Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Essay

The New York Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire is infamous as one of the deadliest industrial disasters in United States history. However, it is was a turning point for American labor. The public outrage that erupted following the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire was the primary force behind the expansion of labor laws in the United States of America. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire led to the expansion of labor laws because of its conditions. The circumstances under which the fire occurred is what caused outrage. There was the high level of corruption in both the industry and the government that led to the massacre. The Factory was largely worked by immigrant women who did not protest to the conditions of the work (1911). Even though

On the evening of March 25, 1911, the work day was coming to an end, but four small fires broke out on the eighth floor of the “Fireproof” Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, and located in the top three floors of the Asch Building, on Greene Street and Washington Place in Manhattan (Timeline). Despite the ‘no smoking’ rules, workers and managers often did so in the factory: when one of them lit scraps of cloth, the heaps of garments caught fire - it spread rapidly through the building (1911). It started fires in the waste bins full of garnet scraps as well as the paper patterns on the ceiling. Workers fruitlessly used pails of water in an attempt to put it out (Drehle). The doors that would free the six-hundred workers were locked shut. The manager attempted to use a fire hose to extinguish it, but the hose was rotted and its valve was rusted shut (Stein). Running from the incinerator, many stuffed themselves into the two freight elevators, operated by Gaspar Mortillaro and Joseph Zito, who both returned to the inferno over and over, saving a hundred and fifty people (Berger). Still, many could not fit in the elevator, and thus, they tried to slide down the cable or jump down the shaft, meeting their deaths (Drehle). The elevators stopped functioning quickly, weighed down by dozens of bodies and unable to rise. Those who managed to get onto the roof received help from a New York University professor and his students who used a ladder left over from painters to pull them up to the their adjacent building (Berger). Many fled onto the fire escape, which snapped (Lieurance). Outside help was just as futile. Many of the victims hung out of windows or ledges, but the fire department’s ladders reached only the sixth floor (Triangle). The crowd watched a man holding three women out the window in an attempt to spare them,