| It was a warm
spring Saturday in New York City, March 25, 1911. On the top
three
floors of the ten-story Asch Building just off of Washington Square,
employees
of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory began putting away their work as the
4:45 p.m. quitting time approached. Most of the several hundred
Triangle
Shirtwaist employees were teenage girls. Most were recent
immigrants.
Many spoke only a little English.
Just then
somebody on the eighth
floor shouted, "Fire!" Flames leapt from discarded rags between
the
first and second rows of cutting tables in the hundred-
foot-by-hundred-foot
floor. Triangle employee William Bernstein grabbed pails of water and
vainly
attempted to put the fire out. As a line of hanging patterns
began
to burn, cries of "fire" erupted from all over the floor. In the
thickening smoke, as several men continued to fling water at the
flames,
the fire spread everywhere--to the tables, the wooden floor trim, the
partitions,
the ceiling. [CONT.]
|
