Look at the building on the northwest corner of the park. Ten stories, brown brick, arched windows. It's an N-Y-U science building now. Students walk in and out of it every day. Most of them have no idea what happened on the top three floors.
On March twenty-fifth, nineteen eleven — a Saturday — about five hundred workers were finishing their shift at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors. Most of them were women. Most of them were teenagers. Most of them were Italian and Eastern European Jewish immigrants who'd been in this country less than five years, and they were making about seven dollars a week sewing blouses.
At four forty in the afternoon, a fire started in a scrap bin on the eighth floor. It spread to the hanging fabric and the tissue paper patterns in minutes. The workers on the tenth floor got out — somebody on eight called up to warn them. The workers on the eighth floor mostly got out — the fire started there, so they saw it first.
The
ninth floor got no warning at all.
And the doors were locked. The factory owners — Max Blanck and Isaac Harris — locked the stairwell doors from the outside so workers couldn't take unauthorized breaks or steal fabric. When the fire hit the ninth floor, roughly two hundred and fifty people were trapped behind a locked door.
The fire escape collapsed. It was a thin iron structure bolted to the ou
