Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Newspaper Accounts - 1911

New York Times, March 26, 1911, p. 1.

141 Men and Girls Die in Waist Factory Fire; Trapped High Up in Washington Place Building; Street Strewn with Bodies; Piles of Dead Inside

Three stories of a ten-floor building at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place were burned yesterday, and while the fire was going on 141 young men and women at least 125 of them mere girls were burned to death or killed by jumping to the pavement below.

The building was fireproof. It shows now hardly any signs of the disaster that overtook it. The walls are as good as ever so are the floors, nothing is the worse for the fire except the furniture and 141 of the 600 men and girls that were employed in its upper three stories.

Most of the victims were suffocated or burned to death within the building, but some who fought their way to the windows and leaped met death as surely, but perhaps more quickly, on the pavements below.

All Over in Half an Hour.

Nothing like it has been seen in New York since the burning of the General Slocum. The fire was practically all over in half an hour. It was confined to three floors the eighth, ninth, and tenth of the building. But it was the most murderous fire that New York had seen in many years.

The victims who are now lying at the Morgue waiting for some one to identify them by a tooth or the remains of a burned shoe were mostly girls from 16 to 23 years of age. They were employed at making shirtwaist by the Triangle Waist Company, the principal owners of which are Isaac Harris and Max Blanck. Most of them could barely speak English. Many of them came from Brooklyn. Almost all were the main support of their hard-working families.

There is just one fire escape in the building. That one is an interior fire escape. In Greene Street, where the terrified unfortunates crowded before they began to make their mad leaps to death, the whole big front of the building is guiltless of one. Nor is there a fire escape in the back.

The building was fireproof and the owners had put their trust in that. In fact, after the flames had done their worst last night, the building hardly showed a sign. Only the stock within it and the girl employees were burned.

A heap of corpses lay on the sidewalk for more than an hour. The firemen were too busy dealing with the fire to pay any attention to people whom they supposed beyond their aid. When the excitement had subsided to such an extent that some of the firemen and policemen could pay attention to this mass of the supposedly dead they found about half way down in the pack a girl who was still breathing. She died two minutes after she was found.

The Triangle Waist Company was the only sufferer by the disaster. There are other concerns in the building, but it was Saturday and the other companies had let their people go home. Messrs. Harris and Blanck, however, were busy and ?? their girls and some stayed.

Leaped Out of the Flames.

At 4:40 o'clock, nearly five hours after the employes in the rest of the building had gone home, the fire broke out. The one little fire escape in the interior was resorted to by any of the doomed victims. Some of them escaped by running down the stairs, but in a moment or two this avenue was cut off by flame. The girls rushed to the windows and looked down at Greene Street, 100 feet below them. Then one poor, little creature jumped. There was a plate glass protection over part of the sidewalk, but she crashed through it, wrecking it and breaking her body into a thousand pieces.

Then they all began to drop. The crowd yelled "Don't jump!" but it was jump or be burned the proof of which is found in the fact that fifty burned bodies were taken from the ninth floor alone.

They jumped, the crashed through broken glass, they crushed themselves to death on the sidewalk. Of those who stayed behind it is better to say nothing except what a veteran policeman said as he gazed at a headless and charred trunk on the Greene Street sidewalk hours after the worst cases had been taken out:

"I saw the Slocum disaster, but it was nothing to this."
"Is it a man or a woman?" asked the reporter.
"It's human, that's all you can tell," answered the policeman.

It was just a mass of ashes, with blood congealed on what had probably been the neck.

Messrs. Harris and Blanck were in the building, but the escaped. They carried with the Mr. Blanck's children and a governess, and they fled over the roofs. Their employes did not know the way, because they had been in the habit of using the two freight elevators, and one of these elevators was not in service when the fire broke out.

Found Alive After the Fire.

The first living victims, Hyman Meshel of 322 East Fifteenth Street, was taken from the ruins four hours after the fire was discovered. He was found paralyzed with fear and whimpering like a wounded animal in the basement, immersed in water to his neck, crouched on the top of a cable drum and with his head just below the floor of the elevator.

Meantime the remains of the dead it is hardly possible to call them bodies, because that would suggest something human, and there was nothing human about most of these were being taken in a steady stream to the Morgue for identification. First Avenue was lined with the usual curious east side crowd. Twenty-sixth Street was impassable. But in the Morgue they received the charred remnants with no more emotion than they ever display over anything.

Back in Greene Street there was another crowd. At midnight it had not decreased in the least. The police were holding it back to the fire lines, and discussing the tragedy in a tone which those seasoned witnesses of death seldom use.

"It's the worst thing I ever saw," said one old policeman.

Chief Croker said it was an outrage. He spoke bitterly of the way in which the Manufacturers' Association had called a meeting in Wall Street to take measures against his proposal for enforcing better methods of protection for employes in cases of fire.

No Chance to Save Victims.

Four alarms were rung in fifteen minutes. The first five girls who jumped did go before the first engine could respond. That fact may not convey much of a picture to the mind of an unimaginative man, but anybody who has ever seen a fire can get from it some idea of the terrific rapidity with which the flames spread.

It may convey some idea too, to say that thirty bodies clogged the elevator shaft. These dead were all girls. They had made their rush their blindly when they discovered that there was no chance to get out by the fire escape. Then they found that the elevator was as hopeless as anything else, and they fell there in their tracks and died.

The Triangle Waist Company employed about 600 women and less than 100 men. One of the saddest features of the thing is the fact that they had almost finished for the day. In five minutes more, if the fire had started then, probably not a life would have been lost.

Last night District Attorney Whitman started an investigation not of this disaster alone but of the whole condition which makes it possible for a firetrap of such a kind to exist. Mr. Whitman's intention is to find out if the present laws cover such cases, and if they do not to frame laws that will.

Girls Jump To Sure Death.

Fire Nets Prove Useless Firemen Helpless to Save Life.

The fire which was first discovered at 4:40 o'clock on the eighth floor of the ten-story building at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street, leaped through the three upper stories occupied by the Triangle Waist Company with a sudden rush that left the Fire Department helpless.

How the fire started no one knows. On the three upper floors of the building were 600 employes of the waist company, 500 of whom were girls. The victims mostly Italians, Russians, Hungarians, and Germans were girls and men who had been employed by the firm of Harris & Blanck, owners of the Triangle Waist Company, after the strike in which the Jewish girls, formerly employed, had been become unionized and had demanded better working conditions. The building had experienced four recent fires and had been reported by the Fire Department to the Building Department as unsafe in account of the insufficiency of its exits.

The building itself was of the most modern construction and classed as fireproof. What burned so quickly and disastrously for the victims were shirtwaists, hanging on lines above tiers of workers, sewing machines placed so closely together that there was hardly aisle room for the girls between them, and shirtwaist trimmings and cuttings which littered the floors above the eighth and ninth stories.

Girls had begun leaping from the eighth story windows before firemen arrived. The firemen had trouble bringing their apparatus into position because of the bodies which strewed the pavement and sidewalks. While more bodies crashed down among them, they worked with desperation to run their ladders into position and to spread firenets.

One fireman running ahead of a hose wagon, which halted to avoid running over a body spread a firenet, and two more seized hold of it. A girl's body, coming end over end, struck on the side of it, and there was hope that she would be the first one of the score who had jumped to be saved.

Thousands of people who had crushed in from Broadway and Washington Square and were screaming with horror at what they saw watched closely the work with the firenet. Three other girls who had leaped for it a moment after the first one, struck it on top of her, and all four rolled out and lay still upon the pavement.

Five girls who stood together at a window close the Greene Street corner held their place while a fire ladder was worked toward them, but which stopped at its full length two stories lower down. They leaped together, clinging to each other, with fire streaming back from their hair and dresses. They struck a glass sidewalk cover and it to the basement. There was no time to aid them. With water pouring in upon them from a dozen hose nozzles the bodies lay for two hours where they struck, as did the many others who leaped to their deaths.

One girl, who waved a handkerchief at the crowd, leaped from a window adjoining the New York University Building on the westward. Her dress caught on a wire, and the crowd watched her hang there till her dress burned free and she came toppling down.

Many jumped whom the firemen believe they could have saved. A girl who saw the glass roof of a sidewalk cover at the first-story level of the New York University Building leaped for it, and her body crashed through to the sidewalk.

On Greene Street, running along the eastern face of the building more people leaped to the pavement than on Washington Place to the south. Fire nets proved just as useless to catch them and the ladders to reach them. None waited for the firemen to attempt to reach them with the scaling ladders.

All Would Soon Have Been Out. Strewn about as the firemen worked, the bodies indicated clearly the preponderance of women workers. Here and there was a man, but almost always they were women. One wore furs and a muss, and had a purse hanging from her arm. Nearly all were dressed for the street. The fire had flashed through their workroom just as they were expecting the signal to leave the building. In ten minutes more all would have been out, as many had stopped work in advance of the signal and had started to put on their wraps.

What happened inside there were few who could tell with any definiteness. All that those escaped seemed to remember was that there was a flash of flames, leaping first among the girls in the southeast corner of the eighth floor and then suddenly over the entire room, spreading through the linens and cottons with which the girls were working. The girls on the ninth floor caught sight of the flames through the window up the stairway, and up the elevator shaft.

On the tenth floor they got them a moment later, but most of those on that floor escaped by rushing to the roof and then on to the roof of the New York University Building, with the assistance of 100 university students who had been dismissed from a tenth story classroom.

There were in the building, according to the estimate of Fire Chief Croker, about 600 girls and 100 men.

Chicago Sunday Tribune, March 26, 1911, p. 1.

New York Fire Kills 148: Girl Victims Leap to Death from Factory

One hundred and forty-eight persons nine-tenths of them girls and young women are known to have been killed in a fire which burned out the ten story factory building at the northwest corner of Washington place and Green street, just off Washington square, this afternoon.

One hundred and forty-one of them were instantly killed, either by leaps from the windows and down elevator shafts, or by being smothered. Seven died in the hospitals.

FALLING BODIES HURT RESCUERS.

Women and girl machine operators jumped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors in groups of twos and threes into life nets and their bodies spun downward from the high windows of the building so close together that the few nets soon were broken and the firemen and passersby who helped hold them were crushed to the pavement by the rain of falling bodies.

Within a few minutes after the first cry of fire had been yelled on the eighth floor of the building, fifty-three were lying half nude, on the pavement. Bare legs in some cases were burned a dark brown and waists and skirts in tatters showed that they had been torn in the panic within the building before the girls got to the windows to jump to death.

The mangled bodies lay there with the spill of the water which the firemen soon were pouring from water towers and hose into the building, soaking them. There was no time to clear away the dead in the street. Inside the building the firemen believed there still were dozens upon dozens of girls and men and they wasted no time upon those whom they knew to be dead.

BODIES LIE IN PILES.

It was more than an hour and a half before the firemen could enter the floor where the fire started, the eighth, and they came back then with word that a glance showed fifty dead bodies on the floor alone.

In the elevator shaft was a pile of bodies estimated conservatively at twenty-five bodies of girls who had jumped down the elevator shaft after the elevator had made its last trip.

Some of the girls, in jumping, smashed through the sidewalk vault lights on the Washington place side of the building. The bodies that continued to crash upon the vault light finally made a hole in it about five feet in diameter. Just at dusk firemen and policemen were pulling many half nude and burned corpses from this hole.

CROKER STAGGERED BY SIGHTS

Inside the building on the three top floors the sights were even more awful. When Fire Chief Croker could make his way into these three floors he saw a tragedy that utterly staggered him that sent him, a man used to viewing horrors, 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 bone. There were skeletons bending over sewing machines, the victims having been killed as they worked. Other piles of skeletons lay before every door and elevator shaft where the sufferers fell in their effort to escape.

"The worst fire in a New York building," said Chief Croker as he came out among the ambulances and fire apparatus again, "since the burning of the Brooklyn theater in the 70's."

FOUND LIVING AMONG DEAD.

More than an hour after the last of the girls had jumped policemen who had approached the building to gather up the bodies and stretch them out on the opposite side of Greene street found one girl, Bertha Weintrout, the last girl to leap from the ninth floor, still breathing. Two or three dead bodies were piled alongside her, and as the policemen were moving those away they heard the girl sigh. The police yelled for a doctor, and the girl, still bleeding and dripping wet was hurried to St. Vincent's hospital.

A man who has an office on the third floor of the building in Washington place, across from the burned building, said he looked up upon hearing shrieks and saw a girl climb out of a window on the ninth floor of the Asch building, where the fire occurred. At this time the man, who refused to give his name, says there was no sign of smoke or flame. The girl stood for a moment. Then she jumped. She whirled over and over, a streak of black gown and white underclothing, for nine floors and crashed into the sidewalk.

LEAP TO THEIR DEATH.

About the same time Dr. Ralph Fralick, 119 Waverley place, was walking across Washington Square park toward the building and started on a run as he saw the heads of screaming girls at the window sills of the ninth floor.

They stood for a time, the doctor says, on the little ledge. Then a girl jumped and another and another. Some of them fell straight as a plummet and smashed through the vault lights of the street into the basement under the sidewalk. Most of them turned many times, shrieking as they fell.

One girl, the doctor says, deliberately took off her hat and laid on the ledge before she jumped.

MAN PUSHES MANY OUT.

But the greater number were jumping from the east side of the corner building and landing burned and crushed in Green street. Here one man ran from window to window, picked up girls bodily, and dropped them to the pavement. Either he thought the nets were there to catch them or he believed this was the easiest way.

When he had dropped the last girl within reach he climbed on to the sill and jumped straight out, with a hand raised as a bridge jumper holds his arm upward to balance himself.

All the girls had jumped from the Greene street side of the building and it seemed that the ninth floor ledge on this side was clear when two girls clambered out upon it. One of them seemed self-poised; at least her movements were slow and deliberate. With her was a younger girl shrieking and twisting with fright.

TRIES TO SAVE COMPANION.

The crowd yelled to the two not to jump. The older girl placed both arms around the younger and pulled her back on the ledge toward the brick wall and tried to press her close to the wall.
But the younger girl twisted her head and shoulders loose from the protecting embrace, took a step or two to the right and jumped.

After her younger companion had died the girl who was left stood back against the wall motionless, and for a moment she held her hands rigid against her thighs, her head tilted upward and looking toward the sky. Smoke began to trickle out of the broken window a few inches to her left. She began to raise her arms then and make slow gestures as if she were addressing a crowd above her. A tongue of flame licked up along the window sill and singed her hair and then out of the smoke which was beginning to hide her from view she jumped, feet foremost, falling, without turning, to the street. It was the Bertha Weintrout, whom the police found still breathing an hour later under the cataracts spilling from ledge to ledge upon the dead who lay around her.

About 200 other employes, mostly women, in the meantime had got out on the roof of the building, crazy with fright. Across the small court at the back of the building are the rear windows of the New York University Law school.

LAW STUDENTS SAVE MANY.

At the first cry from the burning building, two of the law students, Charles T. Kremer and Elias Kanter, led a party of students to the roof of the law school building, is a story higher than the building where the fire occurred. Kanter and the other students dragged two short ladders to the roof of the law school and by making a sort of extension ladder of the two short ones Kremer got down on to the roof of the burning building and tried to get the girls into orderly line and send them up the ladder to where his school fellows were waiting to grab them to safety.

The students got 150 women, girls, and men away from the burning building in this way.

MANY FIGHT FOR SAFETY.

At the other end of the roof from the students' ladders, fifty men and women were fighting with one another to climb the five feet to the roof of an adjoining building at the corner of Waverly place and Greene street. The law students say that the men bit and kicked the women and girls for a chance to climb to the other roof and safety.

Kremer, when the last of the group nearest the law school had been saved, climbed down the ladder to the roof of the burning building and went down the roof scuttle to the top floor.

He could see only one girl, who ran shrieking toward him with her hair burning. She had come up from the floor beneath and as she came to Kremer she fainted in his arms. He smothered the sparks in her hair with his hands and then tried to carry her up the narrow ladder to the roof. But because she was unconscious he had to wrap long strands of her hair around his hand and drag her to fresh air in the way. His friend Kanter helped him to get the girl up the ladder to the law school roof and safety.

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

Stories of Survivors

And Witnesses and Rescuers Outside Tell What They Saw

The rapidity of the flames is shown in the experience of Max Rother a tailor in the employ of the Triangle Waist Company, who was on the eighth floor of the building when the fire started. Rother was on the Washington Place side when he heard the cry of alarm coming form the Greene Street side of the loft. Hanging over the heads of the operators at the machines in the room was a line of clothes ablaze. With the manager of the firm, Max Burnstein, he tried to put the fire out with pails of water. While at this work the rope on which the clothes were hung burned in half and the burning clothes fell over their heads.

Soon the room was in flames. Rother ran for the stairs on the Greene Street side of the building and escaped. He does not know what became of Burnstein, the manager.

Cecilia Walker, 20 years old, who lives at 29 Stanton Street, slid down the cable at the Washington Place elevator and escaped with burned hands and body bruises. She was on the eighth floor of the building when the fire started. Running over to the elevator shaft she rang for the car, but it did not come. As she passed the sixth floor sliding on the cable she became unconscious, she said, and does not know what happened until she reached St. Vincent's Hospital, where she is now.

"A girl and I," she told the doctors at the hospital, "were on the eighth floor, and when I ran for the elevator shaft my girl friend started for the window on the Washington Street side. I looked around to call her but she had gone."

Jump Before Firemen Arrive

According to several eye witnesses, the flames were pouring from the windows and the girls jumping to the sidewalk for several minutes before the first fire truck with ladders arrived. Benjamin Levy of 995 Freeman Street, the Bronx, one of the first men to arrive at the burning building, says that it was all of ten minutes after the fire started before the first fire engine arrived. Mr. Levy is the junior member of the firm of I. Levy & Son wholesale clothing manufactures just around the corner, at 3 and 5 Waverley Place.

"I was upstairs in our work-room," said he, "when one of the employes who happened to be looking out of the window cried that there was a fire around the corner. I rushed downstairs, and when I reached the sidewalk the girls were already jumping from the windows. None of them moved after they struck the sidewalk. Several men ran up with a net which they got somewhere, and I seized one side of it to help them hold it.

"It was about ten feet square and we managed to catch about fifteen girls. I don't believe we saved over one or two however. The fall was so great that they bounced to the sidewalk after striking the net. Bodies were falling all around us, and two or three of the men with me were knocked down. The girls just leaped wildly out of the windows and turned over and over before reaching the sidewalk.

"I only saw one man jump. All the rest were girls. They stood on the windowsills tearing their hair out in the handfuls and then they jumped.

"One girl held back after all the rest and clung to the window casing until the flames from the window below crept up to her and set her clothing on fire. Then she jumped far over the net and was killed instantly, like all the rest."

One for the policemen who were checking up the bodies as they were being shipped to the Morgue told of one heap in which a girl was found still alive when the others were taken off her. She died before an ambulance doctor could reach her.

Elevator Made One Trip.

Samuel Levine, a machine operator on the ninth floor, who lives at 1,982 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, told this story when he had recovered from his injuries at the New York Hospital: "I was at work when I heard the shout of 'Fire!' The girls on the floor dropped everything and rushed wildly around, some in the direction of windows and others toward the elevator door. I saw the elevator go down past our floor once. It was crowded to the limit and no one could have got on. It did not stop. Not another trip was made.

"There were flames all around in no time. Three girls, I think from the floor below, came rushing past me. Their clothes were on fire. I grabbed the fire pails and tried to pour the water on them, but they did not stop. They ran screaming toward the windows. I knew there was no hope there, so I stayed where I was, hoping that the elevator would come up again.

"I finally smashed open the doors to the elevator. I guess I must have done it with my hands. I reached out and grabbed the cables, wrapped my legs around them, and started to slide down. I can remember getting to the sixth floor. While on my way down, as slow as I could let myself drop, the bodies of six girls went falling past me. One of them struck me and I fell to the top of the elevator. I fell on the dead body of a girl. My back hit the beam that runs across the top of the car.

"Finally I heard the firemen cutting their way into the elevator shaft, and they came and let us out. I think others were taken out alive with me."

M. Samilson of the firm of Samilson & Co., on the second floor of the building, was standing at one of the windows of his office just after the fire was discovered. In the next few minutes, he said, he saw several bodies shoot past the window from above, most of the girls. When the firemen reached him at nearly 6 o'clock, he was still standing there horrified. He says he could not tear himself away.

Few of the girls that fell from the windows on the ninth floor, it was learned, jumped of their own accord. They were pushed forward by the panicstricken crowd in the room behind them.

One of the bookkeepers, Morris Lewine, said he was on the top floor. He threw the books with the exception of a ledger into a safe when the cry of fire was raised. He then made his way to the roof, followed by two girls. He found a ladder and made his way with one of the girls to the roof of an adjoining building. He did not know what became of the second girl.

Thomas Gregory, an elevator man, who works at 103 Bleecker Street, said he was going home when he came to the fire. He says he ran into the building and made three trips in the elevator, taking down about fifteen persons at each trip. He said he left the hallways of the upper floors crowded with frenzied men and women, who fought to get into the elevator and clawed his face and neck. After the third trip the machinery broke down, he said. He said there were two elevators when he went into the building. One was on the ground floor, and one was on one of the upper floors. He saw no operator.

A man who said he was Samuel Tauber and that he had been employed as a foreman in the Triangle Company shops told about a fire on the eighth floor which happened two years ago. He said that on this occasion the motor which supplies power for the two hundred sewing and cutting machines on that floor, had emitted a flame which set fire to some cuttings nearby. He said that this fire had not been serious, but that it had thrown the girls working there into a panic. Tauber said that he believed yesterday's fire might have been caused in the same way.

Frank Fingerman, employed by the firm of M. S. Work & Co., in Washington Place East, turned in a fire alarm from a Broadway box when he heard the cries of the women in the factory building.

"I saw as I ran," he said, "a boy and a girl standing together at a Greene Street window. He was holding her, and she seemed to be trying to jump. They were still there when I came back from the fire box. As the smoke began to come out of the window above them the boy let the girl go, and she jumped. He followed her before she struck the ground.

"Four more came out of the same window immediately. The crowds were jamming our own door until I could not pass out and the street was packed right up to the fire trucks."

Rescuers on the Outside.

Frederick Newman, the New York University law student who with Charles P. Kramer, had charge of the rescue party of the New York University students up on the roof of their institution, said this after the work was done:

"We were in the library of the building in the top floor when we noticed a gust of smoke coming from the building across the courtyard. Sparks drifted in at the open library window and as we jumped from our seats we saw the girls workers crowding at the windows. We saw a man leap out and then the girls began to follow him."

O. S. Smith, another student, was on his way from the Astor Place Subway station to the law library when he first caught sight of the fire. "I was stopped by police at Waverley Place and Greene Street," he said. "Across the street we could see the bodies of five women. As I looked I saw an arm raised and I knew that one of the women was alive. I called out to a policeman standing near. His only answer was, 'Get back there and mind your own business.' I pointed out the woman to him and told him something ought to be done, as the water was pouring down upon her. He didn't understand me, perhaps for nothing was done."

Alfred K. Schwach, a student, saw girls rushing to the rear factory windows, their hair on fire, to pause at the window for a moment and then jump out. "I saw four men," he said, "who tried to catch the girls. They seized horse blanket from a truck horse in Waverley Place and held it out. It gave way like paper as the girls struck it."

Human Bridge Bucks and Falls.

Pauline Grossman, 18 years old, who was injured by leaping from a window of the factory as the fire was gaining headway on the eighth floor, says three male employes of the factory made a human chain of their bodies and swung across a narrow alleyway to the building fronting in Greene Street. She declares a number of person's passed across the men's bodies and escaped from the burning building by entering a window of the building opposite.

"As the people crossing upon the human bridge crowded more and more over the men's bodies the weight upon the body of the centre man became too great and his back was broken. She said he fell to the passageway below and the other two men lost their holds upon the window sills and fell. Persons who were crossing upon the human bridge dropped with them to the passageway."

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

Lived Amid Flames, But Nearly Drowns

At five minutes to 9, four hours after the fire in the Triangle Waist Company factory was discovered, the first living person was found in the debris. He was Hyman Meshel, 21 years old, and single, of 332 East Fifteenth Street, who worked on the eighth floor and was on that floor when the fire threw the garment workers of the waist company, by whom he was employed, into a panic.

The rescue party found Meshel crazed by fright and blackened by soot in the southwest corner of the basement. He was sitting helplessly on the elevator cable drum, with his body immersed almost to the neck in water, which was slowly rising in the basement. The flesh of the palms of his hands had been torn from the bones by his sliding down the steel cable in the elevator, and his knuckles and forearms were fill of glass splinters from beating his way through the glass door of the elevator shaft.

Ambulance Surgeon Flanagan rushed him to St. Vincent's Hospital, where it was said that he might recover if pneumonia did not set in. Meshel was weak and chilled from his four hours' immersion in the cold water of the basement. His legs were paralyzed, and it was a difficult task to restore the circulation.

About 8:45 Battalion Chief Worth and several firemen who were working on the ground floor of the burned building near the Greene Street entrance, heard faint cries for help. They listened intently, and decided that the sounds came from below them. The firemen got a lantern, and under Chief Worth organized themselves into a rescue party.

Who the Rescuers Were.

The men in the group who started out to rescue the unknown prisoner consisted of Firemen Wolff, Boucher, and Levy of Truck 5, and Firemen Rubino and Connell of Truck13. When they entered the basement led by Chief Worth, they found themselves splashing in water up to their knees. Their lanterns proved of little value, and they were obliged to grope their way over a great many obstacles and among a number of floating boxes.

As they groped about they set up concerted shouts with the view of learning the prisoners location by his answers. They finally located his cries as coming from the southwest corner of the building, to which they made their way. In their haste to reach the victim they knocked down three partitions and battered in an iron door in the cellar.

When they reached the main elevator shaft in the southwest corner of the basement they saw a man's head just above water directly above the location of the cable drum on which the elevator cables were wound. A little above the man's head was the floor of the elevator of the building.

The man's eyes were bulging form his head, and he whimpered monotonously like a timid and spirit-broken animal. His face was swollen from heat and looked charred as if it had been scorched and the rubbed with soot.

"Get up, we've come to get you!" shouted Chief Worth.

Victim Unable to Rise.

The man did not reply, though the message was repeated by Chief Worth and echoed by his companions. At last the firemen seized him bodily and carried him out of the building g over the same tortuous route by which they had entered.

It was not till he had been taken to the hospital, place in his bed, his wounds treated and his body massaged that Meshel was able to give any account whatever of how he had reached his strange position.

He said he had been on the eighth floor when the fire started and that he had run over to the elevator shaft. There he beat in the glass upper portion of the shaft door with his fists and swung himself over the wooden lower half into the shaft, going down hand over hand for several floors on the cable, though in the process his flesh was torn from the bone. Just before he got to the bottom he became faint from pain and exertion and dropped onto the roof of the elevator.

When he regained consciousness he said he had to break his way out of the shaft again. He said that a man or several men and a woman had fallen onto the top of the elevator down the shaft near him, and that he was afraid he would be killed if he remained where he was. His statement to this effect had not yet been verified by the firemen.

Driven Back by the Flames.

Once out of the shaft Meshel said he was driven back into the elevator well by the flames all about him, and kept himself under water as much as possible to avoid being burned. The heat, he said, was unbearable.

As the water rose in the basement Meshel began to fear, he said, that he would be drowned, and he climbed up on top of the cable drum and sat there, with his back braced against the wall, while the water crept slowly up to his neck. The cold so paralyzed him then that he was unable to move, and the fear that after suffering so much he would be drowned made him semi-conscious.

After Meshel had told his story he became irrational again and shouted, "My sister! My sister!" When quieted he explained that his sister Annie had been working the same floor with him, and he had not seen her in the group of panicstriken shirtwaist operatives when the shouts of fire were taken up in his floor and the mad rush for the windows began.

It was not known at the hospital what had become of his sister, though efforts were made to bring Meshel some encouraging news.

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

Crowd At Police Station

Mercer Street is Turned Into an Emergency Hospital

The Mercer Street Police Station, only two blocks from the scene of the fire, was the centre of a great deal of the police activity in the early part of the disaster. As soon as its serious nature was known the reserves, under Capt. Henry, left for the doomed factory. The first few of the injured were taken to the station, and it was the headquarters until it became evident that this was far too large a matter for any one precinct to manage.

The first person brought there was Kate Uzo, a 25-year-old Russian girl who had jumped from one of the windows. She was found to have serious internal injuries and was removed in a Bellevue Hospital ambulance. Then an unidentified man about 25 years old was brought in. The policemen than brought in Anna Weitre and Anna Niesoles. They were later treated in the police station and removed to St. Vincent's Hospital.

Then the orders came that a field hospital was to be established and no more injured brought there. The staff from the Cororners office also made the arrangements here for the disposal of the bodies.

As soon as the news of the disaster had circulated on the east side, relatives and friends thronged to the station, anxious to learn the fate of workers in the building. There was a crowd in front of the station for several hours. A file of policemen was stretched across the steps to tell all inquirers that no bodies had been taken there and that identifications could be made at the Morgue only.

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

DEATH LIST SHOWS FEW IDENTIFIED

Here are the police lists of the victims - identified and unidentified dead - the missing, and the injured:

Identified Dead.

ABERSTEIN, JULIA, 30 years.
ALTMAN, ANNA, 16, 33 Pike Street.
BERNSTEIN, MOSES, 800 East 5th Street.
BINEVITZ, ABRAHAM, 30, 474 Powell Street.
BIREMAN, GUSSIE, 22, 8 Rivington Street.
CAPUTTA, 17 years, 81 Degraw Street, Brooklyn.
CREPO, ROSE, 19 years, an Italian.
DENENT, FRANCES, 20 years.
DORMAN, K., (man,) identified by registered letter receipt, 235 Gold Street, Brooklyn.
FEICISCH, REBECCA, 17, Russian, 10 Attorney Street, Burns on body: St. Vincent's Hospital.
FELTZER, -, (man,) 40 years.
FORRESTER, MAY, 25 years
GULLO, Mrs. MARY, 23, 437 East Twelfth Street.
KAPLAN, -, (woman,) 20 years.
KEOBER, -, 30.
LEHRER, 114 Essex Street.
LAUNSWOLD, FANNIE, 24 years.
LEVINE, MAX.
LEVINE, ABE, Brooklyn.
NICHOLAS, NICOLINA, 22 years, 440 East 13th Street.
PASQUALICCA, ANTONETTA, 16, 500 East Thirteenth Street.
ROSEN, Mrs.
ROTHER, R., 25 years.
SHENA, CATHERINE, 30 years old.
SPEAR, -, (man,) 30 years.
SPRUNT, Miss.
TERRANOVA, CLOTETE, 25 years, 104 President Street, Brooklyn.
TREBO, ROSE, 18 years.
WANDROSS, BERTHA, 205 Henry Street: right leg broken and internal injuries, St. Vincent Hospital.
NEIBRERER, BECKY, 19 years, operator, 10 Clinton Street: fracture of right leg and arm, New York Hospital.
WEINER, ROSE, 28 years.
ZELTNER, -, 30 years.

Unidentified Dead.

GIRL, 15 years: all clothing burned off except black stockings and black lace shoes.
ITALIAN WOMAN, 27 years, 5 feet 7 inches, red waist, black stockings, and skirt, no shoes, yellow metal ring on left hand set with blue stone.
WOMAN, 30 years, 5 feet 2 inches black hair, handbag containing $10.
WOMAN, 21 years, 5 feet: two rings, one with three small stones and another with three small white stones.
ITALIAN WOMAN, 30 years, 5 feet 3 inches, black hair, dark complexion: signet ring on left hand, with initials "O. S.": black velvet shows.
WOMAN, 25 years. 5 feet 6 inches, dark hair: pair of earrings with white stones.
GIRL, 16 years, black hair, 130 pounds, 5 feet 1 inch.
ITALIAN WOMAN, 25 years: ring on left hand.
WOMAN, 24 years, dark hair: red skirt.
WOMAN, 25 years, 5 feet 3 inches, about 150 pounds.
WOMAN, 19 years, 115 pound, black hair, one ring with opal setting, one plain gold ring, small gold locket.
WOMAN, 25 years, 5 feet 5 inches: ring on right hand with initials which appeared to be "A.O."
WOMAN, 35 years, 5 feet 3 inches, dark complexion and hair: gold ring on left hand, gold ring on right hand, with a black and white stone.
WOMAN, 24 years, 5 feet 2 inches, black hair, bead earrings, signet ring (initials "T. L.")
WOMAN, 21 years, 5 feet 2 inches, gold signet ring on left hand.
WOMAN, about 22, weighed 140 pounds, 5 feet 4 inches, died in New York Hospital.
RUSSIAN WOMAN, 5 feet 4 inches, 30 years old, 140 pounds, died in St. Vincent's Hospital.
HUNGARIAN WOMAN, 20 years old, 5 feet 4 inches, 120 pounds, blonde hair, died in St. Vincent's Hospital.
MAN, 25 years, 5 feet 7 inches, smooth shaven black hair, brown striped coat, black trousers, black patent leather shoes.
WOMAN, 30 years, 150 pounds, 5 feet 6 inches, one opal earring.
WOMAN, 19 years, 5 feet 9 inches, 135 pounds, gold ring with a green stone.
WOMAN, 19 years, 128 pounds, 5 feet 6 inches, velvet slippers, plain gold ring.
WOMAN, 30 years, red hair, 135 pounds, 5 feet 5 inches, turquoise earrings.
WOMAN, 24 years, 5 feet 2 inches, 125 pounds, black velvet shoes.
ITALIAN WOMAN, 24 years, 135 pounds.
WOMAN, 30 years, 135 pounds, 5 feet 5 inches: black hair, fur coat, gold earrings, gold ring, one ring with white stone.
WOMAN, 24 years, dark hair, red skirt, white underwear.
MAN, 163 pounds, 5 feet 9 inches, 30 years: time book with no name, but with card bearing the inscription, "Mr. and Mrs. J. Klein, No 1,625 Washington Avenue, the Bronx," gold watch with hunting case the initials, "A. D."
WOMAN, 26 years, 125 pounds, 5 feet 4 inches.
WOMAN, 28 years, 130 pounds: plain gold wedding ring.
WOMAN, 135 pounds, 5 feet 7 inches, 30 years: brown hair.
WOMAN, 22 years: lottery check, with name of lottery man, I. Goldberg, Pike Street.
WOMAN, 30 years, 5 feet 4 inches, 130 pounds.
WOMAN, 19 years, 118 pounds, 5 feet 7 inches: plain gold bracelet.
WOMAN, brown hair, black plush coat, 125 pounds, 26 years, 5 feet 6 inches.

Thirty-nine bodies burned beyond recognition.

Reported Missing.

BELOTTA, VINCENZA, 25, 625 Washington Street.
BUEALLO, JANE, 23 49 Stanton Street.
BUSCHEN, JOSIE, 52 East Twelfth Street.
CIRITO, ROSE, 20, 135 Cherry Street.
COOPER, SARAH, 1,530 Webster Street.
CORTESI, JOSEPHINE, 502 East Twelfth Street.
FORRESTE, MAY, 23, 37 East Twelfth Street.
FRANCO, JENNIE, 16, 312 East Eleventh Street.
GREENEBERG, LENA, 273 Watkins Street, Brooklyn.
GULO, MAY, 437 East Twelfth Street.
KLEIN, JACOB, 23, 120 Stanton Street.
KUHLA, BERTHA, 24, 421 East Sixth Street.
LEHRER, Max, 19, 114 Essex Street.
LORETTO, Mrs. MARY, 25, 116 Thompson Street.
PINELLO, FRANCESCA, 180 Chrystie Street.
PREVEDENZI, BOGULA, 27, 49 Stanton Street.
STAI, ANNA, 25, 734 East Ninth Street.
STEIN, JENNIE, 120 East Second Street.
TORTORELLA, LIZZIE, 17, 116 Thompson Street.
WEINTRAUB, SARAH, 187 Ludlow Street.
WISE, ALICE, 18, 433 West Forty-fifth Street.

Injured.

ABRAHAM, CLARA, 21, 149 Broome Street: back, arms, hands burned. Taken home.
BOLOMB, NATHANIEL, burns on body; St, Vincent's Hospital.
BRUSELEY, HERMAN, 20, 326 Christopher Street: hands and head cut by falling glass. Taken home.
CUPPNEMAN, GUSSIE,20, 161 Madison Street: contusions. St, Vincent's Hospital.
FIRSHEIM, FANNIE, 21, 354 Pearl Street: contusions of head and body. Taken home
GOLDSTEIN, ESTHER, 20, 33 Broome Street: in Bellevue.
GROSSMAN, PAULINE, fractured ankle, numerous contusions. Bellevue Hospital.
HARRIS, ESTER, 21, 131 Chester Street, Brooklyn: burns. St, Vincent's Hospital.
HEMMELSTEIN, DORA, 20 years, 250 Madison Street: burns: St. Vincent's Hospital.
KUPLA, SARAH, 18 years: fracture of right leg: St. Vincent's Hospital.
KUTLAN, BESSIE: burns: St. Vincent's Hospital.
LEVINE, SAMUEL, 29, elevator operator, 1,982 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn: contusions bead and arms; New York Hospital.
LOREZ, DAISY, 24, 11 Charlton Street: fracture of pelvis, injuries to head and left-arm: New York Hospital.
MESHEL, HYMAN, 21 years, 382 East Fifteenth Street: shock and submersion: St. Vincent's Hospital.
MILLER, ANNIE, 17 years, operator, 154 Attorney Street: fracture of left arm; St. Vincent's Hospital.
NIERSOLES, ANNIE, 18 years, 125 East 110th Street: internal injuries; Bellevue Hospital.
RUBINO, KATE, 17, 265 Madison Street, shock: St. Vincent's Hospital.
ROSEN, ANNA, 30, broken leg: Bellevue.
UZO, KATE, 25, contusions and internal injuries: Bellevue Hospital.
VALLUP, NATHAN, 36, WATCHMAN, 330 East Fifth Street, burns: St. Vincent's Hospital.
VELOKLOWSKY, FRIEDA, 20, 639 East Twelfth Street, fracture of right leg and arm: New York Hospital.
WALKER, CECILIA, severe burns on body: St. Vincent's Hospital.
WEATEL, BERTHA, 17, waistmaker, 205 Henry Street, right leg broken and internal injuries: St. Vincent's Hospital.
ZALLUP, NATHAN, 25, 736 East Fifth Street, shock: St. Vincent's Hospital.

Chicago Sunday Tribune, March 28, 1911, p. 2.

Thrilling Incidents in Gotham Holocaust That Wiped Out One Hundred and Fifty Lives

In the office buildings across Washington place scores of men detained beyond office hours worked at their desks. One of them saw a girl rush to a window and throw up the sash. Behind her dashed a seething curtain of yellow flame.

She climbed to the sill, stood in black outline against the light, hesitating, then, with a last touch of futile thrift, slipped her chatelaine bag over her wrist and jumped. Her body went whirling downward through the woven wire glass of a canopy to the flagging below.

Her sisters who followed, flamed through the air like rockets. Their path could be followed but hardly heard.

It was eighty-five feet from the eighth floor to the ground, about ninety-five feet from ninth door, 113 feet from the cornice of the roof, and the upward rush of a draft and the crackle of the flames drowned their cries.

"Jimmy" Lehan, a traffic squad policeman, dashed up eight flights of stairs when the fire was at its height, braced his shoulders against a barred door, and burst it in. He found a score of girls made with fright. He ordered them down the smoke filled stairways, but they balked. He used his club, and beat them down to safety. Not one of the number perished.

A boy who jumped form one of the upper floors was caught by a policeman who braced himself and held the youngster, practically uninjured, although both fell to the street.

Six girls fought their way to a window on the ninth floor over the bodies of fallen fellow workers and crawled out in a single file to an eight inch stone ledge running the length of the building.

More than a hundred feet above the sidewalk they crept along their perilous pathway to a swinging electric feed wire spanning Washington place.

The leaders paused for their companions to catch up at the end of the ledge and the six grabbed the wire simultaneously. It snapped like rotten whipcord and they crashed down to death.

A 13 year old girl hung for three minutes by her finger tips to the sill of a tenth floor window. A tongue of flame licked at her fingers and she dropped into a life net held by firemen. Two women fell into the net at almost the same moment. The strands parted and the two were added to the death list.

A girl threw her pocketbook, then her hat, then her furs from a tenth floor window. A moment later her body came whirling after them to death.

At a ninth floor window a man and a woman appeared. The man embraced the woman and kissed her. Then he hurled her to the street and jumped. Both were killed.

Five girls smashed a pane of glass, dropped in a struggling tangle and were crushed into a shapeless mass.

A girl on the eighth floor leaped for a firemen's ladder which reached only to the sixth floor. She missed, struck the edge of a life net, and was picked up with her back broken.

From one window a girl of about 13 years, a woman, a man, and two women with their arms about one another threw themselves to the ground in rapid succession. The little girl was whirled to the New York hospital in an automobile.

She screamed as the driver and policeman lifted her into the hallway. A surgeon came out, gave one look at her face and touched her wrist. "She is dead," he said.

One girl jumped into a horse blanket held by the firemen and the policemen. The blanket ripped like cheesecloth and her body was mangled almost beyond recognition.

Another dropped into a tarpaulin held by three men. Her weight tore it from their grasp and she struck the street, breaking almost every bone in her body.

Almost at the same time a man somersaulted down upon the shoulder of a policeman holding the tarpaulin. He glanced off, struck the sidewalk, and was picked up dead.

Within the building a man on the eighth floor stationed himself at the door of one of the elevators and with a club kept back the girls who had stampeded to the wire cages. Thirty were admitted to the car at a time. They were rushed down as fast as possible.

The call for ambulances was followed by successive appeals for police until 500 patrolmen arrived to cope with a crown numbering tens of thousands ñ a mixture of the morbidly curious and of half crazed relatives and friends of the victims. A hundred mounted policemen had to charge the crowd repeatedly to keep it back.

Led by Fire Chief Croker, a squad of firemen stormed the stairways and gained access to the building at 7 o'clock. Two searchlights from buildings opposite lighted the way of the fire fighters as the ascended to the top floors.

Fifty roasted bodies were found on the ninth floor. They lay in every possible posture, some so charred that recognition was impossible. A half dozen were nude, with the flesh hanging in shreds to the bones.

Women with their hair burned away, with here and there a limb burned entirely off, and the charred stump visible, were lifted tenderly from the debris, wrapped in oilcloth, and lowered by pulleys to the street.

Across the street there rested on the sidewalk a hundred pine coffins, into which were placed the bodies. As fast as this was done the coffins were carried away in a kind of vehicle that could be pressed into service to the morgue at Bellevue hospital and to the Charities Pier morgue, opened for the first time since the Slocum horror.

One of the first physicians on the scene was Dr. Ralph A. Froelich, 119 Waverley place. He saw most of the girls jump to the street and as each one fell he rushed to her side and administered hypodermic injections to deaden the pain. He treated twelve of the victims, whom he found still breathing, but each died within a short time.

The Ladies' Garment Worker, April 1911.

When ready to go to press we learn of the awful calamity at the Triangle Waist Company. While most of the garment manufacturing establishments in New York City are not any better as far as fire protection is concerned, it is significant that the worst calamity happened at the Triangle, known among the workpeople in the trade as the "prison." The name is probably due the extraordinary discipline with poor earning for which the firm is famous.

It is not strange that in this most democratic of all countries in the world the employers can so easily use the arm of the law to protect themselves against any inconveniences which their workpeople may cause them, but the law is nowhere when the life and limb of the worker is to be protected.

The writer of these lines, when approaching the factory some two years ago in an attempt to organize the workpeople of that firm, was pounced upon by two plainclothed policemen and taken to the police cell. No one, however, knows whom to blame for this calamity.

It is evident that the worker can expect next to nothing in the way of protection from the legal authorities. Whether it is the Supreme Court or the good people who are interested in the architectural beauties of the city, nothing will be done until the workers will begin in earnest to attend to their own business. They must declare a strike at all such fire traps until adequate protection is provided.

Pickets should be posted at the entrance of such places with sign boards bearing the following inscription: Please do not go to work in this place until proper fire protection is provided for the workpeople.

Let the authorities find our action contrary to the Sherman Anti-Trust Laws or any other of the innumerable laws provide to safeguard the interest of the capitalists, and which the authorities are ever ready to guard jealousy. We will cheerfully go to prison but there will be no more fire traps. Such a strike will put an end to such a state of things within 48 hours.

There are in the same building a number of cloak shops, who before the general strike, worked until 6 o'clock on Saturdays. Thanks to the change in hours all these left at 1 o'clock, otherwise the victims would have been more numerous.