Freedman went on to attend college, get married, and raise a family. After almost a century, she found herself back in the spotlight as the oldest survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. She gave speeches and granted interviews and was featured in a documentary about her life that recently aired on many public television stations. Edited by Kenneth T. It occurred on 25 March in the Asch building at the northwest corner of Washington and Greene streets, where the Triangle Shirtwaist Company occupied the top three of ten floors; five hundred women were employed there, mostly Jewish immigrants between the ages of thirteen and twenty-three.
Workers in the factory, many of whom were young women recently arrived from Europe, had little time or opportunity to escape. The rapidly spreading fire killed workers. The building had only one fire escape, which collapsed during the rescue effort. Long tables and bulky machines trapped many of the victims.
Panicked workers were crushed as they struggled with doors that were locked by managers to prevent theft, or doors that opened the wrong way. Only a few buckets of water were on hand to douse the flames. Outside, firefighters' ladders were too short to reach the top floors and ineffective safety nets ripped like paper.
Famous Trials. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Trial Newspaper Accounts. Fire Report. The bodies of seamstresses, who jumped from the factory floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company to avoid being burned alive, lie outside the building. In five minutes more, if the fire had started then, probably not a life would have been lost.
Last night District Attorney Whitman started an investigation not of this disaster alone but of the whole condition which makes it possible for a firetrap of such a kind to exist. Whitman's intention is to find out if the present laws cover such cases, and if they do not to frame laws that will. Girls Jump To Sure Death. Fire Nets Prove Useless. Firemen Helpless to Save Life. The fire which was first discovered at o'clock on the eighth floor of the ten-story building at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street, leaped through the three upper stories occupied by the Triangle Waist Company with a sudden rush that left the Fire Department helpless.
How the fire started no one knows. On the three upper floors of the building were employes of the waist company, of whom were girls. The building had experienced four recent fires and had been reported by the Fire Department to the Building Department as unsafe in account of the insufficiency of its exits.
The building itself was of the most modern construction and classed as fireproof. What burned so quickly and disastrously for the victims were shirtwaists, 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.
Girls had begun leaping from the eighth story windows before firemen arrived. The firemen had trouble bringing their apparatus into position because of the bodies which strewed the pavement and sidewalks. While more bodies crashed down among them, they worked with desperation to run their ladders into position and to spread firenets. One fireman running ahead of a hose wagon, which halted to avoid running over a body spread a firenet, and two more seized hold of it.
A girl's body, coming end over end, struck on the side of it, and there was hope that she would be the first one of the score who had jumped to be saved. Thousands of people who had crushed in from Broadway and Washington Square and were screaming with horror at what they saw watched closely the work with the firenet.
Three other girls who had leaped for it a moment after the first one, struck it on top of her, and all four rolled out and lay still upon the pavement. Five girls who stood together at a window close the Greene Street corner held their place while a fire ladder was worked toward them, but which stopped at its full length two stories lower down.
They leaped together, clinging to each other, with fire streaming back from their hair and dresses. They struck a glass sidewalk cover and it to the basement.
There was no time to aid them. With water pouring in upon them from a dozen hose nozzles the bodies lay for two hours where they struck, as did the many others who leaped to their deaths. One girl, who waved a handkerchief at the crowd, leaped from a window adjoining the New York University Building on the westward. Her dress caught on a wire, and the crowd watched her hang there till her dress burned free and she came toppling down.
Many jumped whom the firemen believe they could have saved.
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