THE FIRE

Fire engines trying to put out the fire (see fig. 1)

On Saturday, March 25, 1911, a fire began on the eighth floor of the building. The fire marshal would later conclude that it was ignited by a cigarette discarded into a bin full of fabric scraps. In a room full of textiles, the fire spread quickly. The tenth floor was alerted of the fire, but the ninth floor, with its broken telephone, was not. Those on the eighth and tenth floors could escape relatively easily, but on the ninth floor, they were trapped. The foreman in charge of the ninth floor had locked the women in that morning, supposedly to prevent theft. As the fire spread, he had already fled the building with the key.

"...there, smashed on the sidewalk, were the beautiful faces of those who were my neighbors at the machines."

Dora Appel Skalka, blouse maker on the 8th floor

Employees on the ninth floor were left stranded, trapped between the flames. Some managed to escape through the Greene Street stairway up to the roof, but it was engulfed by flames within three minutes. Others managed to get into the elevator, but it could only manage three trips up before the heat destroyed the rails. Some desperately tried to jump into the empty shaft and slide down the cable. The exterior fire escape broke with 20 employees on it. Later, dozens of employees would testify that they did not try to go down the fire escape because they did not know there was one.

Newspaper article showing the exterior of the Asch building after the fire (see fig. 2)

Horse-drawn fire engine on its way to the fire (see fig. 3)

62 people jumped to their deaths from the burning building. The fire engines had arrived, but their ladders did not reach beyond the sixth floor. They were equipped with life nets, but those nets were unable to sustain the velocity of human bodies falling 30 meters. Those falling victims, in turn, were making it difficult to approach the building because people hit by the bodies were also killed.

"I learned a new sound—a more horrible sound than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding, living body on a stone sidewalk."

William Gunn Shepherd, United Press reporter

The building's south side, windows marked with an 'X' indicate where women jumped from (see fig. 4)

The tenth floor interior after the fire (see fig. 5)

The tragedy lasted 18 minutes. By the end of the day, 146 people were dead. They died of burns, asphyxiation, blunt impact injuries, or some combination of the three. Of the 146, the vast majority of them were part of the 200 employees that were working on the ninth floor when the fire began. The factory floors were almost entirely destroyed. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire was the deadliest workplace disaster in New York City until the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, when nearly 3,000 people were killed.

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