Triangle Shirtwaist Fire: March Twenty-Fifth, Nineteen Eleven

At four forty in the afternoon on March twenty-fifth, nineteen eleven, a fire began on the eighth floor of the Asch Building on Washington Place, one block east of Washington Square Park. It spread to the ninth and tenth floors within minutes. The building contained the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, one of the largest shirtwaist manufacturers in the city. The workers on those floors were young women, most of them Jewish and Italian immigrants, many of them teenagers. They had been at their sewing machines since seven that morning.

One hundred forty-six of them died in forty-five minutes.

They died because the owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, had locked the stairwell doors to prevent unauthorized breaks and petty theft. Workers who ran to the locked doors found them unyielding. The freight elevator shaft became a chimney; women who crowded around it fell down it. The fire escapes buckled and collapsed under the weight of the fleeing. On the street below, crowds watched women appear at the ninth-floor windows. They watched them jump. Firemen's ladders reached only to the sixth floor.

Among the people watching from the street on Washington Place was Frances Perkins, then a thirty-year-old social-reform advocate who happened to be having tea nearby and heard the fire engines. She watched women fall. She watched the fire ladders fall short. She stood on that sidewalk and made a decision about the rest of her life.

Twenty-two years later, Franklin Roosevelt appointed Perkins his Secretary of Labor, the first woman in Cabinet history. She served for twelve years. The labor law framework she built, the Social Security Act, the forty-hour workweek, workplace safety standards, the foundation of what would later be called the New Deal, was, in her own accounting, the program she designed from what she witnessed on that sidewalk on March twenty-fifth, nineteen eleven.

Blanck and Harris were acquitted of manslaughter. A subsequent civil suit resulted in a payout of seventy-five dollars per victim.

Every year on the twenty-fifth of March, descendants of the victims and labor historians gather at the Asch Building, now renamed the Brown Building and part of New York University, to read the names of the dead. The youngest was fourteen. Her name was Rosaria Maltese. Her mother and sister died beside her.