Here
are some Fractured Facts about the bad old days in New York City in 1911:
New
York City Fire Chief Edward Croker was very up front about it: the ladders on
his turn-of-the-century, horse-drawn firefighting vehicles could reach no
higher than the 7th floor of the city’s growing number of high-rise
buildings.
There
were plenty of buildings with more than seven floors. The Woolworth Building,
the tallest building in the world when it was completed in 1913, had 60
stories.
In
1911 it’s estimated that half of New York’s office and factory workers—about
500,000 men, women and children—spent their work day at the 8th floor
or higher.
On
March 25, 1911, a fast-moving late afternoon blaze engulfed the Triangle
Shirtwaist Company in lower Manhattan, destroying the 8th, 9th
and 10th floor work areas. The company had routinely and illegally locked
the exit doors to prevent theft and keep employees at their work stations. When
the inferno burned out, horrified firemen counted 146 bodies—mostly young
immigrant women—at locked exits or on the sidewalks below windows where the
desperate victims had jumped to escape the flames.
“
. . . screaming men and women and boys and girls crowded out on the many window
ledges and threw themselves into the streets far below. They jumped with their clothing
ablaze. The hair of some of the girls streamed up aflame as they leaped. Thud
after thud sounded on the pavements . . .”
One
battalion chief of Engine Company 72 had to order spectators to clear the
sidewalks so they wouldn’t be injured by the jumpers.
Chief
Croker retired on May 1 of that year.
Later,
lawsuits resulted in approximately $75 per victim in settlements by the
insurance companies.
Have
you ever thought that a fire drill at work was a pain in the ass?
Sources:
Howard
Zinn, A People’s History of the United
States, 1492-Present (1980; repr., New York: Harper Perennial Modern
Classics, 2005), 326-27.
