The Triangle Fire (6 page)

The girls crushed against the eighth floor elevator doors could see the cars going up. “Some of the girls were clawing at the elevator doors and crying, ‘Stop! stop! For God’s sake, stop,’” Irene Seivos remembered.

“I broke the window of the elevator door with my hands and screamed, ‘fire! fire! fire!’ It was so hot we could scarcely breathe. When the elevator did stop and the door opened at last, my dress was catching fire.”

The car could not hold all who tried to crowd in. Irene Seivos jumped on top of the girls already in the car just as she saw the door closing. Someone grabbed her long hair and tried to pull her out, but she kicked free and rode to safety.

One of those on whom she landed was Celia Saltz. When the fire had started, she was still at her machine. “All I could think was that I must run to the door. I didn’t know there was a fire escape. I even forgot that I had a younger sister working with me.

“The door to the staircase wouldn’t open. We pushed to the passenger elevators. Everybody was pushing and screaming. When the car stopped at our floor I was pushed into it by the crowd. I began to scream for my sister. I had lost her, I had lost my sister.”

Celia fainted in the car, but in the crush remained on her feet. When she regained consciousness she was stretched out on the floor of a store across the street from the Asch building. “I opened my eyes and I saw my sister bending over me. I began to cry; I couldn’t help it. My sister, Minnie, was only fourteen.”

While one group of terrified girls struggled to get into the elevators, another small crowd fought to get through the Washington Place stairway door. Some ran from the elevator to the door. Then back again.

Josephine Nicolosi recalls that when she reached the door to the stairs some thirty girls were there. “They were trying to open the door with all their might, but they couldn’t open it. We were all hollering. We didn’t know what to do. Then Louis Brown hollered, ‘Wait, girls, I will open the door for you!’ We all tried to get to one side to let him pass.”

Crushed against the door was Ida Willinsky, exerting all of her strength in a futile effort to push the crowd back. “All the girls were falling on me and they squeezed me to the door. Three times I said to the girls, ‘Please, girls, let me open the door. Please!’

“But they did not listen to me. I tried to keep my head away from the glass in the door. Then Mr. Brown came and began to push the girls to the side.”

Brown remembered that when he reached the area of the door he found all the girls screaming. “I tried to get through the crowd. I pushed my way through and tried by main strength to scatter them. But they were so frantic they wouldn’t let me through. As I tried to push them to the side, they pushed back. At such a time, a thousand and one thoughts go through your mind. All I could think was ‘Why don’t they let me through? Why don’t they understand that I am trying to get them out?’

“I finally got to the door. There was a key always sticking in that door and I naturally thought that they must have locked the door. So I turned, all I tried to do was to turn the key in the lock. But the key wouldn’t turn to unlock the door. It did not turn. So I pulled the door open. It didn’t open right away.

“I had to push the girls away from the door. I couldn’t open it otherwise. They were packed there by the door, you couldn’t get them any tighter. I pulled with all my strength. The door was open a little while I was pulling. But they were all against the door and while I was pulling to open it they were pushing against it as they tried to get out.

“They were closing the door by their pushing and I had to pull with all my might to get it open.”

Brown finally got the door open, and the screaming girls squeezed themselves into the narrow, spiral staircase, pushing and falling in their fright. Brown tried to calm them as he stood at the door. Then the line downward seemed blocked. Squeezing his way halfway down to the seventh floor, he found Eva Harris slumped on the stairs in a faint. At this moment, Patrolman Meehan came panting up the stairs, lifted the girl against the wall, brought her round, and sent her down.

Sylvia Riegler was right behind Brown when he helped pick up Eva Harris. She had been in the dressing room when the fire started. She had just put on her wide velvet hat when her friend, Rose Feibush, ran into the room screaming, took her by the hand, pulled her into the shop, and began to drag her toward a window.

“I saw men pouring water on the fire at the cutting tables. The wicker baskets where the lace runners worked were beginning to burn. I was scared. Rose was pulling me and screaming.

“Suddenly, I felt I was going in the wrong direction. I broke loose. I couldn’t go with her to the windows. This is what saved my life. Always, even as a child, even now, I have had a great fear of height.

“I turned back into the shop. Rose Feibush, my beautiful, dear friend, jumped from a window.

“I saw Brown get the door open. Somebody pushed me through. I don’t remember how I got down. I was cold and wet and hysterical. I was screaming all the time.

“When we came to the bottom the firemen wouldn’t let us out. The bodies were falling all around. They were afraid we would be killed by the falling bodies. I stood there screaming.”

Two men carried Sylvia across the street into a store and “stretched me out on the floor.”

She had swallowed so much smoke that they tried to pour milk into her for its emetic effect. But for one who had known hunger, milk could have only one purpose. “They gave me a lot of milk to drink to give me back my strength,” is the way Sylvia Riegler remembered it almost half a century later. “But I couldn’t hold it. All the time I could see through the store window the burning bodies falling.”

On the eighth floor the flames had cut across the shop. Now they rose like a wall, cutting Bernstein and Dinah Lifschitz off from the Washington Place door. The corridor through the flames to the Greene Street door was perilously narrow.

“It was getting dark with smoke and there sat my cousin Dinah trying to get upstairs on the telephone or on the writing machine,” Samuel Bernstein said. “She was getting no answer. She screamed ‘fire’ through the telephone and she screamed it so loud I stopped her. She would have scared the girl on the other end.

“We weren’t getting the message through to the ninth floor. Remember, we had to make contact through the tenth floor switchboard. I said, ‘For God’s sake, those people don’t know! How can we make them know?’”

Dinah Lifschitz cried: “I can’t get anyone! I can’t get anyone!”

Bernstein realized the moment of decision had come.

“I said, ‘Dinah, we are the last ones,’ and I ordered her to drop the phone and get out. I remembered I had relatives on the ninth floor and they were all very dear to me. I ran through the blaze and the smoke to try to get to the ninth floor.

“I don’t know how I got into the Greene Street staircase. But I could not get into the ninth floor. Twenty feet from the door on that floor was a barrel container of motor oil. I suppose that was burning. I don’t know. The blaze was so strong I could not get into the ninth floor. Then I ran up to the tenth floor. I found it was burning there, too.”

On the other side of the flames, on the opposite side of the eighth floor, machinist Brown and Patrolman Meehan came back up to the eighth floor to make certain everyone was out.

“We yanked two girls out of a window and got them to the staircase,” Brown said. “I went back to the window to see if anyone else was there. The people in the street saw me. They raised their hands and yelled for me not to jump. When I saw that I decided it was time for me to turn around and get out.

“But I couldn’t find my way out any more. It was so black with smoke that I couldn’t see. I couldn’t even see the door. I knew the doorway was about fifteen feet in front of me. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled out that doorway.”

Eight floors below, Fireman Oliver Mahoney of Company 72 which had arrived at 4:46½, burst into the Washington Place lobby.

“At first we couldn’t even get into the lobby. As I got in, an elevator opened and another group of frightened people got out. We pushed through,” said Fireman Mahoney.

Three other firemen carrying the hose on their shoulders followed him up the stairs until he reached the eighth floor landing.

“I had no water with me yet. My men were coming up with the hose. I located the proper place where I was to work. I could see the eighth floor was a mass of flames,” Mahoney added.

On the Greene Street side Captain Ruch had dashed up the stairs while his men unrolled the hoses from where they were connected to a hydrant at Waverly Place. He encountered Max Hochfield and restrained him from going back upstairs. Then he returned to the street and led his men, now carrying the hose, up to the sixth-floor level. Here they disconnected the house hose from the standpipe and connected the fire hose.

Captain Ruch carried the hose up to the eighth floor:

“I shouted, ‘Start your water.’ It came. The fire was so intense it was impossible to stand up. We lay down on our stomachs or on our knees to try to make an entrance. The eighth floor was a mass of fire….”

4. TENTH

A way the margins make that are not burning.

—
CANTO XIV
:141

The nerve center of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company was the suite of executive offices on the tenth floor, which occupied the space along the Washington Place windows. About forty male and female garment pressers worked at tables lined along the Greene Street windows. The entire rear of the floor, facing the back courtyard, was occupied by a large packing and shipping room filled with hanging garments and cardboard and wooden boxes.

Also on the tenth floor was the Triangle switchboard. On that Saturday Mary Alter, a cousin of Mrs. Isaac Harris, added operation of the switchboard to her usual typing chores because the regular board operator was ill.

When Mary Alter first heard Dinah Lifschitz’ buzz on the telautograph, she hurried to the machine to receive the mechanical message.

She waited, “but the pen did not move. It simply stuck in the well. As I waited for the pen to start writing, I realized that it was a new machine and that a good many of the girls did not yet know how to operate it properly. They often made mistakes and didn’t connect things right. So I went back to my desk thinking that someone was fooling me.”

Mary continued typing until the telephone switchboard buzzed.

“It was the eighth floor calling. At first I couldn’t make out any clear sound. It was like yelling and I asked, ‘What is the trouble down there? what are you yelling about?’

“Then I heard distinctly, ‘There is a fire!’ So I immediately got up and told Mr. Levine, our bookkeeper, to telephone the Fire Department, which he did. Then I went to tell Mr. Harris and Mr. Blanck that there was a fire on the eighth floor and to see about my father.”

Mary Alter’s father was the tenth-floor watchman. One of his jobs was to stand guard at the Greene Street exit at going-home time, just as Joseph Wexler was doing on the eighth floor.

Now no one monitored the switchboard. At her eighth-floor desk, Dinah Lifschitz held on to the phone, shouting into its mouthpiece for the ninth floor, getting no answer.

“I did not ring up the ninth floor,” said Mary Alter.

The bookkeeper, heeding Mary’s order, ran into Mr. Blanck’s office, where there was a phone with a direct outside line. “I called Fire Headquarters but they had already received word of the fire so I hung up,” he said.

Levine put down the receiver and turned to leave when he saw two children standing in a corner of the office, intently watching him. They were Blanck’s two daughters, Henrietta, aged twelve, and Mildred, aged five. Their nursemaid, Mlle. Ehresmann, had brought them downtown for a shopping trip their father had promised. Mrs. Blanck was in Florida with the other children.

Levine told the children to stay in the office where the nursemaid had deposited them while she went to find Blanck. The bookkeeper had seen smoke rising outside the windows and had decided to get back to his own office to put the record books into the safe.

The person in charge of the shipping room was Edward N. Markowitz, and he had also seen the smoke. He was suddenly struck by the realization that on the floor below there were more than 250 persons crowded among the machines and tables. He ran to the Greene Street exit and down the stairs.

Markowitz managed to get through the ninth floor entrance to the shop just as the first wave of fright had washed over the girls. “They were standing with a sort of dazed look on their faces. They were beginning to push toward the exit and I shouted to them, ‘Go nice! There is a fire! Go easy!’ I don’t know how long I stood in that doorway cautioning the girls. I would put my hand on their shoulders to calm them and I would say, ‘One at a time and go to the stairs and get out!’”

The girls in the rear of the crowd began to press forward. Markowitz waved them toward the fire escape near where they stood and shouted to the watchman to guide them through the windows. Then he remembered he had left his order book on the tenth floor.

“That book was very valuable to the firm. I went back to the tenth floor and found it. I had the book in my hand when I turned and saw Mr. Blanck standing there in the middle of the floor. He was holding his little daughter in his arm and he held the older one by the hand. He didn’t seem to know which way to turn.”

Blanck had been in the shipping room—Markowitz’s department—when he heard a cry: “The taxi is here, Mr. Blanck.” It reminded him of his promise to the children, and he found them waiting in his office where Levine had made the call to the Fire Department.

Blanck remembered that somebody ran in and said, “Mr. Blanck, there is a little fire on the eighth floor.” He left the children and started for the Greene Street side. Then it occurred to him that the children might be frightened, so he went back to get them. “At the front passenger elevator the car came up. All the pressers, all the girls were screaming, ‘Save us! save us!’ I told the elevator man, ‘Take these girls down and come right up again.’

“But while the people were pushing in, my little girl, the five-year old, was swept into the car. I grabbed hold of her hand and pulled. I just got her out of the elevator and I held her close to me.

“The elevator operator took them down, as many as he could, and I stood there for about half a minute, seeing if he would come up again. The minute was too big for me. I started for the other side of the shop. When I saw that I was passing the door to the Washington Place stairs, I turned the handle, thinking I will go down this way.

“I heard Mr. Harris someplace in the shop hollering, ‘To the roof! to the roof!’ I thought I will be smarter and go down this way. I opened the door. There was so much smoke. I knew the children would not be able to stand the smoke.

“I grabbed the two children and ran as far as the middle of the room, holding them. When I got to the middle of the room, I stopped. The smoke and the flames seemed to be coming from all sides.”

As the bewildered Blanck stood clutching his children in the center of the turmoil, up the stairs and through the smoke came Samuel Bernstein, clear-headed and determined to save as many as possible. He had tried to enter the ninth floor only minutes after Markowitz had left it, but by that time it was impossible to get beyond the Greene Street vestibule. The flames had come to the door in the partition.

Breathlessly, Bernstein had then hurried up to the tenth floor. At first glance he saw that “they were all running around like wildcats. I shouted that the only way out was over the roof.

“I saw Louis Silk, a salesman for a textile firm, standing on a table trying to knock out a skylight. Near the table was Mr. Blanck with his two children. One of them was screaming. I went over to Mr. Blanck and told him, ‘The only way you can get out is over the roof. But you better be quick about it!’ Eddie Markowitz took the younger child and Mr. Blanck held the older one and we began to fight our way out of there.”

When Markowitz saw Blanck paralyzed by uncertainty, he dropped his order book and picked up the smaller child. “I pulled him by the coat and I said, ‘Come along, Mr. Blanck.’ We went right through the loft to the Greene Street stairs. I could feel the flames in back of me. I could feel the heat of them as we went to the roof.”

Blanck’s partner, Isaac Harris, had posted himself at the Washington Place elevators where he remained to guide the girls until he realized that the elevators seemed to have stopped running.

At this point, “I started to holler, ‘Girls, let us go to the roof!’ We all rushed to the Greene Street stairs. The smoke was getting heavy and the room was getting dark.”

When the girls shrank back from the smoke, Harris urged them on: “Go, one of you, two of you. If you can’t all go, better at least one should get out.”

Harris led the way up the stairs. Halfway up between the tenth floor and the roof was the window facing the rear yard and through it blew a blast of flame. The girls turned up their coat collars or shielded their faces with their muffs. They reached the roof, their clothing scorched, some with their hair smoldering.

On his way to the roof, Bernstein found Lucy Wesselofsky in a fainting condition. He helped her up.

Lucy was one who had tried to calm the girls “by shouting that everyone would be saved if they would stop trying to pile into the staircase all together.

“In fact, on the tenth floor, where there were about seventy people working, all were saved except one. She was Clotilda Terdanova. She tore her hair and ran from window to window until finally, before anyone could stop her, she jumped out. She was young and very pretty. She was to leave us next Saturday to be married three weeks later.”

One of the first to reach the roof was Joseph Flecher, an assistant cashier. He approached the edge of the roof and cautiously peered over the side.

“I looked down the whole height of the building. My people were sticking out of the windows. I saw my girls, my pretty ones, going down through the air. They hit the sidewalk spread out and still.”

The roof now became a refuge, an island surrounded by huge waves of smoke and flame. The survivors came staggering out of the structure that covered the Greene Street stairs. They were coughing, screaming, hysterical, and some stumbled perilously close to the edge of the roof.

The adjoining building on the Greene Street side was 13 feet higher than the top of the Asch building. It could be reached by climbing from the top of the staircase covering to the superstructure over the freight elevator shaft.

On the Washington Place side, the New York University–American Book Company building towered 15 feet above the Asch structure. But it too could be scaled by way of the roof over the passenger elevators.

On the tenth floor of the school building, Professor Sommer and the members of his law class had heard the screams of the fire engines. Elias Kanter, one of his students that day, remembers him as a tall, handsome redhead, “ready to adjourn at the end of class to the nearby Brevoort Hotel bar with a handful of students anxious to pursue further some fine point of the law.”

Professor Sommer halted his discourse and hurried to the adjoining faculty room which had a window facing the rear courtyard.

“Some of the boys followed me,” the Professor said, “and we saw that the ten-story building across the areaway was on fire. The areaway was filled with smoke. We heard ear-piercing shrieks as the girls in the factory appeared at the windows.”

The screams of the engines and the girls were also heard in Professor Parsons’ horticulture class on the ninth floor. He dismissed his class of forty girls at once, and while they gathered up their notes and books, he also ran to the rear window. “I was shocked by a sight more terrible than I ever could have imagined. I saw a fire escape literally gorged with girls. A great tongue of flame reached out for them.”

For a moment, James McCadden, a service worker in the school building, stood beside the professor. “I saw a girl come to the edge of the roof and stand for a minute, looking down. She jumped. Her hair was in flames. I couldn’t look any more.”

On the floor above, Professor Sommer and George DeWitt, one of the students who had run with him to the rear window, rushed back to the lecture room and summoned the young men to follow them to the roof. There they found ladders left by painters who had been working on the roof during the week.

“We put one across the space between the coping of our building and the skylight above the elevator shaft on the Washington Place side,” said DeWitt. Then they lowered a second ladder from the top of the elevator shaft to the Asch roof.

Now they formed a line up to the school roof with Charles Kramer, Frederick Newman, and Elias Kanter starting the slow procession of the frightened women from the Asch roof.

While the students continued their rescue operation on the Washington Place side, others set up a scaling relay at the Greene Street side. There somebody reached down and took Max Blanck’s little girl and pulled her up. Then he handed up the older one, and after that he himself climbed up or was pulled up, he didn’t remember which.

Harris had led a group from the tenth floor in a rush up the stairs past the open window—“The fire was blowing right in that window”—and once on the roof, he climbed to the adjacent Greene Street building. He and another man “ran to the door on that roof. We found it locked. So we smashed the skylight and hollered for help. A man came up and brought a ladder.”

Harris then ran back to the edge of the higher building. Down on the Asch roof he saw Bernstein and Louis Senderman struggling with a salesman named Teschner weighing about 250 pounds who, according to Bernstein, was “shivering like a fish and crying like a baby,” and threatening to jump. Together, the three raised him to safety.

At another time Bernstein had “pushed one man up and when he got to the next roof he began to run away instead of staying there and helping the rest of us. I yelled, ‘For God’s sake, stay and help us push these other people up.’ He came back and helped until there were only a few left on the Asch roof.

“I saw the flames were coming right onto the roof on the Greene Street and areaway sides. And nobody was there anymore to push me up. So I ran across the roof all the way to the Washington Place side where the University is and they pushed me up onto a ladder. When I got near the end of the ladder, I looked down. I saw five or six girls falling from the windows.”

In the short wing of the L-shaped back yard, the flames leaped across at the University building. They cracked the glass in the windows and set the facing rooms afire. When the Law Library began to burn, University Vice Chancellor Charles McCracken and other faculty members organized a group of students who rescued the books armful by armful.

From the roof above them, when it seemed that the last Triangle survivor had been rescued, Charles Kramer climbed down the ladder for a final inspection of the Asch roof. He groped through the thick smoke. Flames were now rising on all sides.

He came across the roof carefully. He heard someone moaning and moved in the direction from which the sound seemed to be coming. He found a girl lying across the top steps of the Greene Street stairway, her head on the floor of the roof, her hair smoldering.