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Jonathan Mark - Associate
Editor
The
UPI reporter, William Shepherd, was just by chance on the corner of
Manhattan’s Washington Place and Greene Street when on March 25, 1911
flames started licking out of the eighth and ninth floors across the
street. He knew the place, the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. The year
before its workers had gone on strike for better conditions.
Shepherd telephoned his office, where telegraph operators
clickity-clacked a dramatic story across America. Shepherd saw, way above
him, a young man helping a young woman to the ninth floor windowsill. The
young man held her out the window, and let her drop. The man reached back
into the flames, held a second girl out the window and then a third,
letting them drop. None of the girls resisted, “as if,” reported
Shepherd, “he were helping them into a street car instead of into
eternity.”
A fourth girl put her arms around that man in the window and kissed him,
perhaps impulsively for the first time or simply for the last. Then he
held her out of the window and dropped her 100 feet to the sidewalk,
quickly jumping after her.
“His coat fluttered upwards,” reported Shepherd, “the air filled his
trouser legs as he came down. I could see he wore tan shoes.”
Shepherd wrote, “Later, I saw his face. You could see he was a real man. He
had done his best.”
In less than half an hour, 146 people were dead, mostly young Jewish and
Italian women. Witnesses said they fell “just like rain,” or like birds
shot in the sky. In the street the water from the fire hoses ran red with
the blood.
Someone clocked the fire at 18 minutes. We can say the fire lasted 18
minutes and 95 years. Last weekend, on the days surrounding the
anniversary of the disaster, fire bells tolled and flowers were placed on
the sidewalk outside the New York University building that occupies the
Triangle’s space. The building survived. It was fireproof.
Last Friday, students and workers read every one of the victims’ names,
placing a flower for each, while firefighters raised a ladder to show the
highest point ladders could reach in 1911 — the sixth floor, two stories
below where it mattered.
How did it start? A lit cigarette? What ignited? Perhaps the oil from the
sewing machines, the rags in bins, the clothing patterns hanging above
work tables. After the blaze ended, a fire chief said he came upon
skeletons bending over sewing machines.
Those who jumped into the firemen’s nets crashed through them. Sometimes
two or three women jumped together, holding hands. One woman, according
to a witness, stood “ as though she was standing before her own mirror,”
removed her wide-brimmed hat “and sent it sailing through the air. Then
slowly, carefully, she opened her handbag. Out of it she extracted a few
bills and a handful of coins — her pay,” for it was payday. “These she
flung into space. The bills floated slowly downward. The coins hit the
cobblestones, ringing as she jumped.”
The first fire alarm was at 4:45 p.m. and at 4:57 the final body fell
from the ninth floor, onto an iron hook on the sixth floor, where she
hung burning and then, about a minute later, with a thud onto Greene
Street. Leon Stein, in his “Triangle Fire” history, wrote that by shortly
after 5 p.m. about 10,000 people were drawn to the scene; by 7, the crowd
doubled. Many of our grandparents or great-grandparents were surely among
them.
In Washington Square, a Salvation Army band played “Nearer My God, To
Thee.”
Eric Goldstein, 37, told us over the phone that his grandmother, Ruth
Teich, was newly arrived in America. The day of the fire was supposed to
have been her first day of work at the Triangle, a job found for her by
relatives.
“But March 25 was a Shabbos,” said Goldstein, as it was this year, and
she had promised her father, before leaving Europe, that she’d remember
who she was. She defied her less observant relatives and hid rather than
work. When she returned home after darkness, her family thought they’d
seen a ghost; she was feared to be dead or missing.
Shabbat saved the lives of others in the building as well. According to
the Yiddish paper’s coverage, workers in a sweatshop on an adjacent floor
had negotiated that their Shabbat workday ended at noon, and so they were
saved.
The last Triangle survivor, Rose Freedman, died in 2001 in California’s
Beverly Hills, aged 107.
Ruth Sergel, an East Village filmmaker, says, “as a Jewish New Yorker you
just grew up with stories of the Triangle fire. I’ve always been haunted
by it.” Three years ago, she e-mailed an idea to some friends. “We would
go out, on the anniversary of the fire,” says Sergel, “to the homes of
the victims and write with street chalk on the sidewalk the name and age
of every victim, that they lived at that address and died March 25, 1911
in the Triangle fire.” This year more than 50 people were chalking.
Last year, said Sergel, Karina Weinstein, program coordinator of the
Workmen’s Circle, “chalked with me,” and this year Weinstein brought
Sergel to Workmen’s Circle groups from Long Island to Westchester to talk
about the project and get people to participate.
“Even if the original buildings are gone,” says Sergel, “the chalk still
goes on the sidewalk.”
Jennie Stellino, a 16-year-old who died from her burns three days after
the fire, lived at 315 Bowery, now home to CBGB, the punk music club.
Write in chalk that Max Lehrer, 19, left home that long-ago morning from
114 Essex Street, as did Yetta Meyers from 911 Rivington, and Rosie
Shapiro from 149 Henry.
The Triangle fire keeps showing up in the most unlikely places. About two
weeks ago, archivists at Manhattan’s Gilder Lehrman Institute of American
History came across sheet music for “Mamenyu,” or “Elegy for the Triangle
Fire Victims,” written by Anshel Schorr in 1911, sung to music of a
Yiddish operetta. The Lehrman people couldn’t read the Yiddish, but it
was transliterated and translated in Eleanor and Joseph Mlotek’s “Pearls
of Yiddish Song,” a Workmen’s Circle book, and performed off-Broadway in
the 1980s, in Zalmen Mlotek’s “The Golden Land.
“The Jews grieve and weep and wring their hands. The morgues are full,”
goes the elegy. “For a piece of bread, a horrible death robbed me of my
only child. My daughter lies dead in a shroud instead of a wedding
dress.”
Instead of going down the wedding aisle, 18 women and six men went down
the aisles of the Hebrew Free Burial Association’s cemetery in Staten
Island. Amy Koplow, the association’s executive director, tells us that
the yellowed archives indicate that one of the girls, Sarah Brodsky, 21,
had her burial arranged by her “chossen,” her would-be groom.
“The chalk always washes away,” says Sergel, but it’s all the more
beautiful for that.
“We’ll always come back next year,” she promises. “That’s what social
justice and memory is all about. It’s not like it’s ever over.”
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