History for the day

It's a nearly-forgotten tragedy, but Dan Daley, a freelance writer from Nashville, Tennessee, has an article at History.com about the Shirtwaist fire:

After what had been a brutal winter, 25 March 1911 was the kind of spring Saturday in Manhattan to which everyone looked forward. Lilies already were appearing in the windows of the tenements of the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village. On Greene Street, which runs between the two neighborhoods, sixteen-year-old Ida Brodsky walked to work that morning, heading toward the ten-story “skyscraper” that was part of New York’s rapidly changing skyline. She was likely joined along the way by Frances Carutto and Molly Gernstein, both seventeen; eighteen-year-old Ida Konowitz; Jacob Klein, 23; and three members of the Maltese family from Queens: 38-year-old Catherine and her daughters Lucia, twenty, and Rosarea, fourteen. They all took the freight elevator to the ninth floor, the middle of three occupied by the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, one of the largest manufacturers of the fashionable shirtwaist garment, whose collared, front-buttoned masculine look was high fashion for the twentieth-century Gibson Girl, as rendered by illustrator Charles Dana Gibson.
Like many new buildings in lower Manhattan, the Asch Building at the corner of Greene and Washington Place had a concrete and cast-iron façade, rendering it ostensibly fireproof. However, the inside of the structure was constructed of wood, as were the long tables at which the women worked, jammed shoulder to shoulder at sewing machines. If a machine's needles broke, company owners Isaac Harris and Max Blanck would charge the workers for replacements. Supervisors timed the girls on toilet breaks and, if they took too long, they could be sent home and docked part of the day’s pay, which made the average $7 a week that many of the garment workers earned from piecework that much dearer. Saturday was a day to pick up a few extra dollars. There was no extra pay for overtime, just how ever many pieces you could assemble from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.— four hours shorter than a typical weekday work schedule.
However, this Saturday would not end like any other day. Frances, Molly, Ida, Jacob, Catherine, Lucia, Rosarea, and 139 others would not live to see Sunday, and the American labor movement, still fighting for mainstream traction, would have a mournful rallying cry like none before.
At 4:45, as the women and girls were putting on their coats to leave, someone yelled: Fire! That's what New York City Fire Marshal William Beers testified during the trial of the Triangle Company’s owners. They had been charged with, among other things, the critical locking of an inward-opening exit door, and inadequate fire escapes too small for the estimated five-hundred-plus workers on Triangle’s three crowded floors. Reportedly, a match tossed carelessly by a cutter lighting a cigarette ignited waste trimmings that were collected in bins beneath the long sewing tables on the eighth floor.
The blaze spread quickly. About 180 people on the eighth floor were the first to be alerted, and all were able to escape down the building’s inside staircase and fire escape; the small number of employees and the owners on the tenth floor scrambled to the relative safety of the roof. However, as the flames licked rapidly upward, the bolts of cloth and trimmings acted as kindling for the building’s wood infrastructure, engulfing and trapping the 310 workers on the ninth floor. On the street, passersby began to notice the smoke billowing out of the upper-floor windows. One of them, noting the bundles of cloth hitting the sidewalk and street in front of the building, sarcastically remarked that the owners must be trying to save their best material. Moments later, they realized these were actually human beings, their hair and clothing on fire and, confronting locked exits, leaping to their deaths from ninety feet above. Remarked witness William G. Shepherd: “I learned a new sound, a more horrible sound than description can picture: It was the thud of a living, speeding body on a stone sidewalk. Thud, dead. Thud, dead. Thud, dead.” In all, sixty-two workers chose to jump rather than burn to death.
Engine Company 72, arriving from their firehouse on West 12th Street, seven blocks to the north, had to maneuver their horse-drawn engines around the bodies that continued to hit the street with sickening thumps. Using horse blankets as life nets, firemen and police officers yelled to the girls to aim for them, but as groups of women jumped together the blankets split under their weight and velocity. Worse, neither the fire engines’ water jets nor their aerial ladders could reach beyond the seventh floor of the building.
On the eighth floor, workers had grabbed for sand- and water-filled fire buckets, but the fire was too far out of control for them to be of any use. The crowd surged toward the two passenger elevators at the west end of the building. There, heroic elevator operators Joe Zito and Joe Gaspar herded in the women, taking a dozen at a time on fifteen or more trips each down to street level. Zito would later testify that he could hear the women hit the roof of his car as they leaped from the open elevator shaft doors they had pried open and jumped into. Police would later pull more than 25 charred bodies from atop the elevator.
The ninth floor was already a charnel house. A crush of terrified workers against doors designed to open inward had already closed off that means of exit. As Kate Alderman, a Triangle employee who survived the fire testified at the trial in December that year, she saw co-worker Margaret Schwartz die in the flames because no one could open the Washington Place stairway door: “I saw Bernstein, the manager’s brother, trying to open the door but he couldn’t… I pushed her aside. I tried to open the door, and I couldn’t… And then Margaret screamed at the top of her voice: ‘Open the door! Fire! I am lost, there is fire!’”
Alderman watched as the flames literally consumed Schwartz, then described how she escaped down a stairway: “And then I turned my coat on the wrong side and put it on my head with the fur to my face, the lining on the outside… I just got ready to go and somebody came and began… pulling my dress back, and I kicked her with my foot and she disappeared… I had a pocketbook with me, and that pocketbook began to burn. I pressed it to my heart to extinguish the fire, and I made my escape right through the flames: The whole door was aflame right to the roof.”
As the combustible materials burned themselves out, firemen were able to climb the steel stairways inside the building, extinguishing the fires on all three floors. What they found horrified even these veterans of grisly calamity: nineteen bodies melted against the locked exit door, two dozen more huddled in death in the company cloakroom, hands covering their faces. Fewer than twenty women had been able to use the fire escape before it collapsed into a grim, twisted ornament hanging limply from the building’s side, taking several other women to their deaths in a courtyard below as it fell. They began to cart bodies out of the upstairs ruins while their comrades and medical personnel from nearby St. Vincent’s and Bellevue hospitals collected the dead on the street. When Bellevue’s own morgue was filled to capacity, a makeshift mortuary was set up on the 26th Street pier; a call went out for more coffins, which were delivered from the indigent hospital and potter’s field on nearby Blackwell’s Island. Relatives of the factory workers began to descend on the morgues, seeking loved ones. The grim process of identifying the dead, many of whom were burned beyond recognition, went on through the night of 25 March. Wails and screams punctuated the chill night air as relatives had their worst fears realized. A week later, they were joined by more than 350,000 people, who participated in a funeral march in Manhattan for the Triangle dead.
The Triangle Shirtwaist tragedy did not occur in a vacuum. The industrial revolution had turned many of America’s inner-city factories into sweatshops, teeming with the cheap and willing labor of hordes of newly arrived immigrants, most of whom came through New York’s Ellis Island intake center. Two years earlier, in November of 1909, in what came to be known in labor history as the Uprising of the 20,000,  many garment workers and more—having initially failed in their bid for a twenty percent pay raise, a 52-hour work week, and extra pay for overtime— staged a multi-city strike. The strike shut down numerous factories in New York City alone; more than seventy of the smaller factories conceding to the union’s demands within the first two days, but the larger sweatshops, including Triangle, formed their own association and resisted, using tactics from political pressure to hired thugs beating up strikers. They were not without powerful allies— in addition to New York City police roughing up demonstrators, judges were inclined to convict and sentence female agitators on moral grounds. As one judge put it while sentencing a picketer for “incitement”: “You are striking against God and Nature, whose law is that man shall earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. You are on strike against God!”
The union women, however, had their own champions. Wealthy progressives like Frances Perkins, J.P. Morgan’s daughter Anne, and Alva Belmont— already advocates of women’s suffrage— saw the labor uprising as an opportunity to move the women strikers’ concerns into a broader feminist struggle. They arranged huge rallies, fund-raising events, and paid the fines levied on arrested strikers.
Their tactics worked: once the large factories realized they had lost the war of public opinion, they agreed to shorter hours and higher pay. However— and this was crucial to setting the stage for the Triangle catastrophe— emboldened union supporters continued to press for a closed shop (where factories would hire only union members and compel owners to treat union and nonunion workers equally in hiring and pay decisions), something that even their progressive patrons deemed too radical at the time. In February of 1910, when the last strikers had settled, workers at Triangle and other large sweatshops returned to work fewer hours for a little more pay, but without the protection of the union on the shop floor. Management never addressed their safety demands, including unlocked doors in the factory and fire escapes that functioned. The stage had been set for tragedy.
The trial of Harris and Blanck in December heard 155 witnesses recount tales of horror before the jury. But presiding judge Thomas C.T. Crain kept the court’s focus extremely narrow— guilt or innocence of the charges of first-degree manslaughter turned on one key factor: that the exit door was not only locked but that it was locked during the very specific period of the fire, and that the defendants knew it was locked at that time.
It was likely that narrow focus that resulted in an acquittal of all charges when the jury returned its verdict on 27 December, barely three weeks since the trial began. Two years later, the owners settled a civil suit with 23 of the victims’ families, paying them each $75. As appalling as that seems (Blanck would be prosecuted once again in 1913 for locking an exit door during work hours at another factory, for which he received the minimum fine of $20), the perverse finding actually served as a catalyst for reform. The Division of Fire Prevention was created as part of the New York Fire Department, tasked with ridding factories of fire hazards. The New York State Legislature created the Factory Investigating Commission, whose leadership included Alfred E. Smith and Samuel Gompers, to investigate nearly two thousand factories in dozens of industries. They enacted new laws covering fire safety, factory inspections, sanitation, and employment of women and children. Among other restrictions, no doors were to be locked during working hours, and sprinkler systems were mandated. Ultimately, this initiative entirely rewrote New York State’s labor laws and created a State Department of Labor to enforce them. Citing the 35,000 annual deaths and two million injuries of workers at the turn of the twentieth century, compared to fewer than 4,400 workplace deaths nationally in 2009, workers’ compensation attorney and president of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Memorial organization James McCarthy observes: “The historical connection of the Triangle to workplace safety is a watershed moment. Without the Triangle tragedy and the reforms which ensued, the present state of workplace safety could hardly be imagined.”

Rico says it's another piece of lost history...