It was Saturday, March 25, 1911 and Isadore Abramowitz was anxious to get home from a long day of cutting fabric at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where he earned his living working 12-hour days, six days a week. As he turned to grab his coat, a cigarette butt was carelessly thrown into the pile of scrap material under his workstation.1By the time it was finally extinguished, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire would claim the lives of 146 innocent people and ultimately inspire a movement for labor reform in New York City and across the United States.
Fed by the flammable wooden tables and yards of fabric, the fire erupted into a full-blown inferno in seconds. It went on to demolish the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of the Asch building, situated at the corners of Washington Place and Greene Street. In thirty minutes, thousands of onlookers watched as 146 people met their deaths, either at the hands of the fire or when they were forced to jump to the pavement below.2
The fire spread beyond Abramowitz’s scrap pile rapidly. Factory manager Samuel Bernstein was on the eighth floor when the flames broke out. He began several failed attempts to extinguish the blaze. Bernstein’s cousin, Dinah Lipschitz, called the tenth floor operator, Mary Alter, who in a panic went to notify the factory owners Isaac Harris and Max Blanck, but forgot to call down to the ninth floor. The 120 workers, one floor below, were unaware that a fire had begun its path towards them.3
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On the eighth floor, women began to frantically move towards the exits, where they met their first roadblock. The Asch building had two exit stairways one leading to Greene Street and the other to Washington Place, the latter of which was never used and often kept locked to prevent stealing, in violation of safety codes. On an average work day women were funneled out the Greene Street exit so security could check their handbags for stolen merchandise; the exit was so small only one person could pass at a time.4 The exit wasn't large enough to evacuate all of the employees quickly, causing panic throughout the factory. Conditions on the other side of the factory were worse because the Washington Place exit door was locked. As the fire grew, workers climbed onto the balconies where they would hover over the cement ground below.
At 4:45 p.m. Mary Alter told the bookkeeper to call the fire department, which arrived on scene within minutes. Despite firefighters' quick response, they were powerless to help.5 Their fire ladders, even the newest models, fell short at the sixth floor and the newly pressurized hosing was ineffective from the street. Within five minutes the fire ate 9,000 square feet of the eighth floor and moved onto the ninth. At 4:50 p.m., the first man stepped off the ledge beginning a mass suicide of workers trying to escape the fire.6
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By the eleventh minute of the fire, workers on the ninth floor were trapped. Operators of the building’s two elevator passenger cars tried desperately to save as many as they could from the ninth floor, but could only make three trips. By 4:51 p.m. it became too dangerous for them to return. Escape down the stairways had also become impossible.7 While the door to the Washington Place exit was eventually unlocked on the eighth floor, it remained locked on the ninth and many women died trying to pry the doors open.
Bodies had already begun to fall from the ledges when women decided to brave the small fire escape. Within minutes, panicked workers rushed onto the poorly-crafted iron and it began to buckle under the significant weight. As it began to sway under the strain, the iron bar that kept the shutters opened at the eighth floor window got stuck in place, slipping through the slates of the stairway. This trapped the women attempting to descend from above, but it did not stop the exit flow of escapees. Soon the ladder reached its weight capacity and fell to the ground below, killing everyone who had been on it at the time.8
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Workers on the tenth floor had a better chance for survival than the ninth. Immediately after word came through about the fire, workers rushed the Greene Street stairway and climbed up to the roof, where NYU law students used ladders to get them to safety.
The fire was over within a half-hour, but it left the street littered with bodies, mostly female. A crowd of thousands stood watching in horror, including newspaper reporter William Gunn Shepherd who spent the duration of the fire on the phone to his office giving a full account of the events.9
Coffins containing the fire's victims were moved to Charities Pier on 26th Street on the Hudson River, on the night of March 25th. The pier was also known as Misery Lane because it was often used as makeshift morgue when a tragedy yielded too large a death toll for bodies to be kept in the city morgue. The doors opened at midnight for friends and family to identify the victims, and remained open for four days.10
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The women who lay in the streets were the mothers, sisters, aunts, friends and wives of Manhattan’s Lower East Side immigrant community, mostly Italians and Jews, and in many cases were the only providers for their families. Relief efforts immediately began to aid grieving families, but it did not quell the questions that society began to ask, the most important being who was to blame for the deaths of 146 innocent people?
In the aftermath of the fire, public outcry demanded someone be held responsible. The Asch building did not have a third stairway, even though building code required it to, its fire escape was weak and unsafe, and doors to some exits were locked while others were blocked by the stampede of bodies trying to rush outside. For weeks blame was shuffled around to various organizations, until Harris and Blank were indicted on two counts of manslaughter. Their trial would begin in December of 1911, but by the end of the month the factory owners were acquitted because of lack of evidence. However, Joseph Asch, the Asch building's owner, later lost civil suits brought against him by the families of the Triangle victims.
The fire would play a very important role in 20th century labor reform, further galvanizing workers to fight for safer conditions and fair treatment. Its impact was part of a series of events, which started with the Uprising of the 20,000; a strike of garment workers, which was started by workers at the Triangle Factory in 1910. It ended before major improvements could be made in the labor industry, but it was the first time workers made a stand for their rights. Many of the women who died in the fire, were part of the Uprising.
The Triangle fire also had a larger societal impact after March 25, 1911. Thousands witnessed the mass suicide, which caused a collective demand for labor reform, ushering in "the Golden Age in factory reform".11In October of 1911, the New York City Board of Aldermen adopted the Sullivan-Hoey Act, establishing the Bureau of Fire Prevention. The New York State Legislature also created the Factory Investigating Commission, which held its first meeting on October 14, 1911. Between October 1911 and December of 1912, the FIC conducted investigations into factory safety, to create new legislation that would enforce the use of fire safety measures, like fire escapes and alarms. The fire continued to impact legislation well into the New Deal era and has been permanently integrated into American labor history narrative. As the centennial approaches in March of 2011, the Triangle fire's legacy remains as a reminder that the battle for worker's rights is never over.
I changed a couple of things for clarity, consistency and grammar, but not too much content.
I do have a couple of suggestions though.
For the beginning of second paragraph: I think it’s very effective to start with Abramowitz as a window into the event, but definitely tie back to him somewhere. What else do we know about him in terms of the fire?
I separated the conclusion paragraph into two to further define the conclusion as opposed to the end of the description of the events of the fire. Also, I think you should be a little more specific about the labor law changes in your conclusion. I don’t think you have to be too extensive at all because it’s not the point of your essay, but definitely go into a little more detail about the impact of the fire. I think maybe going into this would be more effective than describing the Uprising of the 20,000. You could take this part out and strengthen your conclusion.
I changed a couple of things for clarity, consistency and grammar, but not too much content.
I do have a couple of suggestions though.
For the beginning of second paragraph: I think it’s very effective to start with Abramowitz as a window into the event, but definitely tie back to him somewhere. What else do we know about him in terms of the fire?
I separated the conclusion paragraph into two to further define the conclusion as opposed to the end of the description of the events of the fire. Also, I think you should be a little more specific about the labor law changes in your conclusion. I don’t think you have to be too extensive at all because it’s not the point of your essay, but definitely go into a little more detail about the impact of the fire. I think maybe going into this would be more effective than describing the Uprising of the 20,000. You could take this part out and strengthen your conclusion.
I went back and added some more to the conclusion to reflect the impact of the fire as well as what happened to the owners in the aftermath.
I agreed with your comments. I think it would be really effective to bring Abramowitz back into the essay at some point. However, in all the literature I’ve read thus far, there isn’t any mention of him. Accounts of the fire were unclear for obvious reasons. It would be great to talk about him again, especially since he is never accused of actually starting the fire, though it started in his scrap bin. Instead, the Shirtwaist owners were charged with murder.
I also need to add a more solid section/conclusion regarding the fire’s impact on labor laws in order to set it in some historical context. I think I focused on creating a detailed image of what happened that day, and I didn’t take the opportunity to explain the importance of the Triangle fire in a broader historical narrative. I would like to answer why this fire was so important, especially since there were other fires at the turn of the century. For that reason, I may leave the section about the Uprising in the essay, essentially to clarify why this moment in history is imperative for the larger national story regarding labor. I think the Uprising is an important point of that context.
I also like how you broke up the conclusion.
I liked the links you added to the page. Many of them are from the Kheel Center at Cornell University, and are a great resource for information about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. I really like the graphic of the building linked to the words "fire spread". Its something I haven't seen before and would have been very helpful when reading and researching the fire; in much of the literature the authors write very chaotically, and the actual event becomes hard to imagine.
I think you've done a pretty good job of writing up a tremendously important event in American labor history, and you should be congratulated for being stylistically ambitious with this essay. For the most part, it is engaging to read because it's rich with details and involves play with voice and time. While playing with narrative voice and time can draw in readers, however, it can also be very tricky. I hope you'll find some of my edits and suggestions useful in this light. (Note: any and all suggestions offered only reflect the impressions of one particular reader and you should feel free to accept or reject as little or as much as you see fit.)
Most of your essay is written in an action-oriented, chronologically faithful narrative style common to news writing and popular history. Although this style of writing is dramatic, it is best used in specific contexts and for specific purposes. Newspapers and magazines, for example, use this style to visit or revisit past events - criminal, political, culture, and so forth. This can be an effective way to give familiar stories and figures new life or depth. It can also be used to present less familiar events in a detailed yet entertaining way; you can see this in 'feature' articles and select chapters in history books when authors interweave blow-by-blow reportage with analysis and reflection.
In other words, this style of writing works best when you have envisioned an audience and a purpose. This is entirely up to you, but once you've decided, it makes it easier to structure the rest of the essay. If you intend to address a general, 'naive' reader, it would require more background details and context in order to make proper sense of the narrative. If you intend to address an expert reader, it would require more structure and analysis in order for the reader to stay interested. It seems like your essay follows neither mode consistently.
Considering this is not a scholarly article aimed at publication in an academic journal, it should probably be aimed only at a general reader. More background details and context are needed. This does not mean that it can't start with dramatic narrative. It just means that the narrative needs to be accompanied by details or context that help them understand what they are reading. A general reader with no prior knowledge of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire would have a hard time putting together the larger picture - meanings, significances, reasons - until the last two paragraphs, if ever. This is too long for a general reader. People generally do not read for more than a few lines without knowing why they are reading something. Furthermore, what is true for print is much more true for online writing.
Having said all this, this doesn't mean the essay requires a lot of change. Very generally, it means more background information earlier in the essay. This might be done with something as simple as making the second paragraph a more straightforward exposition introducing the event/theme/significance in a very plain way. This might sound boring, but if you think about the average naive reader (imagine a friend or family member with no prior knowledge of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire), this is what they need to maintain interest and to be able to make sense of the whole thing. (I've made a simple change to the introduction that begins to do this.)
In addition, playing with time can make it difficult to keep track of verb tenses and other markers of time. In this case, several different past verb tenses are visible throughout the narrative portions of your essay. This can make it difficult to follow and understand for the reader. I've tried to make the verb tenses more uniform, but I recommend that you double-check them yourself. Similarly, some exact times start appearing halfway in your essay and it probably causes confusion in readers. Unless one has prior knowledge of the chronology, there is no way to make sense of these times. I'll leave it to you, but I would recommend either removing any specific times altogether (and replace them with relative time measures) or to use them from beginning to end.
Altogether, I think you've ambitiously attempted a complicated approach that's not easy for anyone to pull off. (That's why most people avoid it.) You've done a pretty good job so far, but I'd suggest a little more work in order to maximize its impact.
[Also: I know this is not the point of this late editing stage, but you might consider developing your last two paragraphs since they very briefly present the tremendous historical importance of this event.]
best,
DK
I really enjoyed this exercise. For the final edits I changed grammar, making the tenses more consistent and made a few modifications to sentences that I thought were unclear. I had to change a few facts to reflect more accurate truths about the series of events. I was pleasantly surprised by the outcome of this assignment; I think everyone's comments really strengthened the final product. I was expecting the essay to appear disjointed after so many edits but I think the result turned out very well. Having other writers edit and make comments on the work, made it easier for me to edit, since it was no longer just my own work. I find it extremely frustrating to edit my own writing. This processes provided me a great deal of insight into my own writing style and improvement that I can make.