The Triangle Fire Read Online Free Page A

why do they launch so many wildcat strikes in protest? You never read much about this in the American press, but courageous workers in China even mobilize strikes, even though the penalty for the leaders can be ten or twenty years in prison.
    The meaning, I believe, is quite positive for the future of the world and its gorgeous variety of people. Because the young strikers confirm that there are universal human aspirations—a thirst for personal dignity and self-advancement and just relationships—that exist across the vast boundaries of geography, race, religion, and culture. The college students and other young Americans who are mobilizing now to protest against the overseas sweatshops that manufacture products for brand-name multinationals like Nike are on the right track, because these students, after all, are the ones who buy the shoes and electronic toys that those young “working girls” are assembling in Indonesia or China or elsewhere. The American students—some of them anyway—are also beginning to recognize that social injustices are not confined to Asia or Central America; some of the same dark practices also flourish within the United States.
    The students have discovered a moral question that affects their own lives: If I buy the products that afflicted workers make, do I share in the blame for what happens to those workers? This is the same question posed by the young people who died at the Triangle factory, and Americans found they could not avoid answering it.

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J UDGE M. L INN B RUCE ( counsel ): How high can you succesfully combat a fire now?
    E DWARD F. C ROKER ( Chief, New York City Fire Department ): Not over eighty-five feet.
    B RUCE : That would be how many stories of an ordinary building?
    C ROKER : About seven.
    B RUCE : Is this a serious danger?
    C ROKER : I think if you want to go into the so-called workshops which are along Fifth Avenue and west of Broadway and east of Sixth Avenue, twelve, fourteen or fifteen story buildings they call workshops, you will find it very interesting to see the number of people in one of these buildings with absolutely not one fire protection, without any means of escape in case of fire.
—Before the New York State Assembly Investigating Committee on Corrupt Practices and Insurance Companies Other Than Life, City Hall, New York City, December 28,1910

PART ONE

1. FIRE
    I intend to show Hell.
    — DANTE : Inferno , CANTO XXIX :96
    The first touch of spring warmed the air.
    It was Saturday afternoon—March 25, 1911—and the children from the teeming tenements to the south filled Washington Square Park with the shrill sounds of youngsters at play. The paths among the old trees were dotted with strollers.
    Genteel brownstones, their lace-curtained windows like drooping eyelids, lined two sides of the 8-acre park that formed a sanctuary of green in the brick and concrete expanse of New York City. On the north side of the Square rose the red brick and limestone of the patrician Old Row, dating back to 1833. Only on the east side of the Square was the almost solid line of homes broken by the buildings of New York University.
    The little park originally had been the city’s Potter’s Field, the final resting place of its unclaimed dead, but in the nineteenth century Washington Square became the city’s most fashionable area. By 1911 the old town houses stood as a rear guard of an aristocratic past facing the invasions of industry from Broadway to the east, low-income groups from the crowded streets to the south, and the first infiltration of artists and writers into Greenwich Village to the west.
    Dr. D. C. Winterbottom, a coroner of the City of New York, lived at 63 Washington Square South. Some time after 4:30, he parted the curtains of a window in his front parlor and surveyed the pleasant scene.
    He may have noticed Patrolman James P. Meehan of Traffic B proudly astride his horse on