On This Day: A Fire Broke out at The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory That Changed Everything
- Jann Alexander
- Mar 24
- 5 min read
When the fire broke out in a trash can on March 25, 1911, only one garment worker noticed. But soon the flames and smoke were inescapable and within mere minutes, 146 employees of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Greenwich Village would die — 123 of them women and children.
Isidore Abramowitz was leaving his cutting table in the Asch Building on Washington Square when he saw the fire in his scrap bin. He tried to douse the higly flammable cotton scraps with a water from a fire pail but the fire grew geometrically within seconds. The next few fire pails used up the only remaining water on the factory floor, to no avail. Within five minutes the entire eighth floor was in flames, with its 180 workers, mostly young women and children, rushing and shouting in a panic to escape.
But they couldn't escape—owners Max Blanck and Issac Harris kept the street exit doors locked, their measure to prevent theft. The tiny elevator was woefully inadequate and slow, despite the operator's heroic efforts to rescue whomever crammed themselves inside or jumped onto to its roof. The stairway doors swung inward, but the frightened crowd had jammed up against them, preventing a last hope for escape up the stairs to the roof. Soon the fire would overtake the ninth and tenth floors, where the lone fire escape was inoperative.
"People had just begun to jump as we got there," Perkins recalled later. "They had been holding on ... "
It was then that the bells and sirens of racing fire engines prompted Frances Perkins to interrupt her tea at the Norris home and cross Washington Square to investigate. While she and Mrs. Norris hurried toward the flames, they heard screams. "People had just begun to jump as we got there," Perkins recalled later. "They had been holding on ... standing in the windowsills, being crowded by others behind them, the fire pressing closer and closer, the smoke closer and closer."
The ladders put up by the firemen were useless; they did not reach even the seventh floor. The life nets they held for hopeful garment workers who jumped did not hold them. More than fifty plunged from the windows to their deaths. The remaining dead were victims of smoke or flames, bringing the total deaths to 146. Most were young women and children.
Among those women who died were two ancestors of mine. I made that discovery while reading the out-of-print biography of my mother's uncle, Pete: The Story of Peter V. Cacchione, New York's First Communist Councilman, by Simon W. Gerson. Like Frances Perkins, he was a reformer in an era where big business ruled. Still they both persevered at their lifelong missions to improve workers' conditions, pushing for enactment of basic rights we take for granted today.
In 1933 Frances Perkins became FDR’s Secretary of Labor and the first woman to serve as a cabinet secretary, later becoming known as "The Woman Behind the New Deal." Her accomplishments were astounding. She pushed for a minimum wage and maximum work week, to end employment of children under 16, and was the visionary for both the Civilian Conservation Corps and unemployment compensation — and we can thank Perkins today that all were enacted. She lobbied for, and helped draft, the Social Security Act. Again, hat tip to Perkins. She also supervised the Fair Labor Standards Act, in 1938. She was a force.
Frances Perkins, 1912, left, and Peter Cacchione, ca 1940s
My great uncle Pete had served in World War I and later worked for the railroad, until the Great Depression. By the time he joined the Bonus March in 1932, he was penniless, and believed in fighting for his rights. He became active in New York politics. He was aghast by the 1929 Pathe Studio fire in Manhattan that killed or badly injured 37 young women, following unenforced regulations enacted after the Triangle horror 18 years earlier. By 1935, he was a "Red" Party candidate for New York's Sixth District, campaigning for workers rights.
Pete was still bitter about the deaths of his two second cousins in the 1911 Triangle Factory Fire.
Part of Pete's motivation was personal: he was still bitter about the deaths of his two second cousins in the 1911 Triangle Factory Fire.
Young Isabella Portorella, 17, had died a few weeks before her wedding day. The cornoner had ruled her death was due to a "fractured skull," recieved after a "leap from window." She was, as they were uncharitably called in 1911, a jumper.
Her older sister, Maria Giuseppa Tortorelli Lauletta, was a 33-year-old widow who supported herself and her five children. Her remains were so badly burned that her death certificate named her "Unknown Woman," found to be a victim of smoke inhalation and charring during the "conflagration at 23 Washington Place" loft. Maria's remains were buried with those of several unidentified victims, and were not officially identified until DNA testing made it possible.
I imagine the two sisters clinging to each other, and as the flames overtook them, Maria holding Isabella protectively. Perhaps the fire lit Maria's clothes aflame, and they tried frantically, uselessly, to put them out, as Maria urged her young sister Isabella to jump and save herself, begging her to watch over her children. Perhaps Isabella faced the impossible choices survivors recounted later. For so many, jumping was the only way out.
Her remains were so badly burned that her death certificate named her "Unknown Woman"
By 1944 my great uncle Peter Cacchione, born in 1897 and the fourth of 12 children, was a New York City Councilman in the Communist Party representing Brooklyn. He called for the city’s three major league teams — the Yankees, Giants and Dodgers — to sign blacks. The Committee to End Jim Crow in Baseball had scores of prominent members and received endorsements from the influential Eleanor Roosevelt, and the famous Paul Robeson, singer, actor, lecturer, and also a Communist. By 1945, the years of pressure to “End Jim Crow in Baseball” resulted in Jackie Robinson's signing to the Brooklyn Dodgers' minor team, forever ending the color line in professional baseball.
But reform for garment workers would take longer. In March 1958, a six-story building at 623 Broadway, with no sprinklers and worthless fire escapes, would again catch fire. The textile finishing firm on the third floor used an oven box which had blown up. Above the fire, on the fourth floor, workers making women's undergarments would again jump from the windows of the flaming building. Six who jumped died when they hit the pavement. Even more women perished when the floor gave way and pancaked into the fire below. The count was twenty-four dead, 15 wounded.
My great uncle Pete would not give witness to the tragedy this time, however. Though he'd been overwhelmingly reelected as City Councilman in 1943 (the New York Herald reported Communist Party member "Peter V. Cacchione's Ballot Results Astounds Experts"), he died suddenly in November 1947. The son of two Italian immigrants, he was lauded as "among the best that the immigrant ships brought to these shores." Over 8,000 mourners attended Peter Cacchione's funeral.
Learn More
Sources include:
The Frances Perkins Center: https://francesperkinscenter.org/learn/her-life/
Cornell University's The Triangle Fire https://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu/index.html
Triangle Fire, PBS: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/triangle/
These four excellent books:
The Triangle Fire, by Leon Stein
Triangle: The Fire That Changed America, by David von Drehle
The Woman Behind The New Deal, by Kirstin Downey
Pete: The Story of Peter V. Cacchione, New York's First Communist Councilman, by Simon W. Gerson
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