...one-hundred and forty six times, one chime for each of the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. A fire that had taken place over one-hundred years ago is, to this day, one of the most horrific events up until the bombing of the World Trade Center. The Brown Building of New York University that stands on the corner of Greene street and Washington place in Washington Square of Greenwich Village was formerly known as the ‘Asch Building’, and on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Leading up to the fire, 1911 was a time that women were not permitted to vote, and sweatshop labor was the driving force behind the garment industry in New York City. In only eighteen...
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...What happened at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on March 25, 1911? The fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory is one of the deadliest, horrific workplace accidents in the history of New York City. At the end of the half of terror, 146 people were dead. According to the documentary the fire which started on the eighth floor spread to the 9th floor where the Triangle Shirtwaist Workers were getting ready to leave for the day. The workers have no Idea there was a fire raging through the building until it was too late for most of them to evacuate the building. The owners, on the other hand, made it out the building alive through the rooftop. The triangle fire’s tragedy was compounded by the hazardous working environment in the factory and consequently lack of emergency preparedness. According to Berger (2011), Workers unraveled a hose from a stairwell fixture, but no water came out. The building had no sprinklers, nor had the factory ever held fire drills. More disheartening is that the doors in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory only opened inward, therefore when the...
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...Reform That Triangle! The Industrial Revolution launched the world into a new time of machines and cities. Change happened so quickly, nothing could keep up with it, not even the governments. Consequently, there was a lack of regulations and laws. This absence of procedures led to one of the worst disasters in United States history—the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. In our textbook, we learned about labor reforms and how they were created, however we were not given any specific examples of events that directly affected this. These are the details on one such example. On March 25th, 1911, a fire spread through the upper floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company’s Factory, sending laborers into a frenzied panic. “In front of me I saw flames on the outside of the windows shooting up. The flames were climbing up from the 8th floor”(http://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu/). At the end of the day, more than 140 people perished in the...
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...New York City occurred. 146 women and teenage girls died in a fire that broke out on the top three floors of the ten-story work building that the Triangle Shirtwaist Company shared with other businesses. The fire was likely started with a cigarette bud being dropped, and the fire quickly grew with all the clothing and material to burn on. The young women tried to escape without the accommodation of a safe and appropriate exit. There was one flimsy fire exit staircase that quickly buckled under the pressure of dozens and dozens of women trying to run down it and one working elevator out of five that functioned enough to make four trips before the tragedy ended. Women...
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...The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 was the deadliest work related accident until the terrorist attacks on 9/11, ninety years later. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was a large sweatshop run in New York City. This business was run in the top three floors of a ten story building(Workers in the Industrial Age). This fire on Saturday March 25, 1911 caused 146 people to die from multiple causes such as suffocation, burning alive, and jumping to their deaths. All this destruction still has no definite determined cause but is believed to be caused by a cigarette that got thrown into a wastebasket with highly flammable material. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire contributed to the improvements of today's quality of working places...
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...Workers during the Progressive Era continued to form unions such as the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. In 1909, the women workers had a walkout against the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, demanding better hours, working conditions and wages. This walkout achieved better wages for the women, however working conditions and hours were still horrific. On Saturday March 25, 1911 a fire broke out on the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of the Company. Due to the lack of emergency exits many of the workers were trapped and within half an hour 146 immigrant women were dead. The accounts of Kate Alterman, Anna Gullo and Ida Nelson in the primary source tell of people running around trying to find ways to escape. People were jumping out of windows and falling to death because the safety nets could not catch people jumping from that height. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire and the strike of 1909 even though unsuccessful sparked the beginning of progressive reform and workplace safety....
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...Chapter 29 Essay The government protection was without doubt necessary to improve the lot of the laborer from being taken advantage of by industries; for them to work in safe environments, have fair and reasonable wages, working hours, and compensation. Many industrial jobs were known to be dangerous. Without the accountability of the government, workers risked their lives in hostile working environments. Nothing would be done to protect the workers from these evils unless the government was willing to step in and pass laws to protect the workers and enforce them. In many cases laborers did not have a set of working hours, or compensation for injury in their job. They could be taken advantage of because their bosses had absolute power over them. The laws passed to guard women and children workers are completely justifiable, because women worked just as hard as men in dangerous and tough working environments, and children were made to work in positions not adequate for their anatomy, and logically needed to be protected also. The Massachusetts first annual report of its labor statistics bureau said “There is a peril to life and limb from unguarded machinery, and peril to health from lack of ventilation, and insufficiency of means of escape in case of fire, in many establishments…. These evils can only be prevented by detailed enactment.” Massachusetts hoped to pass the Factory Inspection Legislation which would protect workers by demanding factories have machine guarding...
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...evidence of how the past can redefine present culture. Since the civil war, African Americans role within the nation has changed drastically from a slave to the President of the United States. Monumental cases like Dred Scott v. Sanford, Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education, along with mass protests across the United States; all influenced the civil rights of African Americans. Another case that shaped our civilization was from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Due to negligence of the factory owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, one hundred and forty-five people died in a factory fire because of inaccessibility to fire escapes. This devastation sparked outrage among civilians, and the government of the United States was forced to respond. In October, 1911, in the aftermath of the fire, New York State passed the Sullivan-Hoey Fire Prevention Law, requiring that factory owners install sprinkler systems….New York also set up the Factory Investigating Commission… and overhauled or enacted around three dozen laws dealing with factory...
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...left,” (Marrin 114). This terrible thought went through many young women’s, men’s, and even little girl’s heads as the flames grew and grew when three floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company were on fire on March 25, 1911. Burning clothes fell on people’s heads due to the kerosene that was everywhere in the factory (Lieurance 12). The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire was one of the most eventful and influential in New York’s and America’s history. The fire occurred on the top three floors of the ten story Asch Building, which was supposedly fireproof on the outside, but on the inside, not so much. Although devastating, The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire positively influenced and changed many labor laws and fire safety regulations, making working conditions safer and more fair for future generations. Many immigrants coming to America in the early 1900s came for a better life. Getting a job at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company was highly desired due to the nice building in which the factory was located (Zwonitzer). Most immigrants, even those as young as 14, worked to earn money to support their families in the new country (Zwonitzer). Once the immigrants arrived in America they started...
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...their employees safe. In the book The Triangle Fire: A Brief History with Documents, A series of documents explain the disaster that happened at the Triangle Waist Company in New York City. The disaster became known around the country and started a revolution of safety hazards for work. The fire was significant because of the cause of the fire, the irresponsible employers, what the media wrote about it, and how the families of the deceased were compensated. On March 25, 1911, a fire occurred at a shirt factory and climbed the 10 story building. The fire might have been caused by the “sparks from the motors” (242). There is no direct proof what might have caused the fire, but it is likely that the recent sparks ignited nearby cloth and spread throughout the building. Once the chaos was set,...
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...It was near closing time in the Asch Building on March 25, 1911 when the flames began. Within 18 minutes 146 people were dead. The fourth largest industrial disaster in United States history, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire is remembered today as a tragic incident not only because of all the deaths but because of the fact that they were preventable. The death of 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women, would have been preventable if the owners had followed regulatory precautions to ensure that their workers had accessible exit paths and a set plan of action in case of such incidents. From this horrendous inferno arose public outcry for justice and worker safety reform that led to the transformation of the labor code of New York and...
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...progress for the American economy, unions saw this new business model as problematic for the progress of workers’ rights. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, although a tragedy, was the event that showed the necessity of unions to have direct involvement in legislation and policy. Using the extensive resources on the Triangle Fire from the ILR School Kheel Center as well as additional primary sources from databases and newspaper archives, we were able to analyse the impact of labor unions on the law before and after the fire as well as the actual events of the fire. Additionally we used secondary...
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...In the Industrial War there lay a factory called The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory .The factory made blouses for women , that would make the women look tinier around the waist area so they could have more curvature to their body. The Triangle Shirtwaist factory also had a very bad tragedy in the early years of the factory which i will tell you about in a little bit. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was owned by two gentlemen named Max Blanck and Isaac Harris. The men opened the factory in 1900’s. The Factory was located on the corner of Greene St. ,and Washington Pl. in Manhattan.They factory had a majority of women working at the factory and a couple of men here and there. The Homestead Act was an act on how factory owners...
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...In the early 1900s, people who worked in companies, such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, came from different countries, mainly from Europe to New York City. These immigrants knew that by coming to the United States, they had a better chance of finding a job and were in charge of their own future. Meanwhile, men, women, and children, who worked for Triangle, knew they were not being treated fairly. However, even though labor conditions were horrifying, immigrants needed jobs desperately and felt like they had no choice. They had the option to confront their employer about cruelty, such as taking money from their paychecks for unreasonable reasons, but they knew at the end of the day they could be easily replaced. The staff of this factory...
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...Shirtwaist Factory Fire; Was is really an “accident?”- March 25th, 1911 It was a normal day in New York City, workers of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company were going about their business as usual. As the work day came to an end, the bell rings, and workers grab their things and get ready to leave. Eva Harris, local seamstress, smells burning and instinctively shouts “fire!” Workers ring the tenth floor to warn them about the fire, instead of warning the ninth floor as well… workers scatter in panic; the ninth floor was never notified. As the fire approached the ninth floor, factory owner Isaac Harris rushed to them. However the door standing between him and the ninth floor was barricaded with a barrel or motor oil. The call to the fire station...
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