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The workweek for the 500 or so seamstresses and other garment workers who toiled at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on Washington Place was nearly over.
Come 5 p.m. on that first spring Saturday in 1911, the workers—nearly all of them women, most of them immigrants, many in their early teens—could look forward to an evening and all of Sunday spent with friends and families before they returned for yet another taxing and monotonous 52-hour week inside one of the city’s most notorious sweatshops.
At about 4:40 p.m., though, flames flared in a scrap bin under an eighth floor’s fabric cutter’s table. Likely sparked by a lit match or cigarette, the fire ignited piles of discarded cloth cuttings, and then leaped to the factory’s ninth and 10th floors. And while firefighters were on the scene within minutes, the rigs’ ladders reached only to the sixth floor. Hundreds of workers, along with the factory’s owners, would escape either to the roof and a neighboring building or to the street via the building’s single workable freight elevator.
But 146 would perish in the smoke and flames or by leaping to their deaths.
It lasted less than a half-hour, but more than a century later, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire still resonates. The tragedy would become a touchstone in the labor movement in New York City and the nation, certainly, but also internationally.
On the 111th anniversary of the fire, we consider its legacy, for workers, for the victims’ descendants and for the labor movement.
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