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Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire

"Thrilling Incidents in Gotham Holocaust That Wiped Out One Hundred and Fifty Lives"
Originally published in the Chicago Sunday Tribune, March 26, 1911; available at The Triangle Factory Fire (Web site)

"A 13 year old girl hung for three minutes by her finger tips to the sill of a tenth floor window. A tongue of flame licked at her fingers and she dropped into a life net held by firemen."

The Manhattan building owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris at 23–29 Washington Place in New York City was also known as the Asch building. The Asch building was the equivalent of a twenty-first century office building. The owners rented floors of the ten-story building to various businesses. These businesses, in turn, hired workers to make whatever products the companies sold.

One of the businesses housed in the Asch building was the Triangle Shirtwaist Company (also sometimes referred to as the Triangle Waist Company). Shirtwaist referred to a type of blouse worn by women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was white, with a tight waist, buttons down the front, and puffy sleeves. Although there were about five hundred shirtwaist factories in New York alone, the Triangle Company was the largest. The company employed around five hundred workers, most of them Italian and European Jewish girls and women. All five hundred employees were stuffed onto three floors: the eighth, ninth, and tenth. Blanck and Harris were the principal owners of the Triangle Company.

Although wages and working conditions were less than decent, the Triangle workers—mostly immigrants—were glad to have a job. The work day began at 7:30 am and lasted until 9 o'clock in the evening during busy season. Normal work days ended around 4:45 pm. There was no such thing as overtime pay, and employees were not given any money to buy themselves dinner. Wages ranged from $1.50 a week for simpler work to $22 (an astronomical amount) a week for cutters, the men who actually cut the patterns used to make all the shirtwaists. The average weekly pay was $6–7.

The Asch building was a perfect example of the hundreds of other sweatshops (factories that provided inhumane working conditions and employee treatment) found throughout America's industrial regions during the turn of the century. In order to fit the greatest number of people into the building, machinery and equipment were placed in such a way that movement throughout the rooms or floors was dangerously limited. Ventilation (fresh air) in those buildings was poor. The overcrowded conditions made working not only difficult but unsafe.

In addition to the unsafe working conditions and low wages, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company mistreated its workers. One young worker, Pauline Newman, described her experience in the shop in the book American Mosaic: The Immigrant Experience in the Words of Those Who Lived It:

They were the kind of employers who didn't recognize anyone working for them as a human being. You were not allowed to sing. Operators would like to have sung, because they, too, had the same thing to do, and weren't allowed to sing. You were not allowed to talk to each other. Oh, no! They would sneak up behind you, and if you were found talking to your next colleague you were admonished [scolded]. If you'd keep on, you'd be fired. If you went to the toilet, and you were there more than the forelady or foreman thought you should be, you were threatened to be laid off for a half a day, and sent home, and that meant, of course, no pay, you know? You were not allowed to use the passenger elevator, only a freight elevator. And ah, you were watched every minute of the day by the foreman, forelady. Employers would sneak behind your back. And you were not allowed to have your lunch on the fire escape in the summertime. And that door was locked.

In 1909, shirtwaist factory workers throughout New York gathered in protest of the poor working conditions and treatment as well as the …