The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

In the early 1900’s, there was a huge surge of immigrants coming to America. At the same time, everything was being mass produced, especially clothing. The large surge of people coming into America needed jobs. The garment factories used the cheap source of immigrant labor to make really cheap stylish clothing that everyone could afford, including the working poor. People really liked having this source of nice clothes, and bought a lot of it. For the companies to keep making as much money as possible, they needed to make the workers work as hard as possible, and pay them as little as possible, and minimizing safety features for their employees as far as the law would allow.

Most workplaces were very unsafe, and every day, hundreds of workers in New York died. A year before the fire, there was a huge strike among garment workers that forced a lot of companies to raise pay and lower hours. The Triangle Factory did meet some of the demands, but they refused to add more safety features, and the unionizers were just glad to make some change.

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The Triangle Factory wasn't a factory in the way you would expect. It wasn't a squat building in the factory district, or a gaggle of harried girls around a table in a tenement building.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was based in the top floors of the Asch Building, a ten-story stone building on Washington Place. It was very common for larger factories to rent floors in large 'loft' buildings because the insurance was cheaper than if they were located in a tenement building. These loft locations also provided the access to electricity to fuel the machines, which was cheaper than using gas. The buildings were not made to hold so many people, and the safety features, or lack of them, reflected that. While the contents of the factory were highly combustible, the building itself was considered fireproof (and survived the fire without structural damage).

Triangle dealt with fire hazards to their equipment and inventory by buying insurance. Worker safety in this period was not the first concern. (Smithsonian) There were no sprinklers, as they were considered 'cumbersome and costly' by the Protective League of Property Owners. The single fire escape collapsed during the fire; the factory had been cited the week before for not having a sufficient point of egress. It would take more than two hours for everyone in the factory to exit through the escape, when they had only minutes before the fire reached them.