Unit VII: What, Then, Is This American? ca. 1865 - 1900

Question/Problem 10: Describe the working conditions in factories in the late 19th century.

141 Men and Girls Die in Waist Factory Fire; Trapped High up in Washington Place Building; Street Strewn with Bodies; Piles of Dead Inside

Three stories of a ten-floor building at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place were burned yesterday, and while the fire was going on 141 young men and women, at least 125 of them were mere girls, were burned to death or killed by jumping to the pavement below.

The building was fireproof. It shows now hardly any signs of disaster that overtook it. The walls are as good as ever; so are the floors; nothing is the worse for the fire except the furniture and the 141 of the 600 men and girls that were employed in the upper three stories.

Most of the victims were suffocated or burned to death within the building, but some who fought their way to the windows and leaped met death as surely, but perhaps more quickly, on the pavements below. At 4:40 o'clock, nearly five hours after the employees in the rest of the building had gone home, the fire broke out. The one little fire escape in the interior was never resorted to by any of the doomed victims. Some of them escaped by running down the stairs, but in a moment or two this avenue was cut off by flame. The girls rushed to the windows and looked down at Greene Street, 100 feet below them. Then one poor little creature jumped. There was a plate glass protection over part of the sidewalk, but she crashed through it; wrecking it and breaking her body into thousand pieces.

Then they all began to drop. The crowd yelled 'Don't jump!' but it was jump or be burned - the proof of which is around in the fact that fifty burned bodies were taken from the ninth floor alone.

The victims who are now lying at the Morgue waiting for some one to identify them by a tooth or the remains of a burned shoe were mostly girls of from 18 to 23 years of age.

There is just one fire escape in the building. That one is an interior fire escape. In Greene Street, where the terrified unfortunates crowded before they began to make their mad leaps to death, the whole big front of the building is guiltless of one. Nor is there a fire escape in the back.

The building itself was of the most modern construction and classed as fireproof. What burned so quickly and disastrously for the victims were shirtwaist, hanging on lines above tiers of workers, sewing machines placed so closely together that there was hardly aisle room for the girls between them, and shirtwaist trimmings and cuttings which littered the floors above the eighth and ninth stories.

According to two of the ablest fire experts in the city the great loss of life at the shirtwaist factory fire can be accounted for by the lack of adequate instruction of the girls in the way to conduct themselves in time of fire.

These men, H.F.J. Porter, an industrial engineer, with offices at 1 Madison Avenue, and P.J. McKeon, a fire prevention expert, who is now delivering lectures at Columbia University, are both familiar with the building which was destroyed and had advised the owners of the factory to establish some kind of a fire drill among the girls and put in better emergency exits to enable them to get out of the building in case of fire. Mr. Porter said las night, when told of the fire by a Times reporter: 'I dont't need to go down there. I knwo just what happened.'

Two years ago Mr. McKeon made an insurance inspection of the factory, among others, and was immediately struck by the way in which the large number of girls were crowded together in the top of the building. He said last night that at that time there were no less than a thousand girls on the three upper floors.

'I inquired if there was a fire drill among the girls, and was told there was not,' said he. 'The place looked dangerous to me. There was a fire-escape on the back and all that, and the regulations seemed to be complied with all right, but I could see that there would be a serious panic if the girls were not instructed how to handle themselves in case of a fire.'

'I even found that the door to themain stairway was usually kept locked. I was told that this was done because it was so difficult to keep track of so many girls. They would run back and forth between the floors, and even out of the building the manager told me.'

'It is a wonder that these things are not happening in the city every day,' said he. 'There are only two or three factories in the city where fire drills are in use, and in some of them where I have installed the system myself the owners have discontinued it.'

'One instance I recall in point where the system has been discontinued despite the fact that the Treasurer for the company, through whose active co-operation it was originally installed, was himself burned to death with several members of his family in his country residence, and notwithstanding that the present President of the company, while at the opera, nearly lost his children and servants in a fire which recently swept through his apartments and burned off the two upper floors of a building which was and still is advertised as the most fireproof and expensively equipped structure of its character in the city.'

'The neglect of factory owners of the safety of their employees is absolutely criminal. One man whom I advised to install a fire drill replied to me, 'Let em burn up. They're a lot of cattle anyway.'

'The factory may be fitted with all the most modern firefighting apparatus and there may be a well-organized fire brigade, but there is absolutely no attempt made to teach the employees how to handle themselves in case of a fire. This is particularly necessary in case of young women and girls who always go into panic.'