Triangle Shirtwaist locked its doors — 146 workers burned or jumped to their deaths

On Saturday, March 25, 1911, at 4:40 PM, a fire started in a scrap bin under a cutting table on the 8th floor of the Asch Building in Greenwich Village. The Triangle Waist Company occupied the top three floors. It employed about 500 workers, mostly young Italian and Jewish immigrant women and girls, aged 14 to 23. They worked 52-hour weeks for $7 to $12. The doors to the stairwells and exits were locked from the outside — a common practice to prevent theft and unauthorized breaks. There was no sprinkler system. The sole fire escape was a flimsy iron structure.

The fire spread fast. The manager on the 8th floor tried the fire hose: the valve was rusted shut. Workers on the 8th and 10th floors could reach the Greene Street stairs — most escaped. But one foreman on the 9th floor had locked the Washington Place exit and taken the key with him when he fled. For those workers, there was no way out. The fire escape, overloaded with 20 people, collapsed under the heat. The elevator ran three trips before it broke. The fire department's ladders reached only the 7th floor.

Sixty-two people jumped or fell from the 9th floor windows to their deaths. Others burned inside. The entire event lasted 18 minutes. By the time it was over, 146 workers were dead — 123 women and girls, 23 men. A reporter described the sound of bodies hitting the pavement as the worst sound he had ever heard. The youngest victims were 14. The bodies were laid out on the sidewalk, row after row, covered in tarps.

The owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, were indicted for manslaughter. Their defense lawyer destroyed a witness by asking her to repeat her memorized testimony until it sounded rehearsed — the jury acquitted in under two hours. In a civil suit, families were awarded $75 per victim. The insurance company paid the owners $64,925 more than their reported losses. But the fire had consequences: it led to 38 new labor laws, created the Factory Investigating Commission, and sparked the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.