As high school students in the age of technology, with all of our seemingly important yet relatively insignificant problems to occupy our minds, the struggles and conflicts of the past might seem far from relevant.
However, March 25 marked the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Fire, a name you may or may not remember from your history textbooks. This was actually New York’s most devastating workplace disaster, with the highest number of deaths until the tragedy of 9/11. It was also the event in U.S. history that led to the greatest amount of reform legislation, because Francis Perkins, who was Secretary of Labor, saw the factory workers get trapped in the fire and the firemen’s ladders reach much lower than the top of the burning building.
I have always known a great deal about this historical happening, because my grandmother’s aunt, Mary Leventhal, who was 22 in 1911, was one of the victims of the fire.
She had been a bookkeeper on the ninth floor, and was popular among both the workers and the owners of the shirtwaist company. She has been mentioned in a number of accounts of the fire, and is said to have stayed behind in the fire, helping other people escape, until it was too late for her to escape the flames herself.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was filled with workers, many of whom were only of high school age – one girl was even 14-years-old. A year before the fire, the same workers had protested and gone on strike in the hopes of gaining better working conditions. They were upset about the doors being locked, the crowded working conditions, and the inadequate precautions the building had in case of a fire. Yet, unlike many other garment factory owners, the Triangle Factory owners did not sign a general agreement giving their workers more rights.
On Saturday, March 25, 1911, 15 minutes before quitting time, a fire occurred in the Asch building of the Triangle Factory. There were no fire hoses with which to put out the flames, and they spread quickly. Some people went down the elevator, and others tried to leave the floor directly. However, the doors to the stairs were locked, the fire escapes collapsed to the ground below, and the nets firemen extended to catch people who jumped out of the windows quickly snapped.
Ironically, what the workers had protested against ended up happening, anyway. However, the Triangle Fire was what led to a lot of reforms and regulations which shaped the country we live in today.
Recently, I visited New York and went to see the infamous Asch Building. To my surprise, I saw that the very same building had survived the fire and was now the biology and chemistry building of NYU. I wondered if the students who worked and studied on the ninth floor – and I could see students there through the windows – even knew that one hundred years ago, people, mostly younger than themselves, desperately jumped out of those windows while smoke ravaged that very spot.
