Minute By Minute

by William Gunn Shepherd

At 4:35 o'clock yesterday afternoon a fire was discovered in the rear of the eighth floor of the Triangle Waist Company. At two o'clock this morning Fire Chief Croker estimated the total dead as 154. More than a third of those who lost their lives did so in jumping from windows. The first firemen who arrived found thirty bodies on the sidewalks of Washington Place and Greene Street.

Every available ambulance in Manhattan was called to carry the dead to the morgue. Bodies were burned to blackness or reddened to a sickly color or to shoulders or legs sticking out of burned clothing. Men and women, boys and girls littered the street; that is actually the condition-the streets were littered.

The fire began in the eighth story. The flames shot up through the other two stories. The Triangle Waist Company occupied all three floors. The estimate of the number of employees at work was made by Fire Chief Croker at about 1,000. The owners of the factory say 700 men and girls were at work. Before smoke came out of the windows, the loss of life had begun. The first sign that persons in the street knew that these three top stories had turned into red furnaces in which humans were being caught and incinerated was when screaming men and women and boys and girls crowded out on the window ledges and threw themselves into the streets far below. They jumped with their clothing ablaze. The hair of some of the girls streamed up aflame as they leaped. Thud after thud sounded on the sidewalks. It is a horrible fact that on both sides of the building there grew mounds of the dead and dying. And the worst horror of all was that in this mound of the dead an arm or leg moved or a cry sounded.

Inside the building it was frightful. The flames took so many that they died instantly. When Fire Chief Croker could make his way into these three floors, he found sights that stunned him, that sent him back and down into the street with quivering lips. The floors were black with smoke. And then he saw as the smoke drifted away bodies burned to bare bones. There were skeletons bending over sewing machines.

The elevator boys saved hundreds. They each made twenty trips from the time of the alarm until twenty minutes later when they could do no more. Fire was burning in the shaft and at the cables. People ran for their own lives. Some, about seventy, chose to climb a ladder to the roof. A few remembered the fire escape. One narrow door led to this fire escape. They fought and struggled and breathed fire and died trying to get to that door.

Shivering at the fall below them, scorched by the fire behind, some were still on the windowsills when the first firemen arrived. The nets were spread below quickly. Citizens were asked to hold the nets but the force of the bodies in the long falls made the nets useless. Screaming girls and men tore the nets from the grasp of the holders, and the bodies struck the sidewalks and lay just as they fell.

Inside the building the fire burned. The flames caught all the flimsy lace stuff and linens that go into the making of spring and summer shirtwaists and fed upon the rolls of silk. The cutting room was filled with fabric on long tables. The employees had been working at the rows and rows of machines. Sadly the spring day helped the fire; many of the window facing south and east were open and the wind had full play. The experts say that each floor became a whirlpool of fire. Any way the trapped workers ran they met a curving sweep of flame. Many fell and died. Others fought their way to the windows or the elevator or fell fighting for a chance at the fire escape.

This tragedy occurred in a fireproof building. Except for the three stories of blackened windows at the top, you would not be able to tell where the fire had happened. The walls still stood. A thin tongue of flame now and then licked around a window sash. On the ledge of a ninth-story window two girls stood silently watching the arrival of the first fire engines. Twice one of the girls made a move to jump. The other stopped her. They watched firemen rig the ladders up against the wall. They saw the last ladder lifted and pushed into place. They saw that it reached only to the seventh floor. For the third time, the more frightened girl tried to leap. The bells of arriving fire wagons must have risen to them. The other girl pointed in the direction of the sounds. But she talked to ears that could no longer hear. Scarcely turning, her friend dived head first into the street. The other girl drew herself up. The crowds in the street were stretching their arms up at her shouting and begging her not to leap. She looked down as if to assure them she would remain brave. But a thin flame shot out of the window at her back and touched her hair. In an instant her head was aflame. She tore at her burning hair, lost her balance, and came shooting down upon the mound of bodies below. From opposite windows watchers saw again and again friendships formed in the instant of death-girls who placed their arms around each other as they leaped. In many cases their clothing was flaming or their hair flaring as they fell.

By eight o'clock the supply of coffins was gone, and those that had already been used began to come back from the morgue. By that time bodies were lowered at the rate of one a minute, and there were not enough wagons, so that four, sometimes six, coffins were loaded on each wagon. At times throughout the night the very horror of their job overcame the most experienced of the policemen and morgue attendants at work under the moving finger of the searchlight. The crews were completely changed no less than three times.

Adapted from The New York World 26 March 1911. Reprinted in Allon Schoener, Portal to America:

The Lower East Side, 1870-1925 (New York: Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston, 1967), 171172.

New York Times, March 26, 1911, p. 4