What became of the Triangle factory owners?

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.

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 and 16th Street.

But their names made headlines again. “All of their revenue went into paying off their celebrity lawyer, and they were sued in early 1912 over their inability to pay a $206 water bill,” states PBS.org.

“Despite these struggles, the two men ultimately collected a large chunk of insurance money—$60,000 more than the fire had actually cost them in damages. Harris and 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, and he was warned during an inspection that factory was rife with fire hazards.

A year later, the two 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 and disbanded the company.

[Photos 1-3: Kheel Center, Cornell University; 4-5: Brown Brothers]

The murals memorializing the 1911 Triangle Fire

It’s one of the city’s most notorious tragedies: the March 25, 1911 fire that broke out on the upper floors of a Washington Place sweatshop, killing 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women.

The fire ushered in a new era of safety standards for garment-industry workers—a huge business in the city in the first half of the 20th century and the post-World War II years.

So in 1940, when a coalition of unions and government groups created a new secondary school, Central High School of Needle Trades, to train students to work in the garment industry, it seemed fitting to also commemorate the Triangle fire and the struggle for workers’ rights.

Artist Ernest Fiene was brought in by the Works Progress Administration to paint the murals in the auditorium of the new school, on 24th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues.

“Completed in 1940, Fiene’s History of the Needlecraft Industry positions the Triangle fire at a critical juncture between the exploitative labor conditions characteristic of the early garment industry and the strong worker protections ushered in by unionism and New Deal legislation in the 1930s,” states this New York University website.

The high school is now called the High School for Fashion Industries, and though the auditorium isn’t open to non-students, more detailed information about all three panels can be found here.

The mysterious plaque affixed to fire escapes

An Ephemeral reader sent in this photo of the plaque on her fire escape. It carries a stern warning: “Notice: Any one placing any ? ? on this balcony will be fined ten dollars.” 

I once lived in an old walkup with a fire escape with the same plaque, and I’ve seen them in other apartments as well. 

According to a 1905 guide the reader dug up called Birdseye’s Revised Statutes, Codes and General Laws of the State of New York, all fire escape balconies had to sport this plate, which is supposed to read “Any one placing any encumbrance on this balcony shall be fined ten dollars.”

Does anyone know if this law was inspired by a specific tragedy? Residents back then, crammed into small apartments, must have routinely stored stuff on their fire escapes. The result: They couldn’t get out during a fire—and firefighters couldn’t get in to save them.