The Triangle Fire Read Online Free Page B

one of the bridle paths which cut through the park.
    Or he may have caught a glimpse of William Gunn Shepherd, young reporter for the United Press, walking briskly eastward through the Square.
    Clearly visible to him was the New York University building filling half of the eastern side of the Square from Washington Place to Waverly Place. But he could not see, as he looked from his window, that Professor Frank Sommer, former sheriff of Essex County, New Jersey, was lecturing to a class of fifty on the tenth floor of the school building, or that directly beneath him on the ninth floor Professor H. G. Parsons was illustrating interesting points of gardening to a class of forty girls.
    A block east of the Square and parallel to it, Greene Street cut a narrow path between tall loft buildings. Its sidewalks bustled with activity as shippers trundled the day’s last crates and boxes to the horse-drawn wagons lining the curbs.
    At the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, a wide thoroughfare bisecting the east side of the Square, the Asch building rose ten floors high. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company, largest of its kind, occupied the top three floors. As Dr. Winterbottom contemplated the peaceful park, 500 persons, most of them young girls, were busily turning thousands of yards of flimsy fabric into shirtwaists, a female bodice garment which the noted artist Charles Dana Gibson had made the sartorial symbol of American womanhood.
    One block north, at the corner of Greene Street and Waverly Place, Mrs. Lena Goldman swept the sidewalk in front of her small restaurant. It was closing time. She knew the girls who worked in the Asch building well for many of them were her customers.
    Dominick Cardiane, pushing a wheelbarrow, had stopped for a moment in front of the doors of the Asch building freight elevator in the middle of the Greene Street block. He heard a sound “like a big puff,” followed at once by the noise of crashing glass. A horse reared, whinnied wildly, and took off down Greene Street, the wagon behind it bouncing crazily on the cobblestones.

    Reporter Shepherd, about to cross from the park into Washington Place, also heard the sound. He saw smoke issuing from an eighth-floor window of the Asch building and began to run.
    Patrolman Meehan was talking with his superior, Lieutenant William Egan. A boy ran up to them and pointed to the Asch building. The patrolman put spurs to his horse.
    Dr. Winterbottom saw people in the park running toward Washington Place. A few seconds later he dashed down the stoop carrying his black medical bag and cut across the Square toward Washington Place.
    Patrolman Meehan caught up with Shepherd and passed him. For an instant there seemed to be no sound on the street except the urgent tattoo of his horse’s hoofbeats as Meehan galloped by. He pulled up in front of 23 Washington Place, in the middle of the block, and jumped from the saddle.
    Many had heard the muffled explosion and looked up to see the puff of smoke coming out of an eighth-floor window. James Cooper, passing by, was one of them. He saw something that looked “like a bale of dark dress goods” come out of a window.
    “Some one’s in there all right. He’s trying to save the best cloth,” a bystander said to him.
    Another bundle came flying out of a window. Halfway down the wind caught it and the bundle opened.
    It was not a bundle. It was the body of a girl.
    Now the people seemed to draw together as they fell back from where the body had hit. Nearby horses struggled in their harnesses.
    “The screams brought me running,” Mrs. Goldman recalled. “I could see them falling! I could see them falling!”
    John H. Mooney broke out of the crowd forming on the sidewalk opposite the Asch building and ran to Fire Box 289 at the corner of Greene Street. He turned in the first alarm at 4:45 P.M.
    Inside the Asch building lobby Patrolman Meehan saw that both passenger elevators were at the upper floors. He took the