The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: New York, 1911
1911 · event
Late on the afternoon of Saturday 25 March 1911, fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Asch Building near Washington Square in New York. The upper three floors held the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, a garment factory where hundreds of workers, most of them young immigrant women from Italy and eastern Europe, were finishing the working week. The fire spread through cotton scraps and hanging fabric within minutes. One hundred and forty six people died. The youngest were fourteen years old.
Escape was almost impossible. One stairway door was locked, a practice used to control the movement of workers, the single fire escape buckled under the weight of those on it, and the ladders of the city fire brigade reached only to the sixth floor. Crowds gathered in the street below and could do nothing. The scale of what New York witnessed that afternoon made the tragedy impossible to file away as an accident.
Within weeks the state of New York created a Factory Investigating Commission, which inspected workplaces across the state and heard from workers themselves. Over the following years dozens of new laws were passed on fire exits, sprinklers, occupancy limits, working hours for women and children and factory inspection. The garment unions, which had been striking for better conditions since 1909, grew into a major force.
The Triangle fire is remembered as one of the events that built the modern idea of workplace safety, in the United States and beyond. Every year the names of the dead are read aloud outside the building, which still stands and is now part of a university. The memory belongs to the young women who went to work on an ordinary Saturday and to the laws written in their name.