The 1911 New York fire that changed history

On the eighth floor of a women’s garment factory steps from Washington Square Park, a fire broke out in a wood bin filled with fabric scraps. It was about 4 pm on a Saturday, and the workday should have been ending.

Instead, the blaze grew, reaching the ninth and tenth floors of the factory. When workers tried to escape, they encountered locked doors. One fire escape collapsed to the ground under the weight of desperate employees.

Many of those trapped in the upper floors jumped to the sidewalk in front of horrified onlookers, others burned in the flames because firefighters’ ladders were too short to reach the windows. A total of 146 workers were killed in the fire of March 25, 1911—mostly young female immigrants.

As tragic as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was, the terrible toll had a profound effect in New York City—leading to stricter workplace safety laws and harsher legislation protecting workers. These new mandates had strong support from an outraged public, whose horror was reflected in piercing illustrations that appeared in newspapers for weeks.

This one above is by John Sloan, published in The Call. The illustrator of the second image is unknown, but that sure looks like the Asch Building, where the Triangle fire occurred.

The Triangle Shirtwaist fire’s hero elevator men

The Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women trapped in the Greene Street building’s locked upper floors.

But the death toll on that spring-like afternoon, March 25, 1911, would have been higher if not for the factory’s two passenger elevator operators.

“Jospeh Zito (at right) and Gaspar Mortillalo, the elevator operators, were sitting in their cars waiting for the Triangle closing time when suddenly their bells began ringing wildly,” writes David Von Drehle in his book Triangle.

“In the aftermath, there would be much confusion about which floors the elevators visited and when, but they probably went first to the eighth floor, saved a load of grateful survivors, then headed up to the [tenth] floor.

“Zito estimates that he made two trips to the tenth floor—but when he got there the second time, everyone was gone. The rest of their work was on nine.

“Each elevator was built to hold about a dozen people. On their final runs, the cars carried at least twice that number.

“Between them, Zito and Mortillalo probably rescued 150 people or more—approximately half the total number of survivors.

“‘When I first opened the elevator door on the ninth floor all I could see was a crowd of girls and men with great flames and smoke right behind them,’ Zito said.

“‘When I came to the floor the [last] time, the girls were standing on the window sills with fire all around them.'”