons bending over sewing machines.
Looking for Blame. Within two days after the fire, city officials began announcing preliminary conclusions concerning the tragic fire. Fire Marshal William Beers stated that the fire probably began when a lighted match was thrown into either waste near oil cans or into clippings under cutting table No. Despite an announced policy of no smoking in the factory, Beers reported that fire investigators picked up many cigarette cases near the spot of the fires origin, and that many employees reported that smoking on the premises was commonplace.
Fire Chief Edward Croker told the press that doors leading into the factory workplace appeared to be locked and that his men had to chop their way through doors to get at the fire. Many pointed fingers at New York City's Building Department, blaming it for an inadequate inspection of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. District Attorney Charles Whitman called for "an immediate and rigid" investigation to determine whether the Building Department "had complied with the law. I shall proceed against the Building Department along with the others.
They are as guilty as any. Calls for justice continued to grow. Charles Slattery, rector of a church a few blocks from the fire scene, told his congregation that "It will perhaps be discovered that someone was too eager to make money out of human energy to provide the proper safeguards.
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