The Triangle Fire (14 page)

5. Friends and relatives identifying bodies in Pier Morgue after the fire.

6. Crowds gather outside the Asch building.

7. A room in the Asch building after the fire.

8. Joseph Zito, the elevator operator who performed heroic work during the fire.

9. Coroner and jury questioning employees.

10. Thousands line the street waiting for the funeral procession.

11. A description of the disaster in a local newspaper.

12. The unions mourn.

13. One of hundreds of families in mourning.

14. Despite earlier safety warnings, the doors were kept locked. (From the New York
Evening Journal
, March 31, 1911.)

15. Tad in the New York
Evening Journal
expresses the sentiments of many.

16. A commentary on safety inspections.

She died. And they kept word of her death from her friend in the next ward who had also jumped. The doctors said Freda Velakowsky of 679 East Twelfth Street still had a chance.

At 9
P.M
., Monday, twenty-eight unidentified bodies remained in the morgue.

On the third day after the fire, the crowd began to form in Misery Lane shortly before dawn. It was the smallest crowd since the catastrophe. Before noon, half of the sixty patrolmen and mounted policemen on duty were sent back to their regular assignments.

They had hardly passed from sight when about one thousand factory girls, dressed mainly in black, marched into Twenty-sixth Street at First Avenue. Under the impression that there was to be a public funeral of the unidentified that afternoon, they had come to pay their final respects to fellow workers. They were dispersed by the police.

Benny Castello went to the shoe store on Houston Street and purchased a pair of button shoes like the single pair his sister had bought in this same store. In the morgue he identified her by matching the shoes he carried with those in the pine box.

Hope of identifying the well-preserved, Italian-looking woman in Box No. 74 evaporated. No one from Randall’s Island could recognize her. Commissioner Drummond ordered that pictures be taken of her and that they be reproduced in the city’s Italian-language newspapers.

In New York Hospital, Freda Velakowsky lost her fight.

The police moved the jewelry and other personal possessions of the victims to the East Thirty-fifth Street Police Station.

Twenty unidentified bodies remained in the morgue.

Four days after the fire, pretty Mary Leventhal was still among the missing. Many of the workers, with whom she had been a favorite, had come to look for her. But it was Joseph Flecher, who worked in the Triangle office, who remembered he had recently sent her to a dentist friend of his.

He came to the morgue with his friend, Dr. J. Zaharia, who recognized her by a gold cap he had recently set.

But Sophie Salemi’s mother recognized her by the dam in her stocking at the knee of her left leg. “I mended it only the day before the fire,” her mother said. “That is my Sophie.”

Policeman Peter Purfield, who had already been complimented by Commissioner Drummond for his resourcefulness in the identification work, closely examined a shoe taken from the body of the Italian-looking woman in No. 74 box. He found a baby’s sock in the heel.