The Triangle Fire (9 page)

But when she felt that the pressure behind her could no longer be resisted, she turned and leaped for a cable.

“I was on top of the elevator cage, face up,” she said. “I saw firemen going up the stairs with a hose. One of them called to me through the grill as he went up, ‘You are all right!’ I kept crying, ‘Look! Look!’ That’s all I could say. They couldn’t see what I could see way up there in the shaft.”

She could see others being pushed out into the shaft at the ninth floor. She rolled over toward the wall to be out of the line of their plunge.

Joseph Zito heard the bodies hit, felt his car shiver with each new impact. “A body struck the top of the elevator and bent the iron. A minute later another one hit.

“The screams from above were getting worse. I looked up and saw the whole shaft getting red with fire. I knew the poor girls up there were trapped. But my car wouldn’t work. It was jammed by the bodies.”

Then the car slipped down to the bottom of the shaft.

“It was horrible,” Zito added. “They kept coming down from the burning floors above. Some of their clothing was burning as they fell. I could see the streaks of fire coming down like flaming rockets.”

Now there was no exit. The flames roared louder, steadier. They poured up the Greene Street stairwell. They pushed out of all of the windows. They blew into the Washington Place elevator shaft. In the center of the shop, they billowed as a single deep layer of flame. And the door to the Washington Place staircase held fast and there life screamed to an end.

“I have never been able to forget that maybe I could have saved pretty Mary Levanthal,” cutter Joseph Granick says.

“Only a few minutes before the fire she came down to the eighth floor where I was cutting trimmings. She said to me, ‘Joe, I have a few girls coming in tomorrow. I need a few dozen cuffs.’

“I gave her five bundles of cuffs. Why didn’t I hold her back? Why didn’t I talk to her a little longer? Why didn’t I argue with her? If she had stayed only a few more minutes she would have escaped with us. But, no! She went back to the ninth floor to die.”

6. ESCAPE

For never to return here I believed.

—
CANTO VIII
:96

The city came running.

On the East Side, the old women heard the screams of the fire engines, distant and shifting like wild beasts dashing through the labyrinth of narrow streets. They threw their knitted shawls over their heads, wrung their hands, and ran.

The clang and screams of the engines converging from all sides on Washington Place made thousands pause. On nearby Fourteenth Street, Saturday afternoon crowds in front of the department stores and the Academy of Music at Irving Place heard the terrible sounds. In the tenement canyons south of Washington Square, and in the offices along lower Broadway the insistent engine whistles announced an unknown catastrophe.

Wherever they were in the streets, people looked skyward and knew the place of disaster. Faces turned toward the pillar of black smoke steadily rising in the sky. Thousands began to race the screaming engines toward the Asch building.

They came by Third Avenue elevated and by Fifth Avenue double-decker buses. In the more remote reaches of the East Side they boarded streetcars or commandeered rides on horse-drawn wagons.

As they drained toward Washington Place, groups coalesced into crowds overflowing the sidewalks, running in the cobblestoned streets, parting only to let the galloping fire horses dash through. They turned the final corner breathlessly, horrified as they saw the flames, speechless and dumb on first viewing the holocaust, then making the sounds of helpless terror and grief as they saw the bodies on the sidewalk.

But a few ran the other way.

These had escaped the flames in the Asch building. Wildeyed, disheveled, they had come staggering out of the building, had seen the bodies of friends and co-workers twisted on the sidewalk, and had fled for the sanctuary of home.

Anna Dougherty ran. Her long hair had come loose, her clothing was torn and smoke-smudged. She ran through Broadway near Wanamaker’s store, said the
Herald
, “and gave to a large shopping crowd the first intimation of the fire.”

Hysterically she darted between the streetcars and the horse-drawn wagons on the busy street, shouting all the time to the people watching her in astonishment:

“Don’t let them hurt me! Don’t let them hurt me!”

Traffic stopped. Kind hands led her to the sidewalk. She struggled weakly with a policeman who tried to help her. Then she sobbed out her name, told where she lived, and was led away by a group of women.

Dora Appel had come out of the eighth-floor Washington Place staircase door, stumbling downward to the street. There she saw the smashed bodies of her shopmates.

“I couldn’t stay there.”

She doesn’t remember how she got home to Broome Street.

“I walked. I remember coming to my house. I was numb. I walked up the stairs, through the apartment to my bedroom and threw myself across the bed.”

There she lay in a sleep of exhaustion. She awoke to the sound of crying on the other side of her bedroom door.

“It was my friend from the next apartment. She was crying for me, pleading to know if I was home. I ran to the door and threw it open. I called to her, ‘I am here! I am alive!’ Oh, how she ran to me. We were together till early morning. The families around us talked and talked. But we two couldn’t stop crying.”

Rose Cohen had also sobbed herself to sleep on her bed in the dark bedroom of a long railroad flat on Lewis Street. No one was home when she arrived.

In her sleep she heard shouting and opened her eyes to the darkness. Down the long line of rooms, in the kitchen, her cousin Harry was shouting and crying. He had made the rounds, looking for Rose and had been unable to find her. He feared the worst had happened.

“My mother asked him what had happened. He began to tell her about the fire. I got up from the bed and began the long walk to the kitchen, passing through one room after another as in a dream. Finally, I stood in the kitchen doorway, supporting myself by holding on to the door frame. Then everything broke apart. My mother took one look at me and collapsed to the floor. I began to cry and scream hysterically.

“I couldn’t stop crying for hours, for days,” says Rose. “Afterwards, I used to dream I was falling from a window, screaming. I remember I would holler to my mother in the dark, waking everybody up, ‘Mama! I just jumped out of a window!’ Then I would start crying and I couldn’t stop.”

When Ethel Monick started for home on the East Side, her clothing was torn and soiled, her face was dirty. She reeked with the odor of smoke. In her heart, the terror she had seen contended with the punishment she anticipated.

Her father was “strict.” Every morning he doled out fifteen cents to her, “a nickel to go to work, a nickel to come home and a nickel for lunch.”

Late and disheveled, she opened the door to the apartment. Before she could speak, her father began to berate her, shouting this was no time, this was no way for a respectable girl to come home.

“I got a licking from my father while my mother stood in a corner respecting his anger. He kept calling me names and I kept crying, ‘but, Pa….’ He wouldn’t listen to me and commanded me to go to bed. I guess while I was sleeping they found out the truth because when I got up they were all standing around me, smiling and kissing me.”

Josephine Nicolosi, half blind from shock, had come out of the Washington Place lobby with her friend Frances LoCastra. Both lived as neighbors on Elizabeth Street. Confused, they linked arms and started for home.

“A boy from our block named Frank must have been at the fire. He saw us, took one girl on each arm, led us home. Frank had a reputation of sometimes taking a little too much to drink. And in our neighborhood, if a fellow asked a girl to marry him and she turned him down he would sometimes take terrible revenge.

“We turned into Elizabeth Street, dirty, crying, Frank and us reeling from side to side. The block was quiet. We came straight down the middle of the street.

“My father was in a barber shop in the middle of the block, getting a shave. Somebody ran into the shop and shouted to him: ‘Your daughter is coming and her face is all bloody!’ My father jumped from the chair. I saw him come tearing out of the barber shop, his face covered with soap lather, his hands twisting a towel.

“The whole block rang with his shouting. ‘Who did it? Tell me, who did it? I’ll kill him!’ he kept roaring.”

Josephine knew what was going to happen next. As her father ran to her, the window on the third floor of the house opposite the barber shop shot up.

“Out came my mother’s head. She took one look at me from up there, spied the towel in my father’s hands and let out a scream that had all the other windows on the block going up in a second.

“She screamed again and disappeared from the window. My father was shaking me by the shoulders hollering, ‘I’ll kill him! I’ll kill him!’ Seconds later, my mother caught up with us, crossing herself and crying ‘Who? Who?’

“I fell into her arms and while my father continued to threaten and my mother kept asking, all I could do was sob over and over again, ‘Tutti morti … mama, tutti morti.’”

For some the horror stretched through many nights and days. Even now, Max Hochfield, who was stopped from turning back up the staircase to look for his sister, remembers how he became obsessed with the idea of avenging her death. He thinks now that the idea came to him during the first night after her death.

“I began to plan how to get a gun,” he says. “I would go to collect the wages they owed me—and my sister. The bosses would be there. I would come in and ask for the money. I would kill them.”

The trouble with the plan was that until he collected the pay, Hochfield was virtually penniless. “I couldn’t buy the gun before I got the pay. And I would have no chance for revenge after I got it.”

Then Hochfield had another inspiration. He was a good union man, member of Local 25 of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. He would go to the union office, tell his plan, and borrow money for the gun.

He went.

“I found one of the officers,” he recalls. “Nobody else was around. I told him the secret I carried in my heart. I had to avenge my sister’s death.

“He listened to me and said, ‘No, not that way. I know how you are suffering. But you’re a young fellow. You’ll ruin your life. Take my advice. Killing won’t do you any good and it won’t do us any good. Shooting? no; making the union stronger? yes; that’s the way.’”

But even now Max Hochfield says: “Still and all, if I had had the money and if I had known where to buy a gun, maybe I would have gone through with the plan.”

Like Hochfield, Isidore Wegodner escaped down the Greene Street stairs from the ninth floor, where he and his father had come to work four months earlier as sleeve setters. He was near that exit when he heard the first cry of fire and had no difficulty reaching the street.

But unaware of the extent of the disaster, he had left his father behind. Only when he emerged into the body-littered street did he realize what was happening. The firemen stopped him when he tried to rush back into the building.

They wouldn’t even let him cross the street to look among the dead, and he began to cry softly, certain his father lay among them. He moved away, looking into other faces and asking for his father. He spoke only Yiddish, therefore only dimly perceived that there was something called a morgue to which the dead were to be taken.

Suddenly his young heart was lifted by the thought that perhaps his father was seeking him even as he was searching for the old man and that not having found him he had gone home in the expectation of finding him there.

Isidore ran to the Third Avenue elevated, then ran all the way from the 116th Street station to his sixth-floor home on 119th Street. But his father was not there, and when he turned to go down to the street, he lied to his unknowing mother, telling her he had forgotten to buy the old man his newspaper.

In the street, he ran again, determined to return to Washington Place and to find out where this thing called a morgue was located. He missed a train by seconds and stood on the platform breathing hard, watching another pull in on the opposite platform.

“I saw him come out of the train, my dear father who was a quiet man, a dignified man. He looked battered. His pants were torn and in places his flesh showed through. His hat was gone, his face was dirty and bloody. On top of it all he wore a fancy, clean jacket that someone had thrown around his shoulders because his shirt had been ripped off. He stood on the platform dazed and the people walked around him.

“I remember,” says Isidore Wegodner, “how with my last strength I shouted to him, how I went tearing over the little bridge that connected the two platforms, how we fell into each other’s arms and how the people stopped to look while sobbing he embraced me and kissed me.”

7. NIGHT

… a little rivulet,

Whose redness makes my hair still stand on end.

—
CANTO XIV
:77

The fire was brought under control in eighteen minutes. It was practically “all over” in half an hour, said the
Times
, noting that because the building was fireproof, “it showed hardly any signs of the disaster. The walls were as good as ever; so were the floors; nothing was any the worse for the fire except the furniture and the men and girls employed in its upper three stories.”

Most of the victims were the main support of their immigrant families, spoke little English, and fled to their homes in the lower East Side as soon as they gained the sidewalk, the paper concluded, adding that it was therefore impossible to estimate the number of those who had escaped the flames.

Shortly after five o’clock, about ten thousand people had been drawn to the neighborhood of the fire. “Great hordes came marching up from the East Side,” said the
World
, drawn by the smoke marker in the sky. By seven o’clock the size of the crowd had doubled.

From high water towers and from ten hose lines firemen continued to pour steady streams into the top floors of the building. The water smacked the face of the building with a loud sound; it filled the air with a heavy spray; it came cascading out of the windows, down the sides, out of the lobby, falling like a “miniature Niagara,” said the
Times
, and turning the gutter into a blood-stained rivulet.

A pile of thirty bodies lay on the Greene Street sidewalk next to the building. The water soaked them. Surgeons from Bellevue Hospital, dripping wet and cold, burrowed among the bodies, searching each for a spark of life. They dragged tarpaulins along behind them, covering the lifeless heap as they worked across it.

The first medical men to arrive was a group of internes from Bellevue under the direction of Doctors Byrne, Read, and Kempf. Soon they were joined by doctors from New York and St. Vincent’s Hospitals. The ambulances lined up like cabs along the curb of Washington Square East.

At times, the young doctors and the policemen working with them among the dead thought they saw signs of life. “Then,” said the
World
, “they would bring from under a mass of corpses a breathing woman. And as they carried her toward an ambulance, policemen, doctors and firemen fell back. Men covered their ears with their hands to shut out her cries.”

The police could handle the dead; it was with the living they now had trouble. For the crowd continued to grow in size, its massed grief swaying it against the police lines which formed a circle half a mile in circumference around the Asch building.

Thousands of relatives and friends of Triangle’s workers poured into the open spaces of Washington Square Park. There too came the curious, the disaster-lovers, the crowd-seekers. At the corner where Washington Place fronts on the Square, the pressure of the crowd became threatening.

“They pleaded, demanded and stormed to be let through. As time passed and more definite knowledge of the horror’s proportion spread,” the
World
reported, “the pressure on the police grew greater. The lines were reinforced but the frantic beating upon them outweighed every precaution of the authorities.

“Then someone in the Washington Square crowd cried agonizingly the name of a girl and rushed blindly at the police ranks. It started the huge crowd. The police were swept away. One thousand men and women had torn through the lines.”

The policemen rallied, closed ranks quickly, and drove the crowd back out of the cleared area. But before they had done so, “men and women had rushed to the tarpaulin-covered mounds and knelt and prayed…. Here and there,” the
World
continued, “a woman caught up a hat or a slipper or a fragment of a burned skirt, grasped it wildly and ran to a fireman or policeman, begging them to throw the light of their lanterns on the things.

“One of these women, looking at a poor, stained shoe, fell into a pool of water and was carried away struggling and utterly mad with grief as if she had surely recognized in it a daughter’s possession.”

The policemen prepared for a repetition of the breakthrough. It came at 6:45
P.M.

A portion of the huge throng, about five hundred at the same end of Washington Place, “pushed forward until the ropes went down and, shrieking, they swept over the policemen like a wave.”

The movement was checked immediately. But it was only by force that the women were held back. “In more than one instance,” the
World
added, “before the women gave way before them, the policemen were compelled to use their clubs.”

Then there were no more breakthroughs. The crowd had been purged of its wildness. Sorrow settled down heavily on it, and the men now stood dumb and staring, the women with their hands to their mouths, sobbing, watching the pantomime of the rescuers and the savers of life, lifting and carrying the dead.

It was done with great orderliness. Deputy Commissioner Driscoll, Inspectors Schmittberger and Daly, and Captain Henry of the Mercer Street station took charge.

On the east sidewalk of Greene Street, across from the Asch building, they spread a huge canvas of dark red. Working silently, in pairs, policemen carried about forty bodies of women, “charred and dripping” said the
Sun
, and laid them in rows on the canvas.

There they lay, waiting for coffins. And while they waited, the police covered them gently with tarpaulins and crossed back again to the sidewalk under the windows from which the dead had leaped and began to glean the cheap belongings the girls had clutched as they fell through space.

“There were leather handbags, broken combs, hair ribbons, some dimes and cents, parts of clothing,” the
Sun
reported. In the gutter water, a policeman picked up what appeared to be a necklace but which under the electric light proved to be a rosary.

On the sidewalk, a russet shoe with all buttons gone, its heel half ripped off, evidence “that the girl who had worn it had caught her heel on a wire or projection when falling and it had been torn from her foot.” In the street, a patent leather Oxford, its laces still tied in a knot and “hanging over its edge, a soiled garter.” A fur-trimmed hat “with what had once been a gay red rose.”

The coffins arrived. “Worming their way between the clutter of ambulances, mounted policemen, patrol wagons and throbbing fire engines,” the
Sun
reported, “came men bearing rough brown coffins on their shoulders. The police had sent to the morgue for 75 or 100 coffins. But all they had was 65.”

They began to pile the occupied coffins into the patrol wagons and ambulances. As soon as a carrier had its load, it moved off, its bell clanging. The silent crowd, pressed against the police lines, silently parted, opening a single lane for the passing dead or dying.

The city’s hospitals filled with the near-dead. In the galloping dash to the hospitals, internes nursed their charges in the ambulances, applying splints and tourniquets, seeking to keep alive the small flicker of life but often finding it extinguished upon arrival.

More serious than the broken bones, said the
Sun
, were the cases of those who were badly burned about the face and body. They were quickly wrapped in oil-soaked bandages and taken to operating rooms. All the victims were suffering from shock, and this, the
Sun
added, “was just as liable to result seriously as was a fracture or a burn.”

Shortly after six o’clock, teams of firemen spread through the building in search of victims.

On the second floor they found Maurice Samuelson of the cloak firm of Samuelson and Company. He had heard a commotion in the street and had gone to the front window of his office to see what was causing it. He opened the window. Without warning, a body shot by. Several more came rushing down in the next few seconds.

When the firemen found him, Samuelson was still standing at the window, immobilized by horror, frozen by fear. He whispered to them hoarsely that he could not move. Gently, the firemen led him to the street.

By 6:20, a team of firemen led by Chief Croker himself worked its way into the three top floors of the building. The woodwork on the tenth floor was still burning. Fireman Charles Lauph was one of the first to enter the ninth floor from the Washington Place stairs. He stumbled on bodies.

“I found two in a little crevice behind the dressing room; I found eleven bodies in front of the dressing room,” said Fireman Lauph.

At the same time, Captain Ruch got to the ninth floor from the Greene Street side. He reached the Washington Place side of the shop, about six windows from the Greene Street side. Window frames were still burning.

“In my hurry, I stepped on something soft,” Captain Ruch remembered. “I looked down and saw it was a body. I saw three or four others next to it.”

Exploring the three floors, Chief Croker saw sights, “that utterly staggered him, that sent him, a man used to viewing horrors, back down into the street with quivering lips,” the
World
reported. “In the drifting smoke, he had seen bodies burned to bare bones, skeletons bending over sewing machines.”

Other firemen dug their way into the rear courtyard to which the Asch building’s single fire escape descended.

The backyard was L-shaped. The smaller wing on the west side had three windows facing the New York University building. The longer portion of the yard, running the full length of the north wall of the Asch building, was 75 feet long and 25 feet wide. Of the eight Asch windows facing this part of the rear yard on each floor, the two center ones—the fourth and fifth windows—served as exits to the single fire escape.

A tenant in the Waverly Place building backing on the same courtyard said that iron shutters on these two windows, on every floor, had been closed for months. Triangle employees like Ethel Monick, for example, who had come to work for the firm in the fall, had therefore never seen the fire escape.

The balcony of the fire escape was 14 feet 6 inches long and 3 feet 6 inches wide. Each window facing it, when fully open, provided a clearance about 54 inches square. The ladder leading from floor to floor was 18 inches wide, cutting into the balconies 4 inches from their outer edge and 20 inches from the wall of the building.

The dark bottom of the courtyard was divided lengthwise by a cement wall. On top of the wall, which separated the Asch yard from the adjacent yards, was a 6-foot-high iron fence, topped in turn with 4-inch spikes.

The fire escape ended abruptly at the second floor. The remainder of the descent was by a drop ladder 12 feet 9¾ inches long. Hanging free from the second floor, the ladder ended 5 feet 9½ inches above the glass skylight of a ground-floor extension pushed out into the yard.

(A decade earlier, Building Department Inspector Miller had directed that Asch construction plans be modified so that the fire escape “lead down to something more substantial than a skylight.” The architect had promised: “The fire escape will lead to the yard.”)

The firemen found the skylight smashed. Its iron framework was twisted and broken. Pausing to look skyward as they gathered up the bodies from the dark pit of the yard, they saw the twisted structure of the fire escape, loosened from the side of the building, its top story gooseneck ladder to the roof torn away from the side of the building.

At each of the three Triangle floor levels, the iron window shutters, as Fireman Lauph later described them, were “sprung and warped.” They had blocked the escape to life with almost the same finality as a locked door.

The
Evening Journal
attempted a reconstruction of the horror on the fire escape.

“A girl climbing out of the ninth floor window onto the fire escape,” it reported, “passed down the stairs to the eighth floor safely and turned into the treadway. So far, she was alright. But in order to reach the steps leading down to the seventh floor, she must follow this little gangway across the windows to a similar platform-opening leading down to the seventh floor from the far side of the platform.

“The heavy sheet-iron shutters opening outward were in the way. Not only did they open outward until they completely blocked the gangway but they also buckled back in the direction of the wall so that they ran out in a V shape from hinges at the window to the railing of the treadway.”

At each window, the shutters opened like two arms. In each case, one arm ended flush against the short side railing of the fire escape, extending at right angles to the building.

Abe Gordon, and a handful of others, seconds ahead of the crush that was to follow, had been able to squirm out of the ninth floor window facing directly on the ladder to the eighth floor balcony. Despite the heat and panic, they had somehow managed to bypass the shutters on the eighth floor.

But by the time Gordon reached the sixth-floor window through which he reentered the building, two terrible developments tipped the scale. The fire had driven a mass of panic-stricken women onto the fire escape. On both the eighth and ninth floor balconies the inner halves of the shutters, which were supposed to swing back flat to the face of the building in the space between the two windows, actually were locked outward.

“The shutters were held in place by a heavy iron rod,” continued the
Evening Journal
. The rod should have been held fastened on the shutter by a hook. But this time it had not been hooked. Instead, it dropped down through the iron treads or cleats of the gangway and unless a girl got down on her knees and pulled out this heavy bar, the advance to the next steps would be impossible.

“The condition of the fire escape shows that the girls got down to the eighth floor and that the heavy bar holding the shutters was so firmly caught in the cleats of the treadway that they could go no further.”

The fire escape grew heavy with its human load. At one of the ninth-floor windows some of the women and girls, finding their way blocked, turned and tried to go up the ladder to the tenth floor. But the fire blazed from the tenth-floor windows which opened on the packing and shipping room. There was no escape that way.