The factory was located on the eight, ninth and tenth floors of the Asch Building at 23-29 Washington Place. (It is now known as the Brown Building and it is designated a National Historic Landmark.) There were ten stories in the building. The fire started about 4:40 P.M. on the eight floor under one of the cutter's tables. It soon spread to the higher floors.
About five hundred workers were in the factory when the fire started. There were two stairways and two freight elevators. A door leading to the Washington Place stairway was locked. The Green Street stairway provided an escape route for three minutes before it was engulfed in flames and smoke. Workers escaped by freight elevator until electric power failed. Others climbed a stairway to the roof. Some of the workers decided to leap from windows.
An eyewitness, Lewis Waldman, described the event: "...looked up at the burning building, saw girl after girl appear at the reddened windows, pause for a terrified moment, and then leap to the pavement below, to land as a mangled, bloody pulp... Occasionally a girl who hesitated too long was licked by the pursuing flames and, screaming with clothing and hair ablaze, plunged like a living torch to the street. Life nets held by the firemen were torn by the impact of the falling bodies."
The fire was extinguished in half an hour. Most of the one hundred forty six workers who died were young women. The Fire Marshall concluded that a match or cigarette butt started the fire under a cutter's table.
One hundred thousand people attended a public funeral march a few days later. Victims of the fire were buried in more than a dozen cemeteries.
The New York City District Attorney indicted the two owners of the factory on manslaughter charges. Evidence was introduced to show that it was common practice to lock the doors of the factory to prevent theft and unauthorized worker's breaks. The owners were acquitted when a jury determined that the owners did not know a door was locked.
"The monstrous conclusion of the law is that the slaughter was no one's fault," New York's Literary Digest opined. "There are no guilty. There are only the dead."
Reform was demanded by the people of New York State. Al Smith, Speaker of the Assembly, and Robert F. Wagner, Majority Leader of the Senate, led a Factory Investigation Committee. Committee members toured factories and mills all over the state. Working conditions were examined and documented. The commission drafted bills governing fire protection and work safety. Special restrictions were written into law for women and child labor. Between 1911-16, the state legislature passed sixty work safety bills.
Four days after the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in New York City, a fire roared through the State Assembly chamber in Albany, New York. On March 29, 1911, the State Library was gutted by the fire, a night watchman was killed, and several offices were damaged. The cause of the fire was never determined.
Approximately 450,000 books and 270,000 manuscripts, including some historical records of early Dutch and colonial history, were destroyed. Archivist A.J.F.Van Laer claimed: "The loss in this room means that the very basis of the early history of the state has been wiped out."
As a result of this fire, a bill was pushed through the state legislature to place the historian's office under the Education Department.
Reference:
1) Wikipedia, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
2) New York Under Fire by Bruce W. Dearstyne, former program director at the New York State Archives.
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