American History Tellers - The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire - Sixteen Minutes | 3

Episode Date: November 6, 2019

Two years after the labor strikes that shook the city of New York, the workers of Triangle factory returned to better wages and lower hours. But when a fire broke out near closing time on a Saturday afternoon, these same workers found themselves swept up in a catastrophe. Some would escape, but many would not. In the weeks that followed, a city mourned and began to wrestle with questions of responsibility. Where did the blame for the tragedy lie? With the city? With the factory owners? Or with the workers themselves? Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's a Saturday in March, 1911. You operate the elevator at the Ash Building, and today you're riding a salesman down to the ground floor. You crank on the doors, and they open up and down, like the jaws of a giant bear yawning. Have a good weekend, sir.

The salesman steps out into the foyer without saying anything back. You don't mind, though. It's just the way people are. The next elevator car over, your colleague Gasper, leans against the mesh cage, his hat tilted back on his head. Today's just been dragging. There's no one here. No one except Triangle. When are they not here? No one else works this late on Saturday. Well, it beats being a carriage driver. Pays better, too. Sure, as long as you're not afraid of heights. I'll take heights over downtown traffic any day. All those cars zooming around? Jeez, scares the horses half to death. That's Gasper's elevator call, but he doesn't move. He just keeps leaning against his cage. Eighth floor's calling it early today.

You laugh. Yeah, what, a whole three minutes? What are you waiting for? I'm waiting for them to queue up a bit. First one there always hits the button. I ride up and then I'm stuck waiting as they all bump into each other. Excuse me, get on. The way I figure it, I wait a little bit down here, let them pile up at the doors. Much faster, much more efficient. But that's your bell. They usually don't hit it twice in a row like that. The two of you look at each other. What's going on? It's on 8 and 10.

Something's not right about this. That's when you smell it. Smoke coming from the elevator shaft. As you pull the cord to get the elevator moving, you can begin to hear something else, too. From eight stories up, the sound of screams. Hey, this is Nick. And this is Jack. And we just launched a brand new podcast called The Best Idea Yet. You may have heard of it. It's all about the untold origin stories of

the products you're obsessed with. Listen to The best idea yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the hosts of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. By March of 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory took up the top three floors of the ten-story Ash Building, just one block from Washington Square Park. Owners Max Blank and Isaac Harris shared their offices on the 10th floor with the shipping department. These two immigrants and entrepreneurs

had endured a lot. They had survived a strike and negotiated a solution with their workers. They were nearly back to full production, and now a fire. The Triangle factory was not equipped to handle the fire. The owners had not installed a sprinkler system or conducted employee fire drills. The entire Ash Building was woefully unprepared. On Saturday, March 25th, the Triangle fire began on the 8th floor at around 4.40 p.m. Every single minute would become a matter of life and death for the approximately 450 garment workers trapped more than 80 feet above the streets of Lower Manhattan. What unfolded was sheer panic and disaster. This is episode 3,

16 minutes. It started in a scrap bin underneath one of the cutting tables on the east side of the building. The eighth floor of the Triangle Factory was a long, open room shaped like a rectangle. Windows ran the length of both sides, offering majestic views of the city below. There were two exits on either end of the floor, a freight elevator and stairs on the Green Street side to the east, two passenger elevators and stairs on the Washington Street side to the west. Roughly 180 people were crammed at tables set across the 90-foot-long factory floor. Workers either operated sewing machines, stitched together blouses,

or fashioned collars and sleeves, or they stood, manning the cutting tables. By 1911, shirtwaists were made from a thin cotton fabric called lawn. At Triangle, each piece of the blouse would be set in a metal-edged pattern, then cutters, who were mostly men, would place the pattern on a stack of lawn. Using long, razor-sharp knives, they'd slice through 16 layers of fabric at once. When they were done, they'd sweep the fabric scraps into large bins directly under their tables. On that Saturday afternoon, a group of cutters were hanging out by the table of Isidore Abramowitz,

just after 4.30. The shop would close soon, and it was at the end of the work week. The men pulled out cigarettes to savor the moment. Smoking was forbidden on the factory floor, but the cutters, considered the lords of the shop floor, shrugged and did it anyway.

The cutting tables were already laid out for next Monday. 150 layers of cotton lawn and tissue paper stacked in small piles halfway across the room. Beneath the tables were dozens of scrap bins filled with thousands of pounds of fabric. Above the tables, thin cotton patterns edged in steel dangled from a set of wires. Around 4.40 p.m., Abramowitz noticed a small fire in his scrap bin. No one would ever figure out how it started, maybe a match or cigarette that hadn't been snuffed out. The bin first smoldered, but then quickly engulfed the highly flammable lawn inside. Then, it jumped over to the next bin.

Abramowitz and other cutters grabbed pails of water and tried to splash the flame out, but the water had no effect. On the far west side of the room, Dinah Lipschitz heard the cry of fire and squinted into the distance. Lipschitz was the eighth floor bookkeeper and a cousin of the owners. She'd been talking to floor manager Samuel Bernstein, who was also related to the owners. Bernstein heard the cry too and dashed across the room. Abramowitz's cutting table was just steps away from the Green Street windows and the exit staircase on the building's east side.

Workers, anxious to enjoy what was left of the beautiful Saturday afternoon, had already been lining up at the Green Street exit to have their bags checked. Once they realized there was a fire, these workers began to panic. Bernstein arrived to find a confused melee. The fire had leapt from the bins to the tabletops covered with fabric. A young freight elevator operator burst into the room with more pails of water, but in his hurry, he left the doors to his elevator open, and the shaft sucked the breeze from eight stories below up to the factory floor. This plume of new oxygen fed the fire, and the flames leapt from the tabletops up to the dozens of dangling patterns of cotton lawn. The floor convulsed into chaos and panic. Scores of workers tried to jam through a doorway

built to accommodate one person at a time. At her accounting table across the room, Dinah Lipschitz kept a clear head. She needed to alert management on the 10th floor. But instead of using the telephone, she reached for a brand new piece of technology, the teleautograph machine. Like a turn-of-the-century fax machine, the teleautograph was wired from floor to floor. It allowed the sender to write a brief message with pen or a pad of paper. The message would be simultaneously transcribed two floors up onto another pad of paper with a mechanized pen. In an extreme situation, Lipschitz reached for the newest technology.

She wrote FIRE with her pen, and then she waited. It was around 4.42 p.m. Across the room, Bernstein would later describe how the fire seemed to jump. The burning cotton patterns fell one by one from their wires, sending light scraps of fiery fabric floating across the room. Smoke billowed into the air, increasing the pressure on the floor until one by one, the windows began to shatter. Men swatted at the flames with their jackets, but it was no use. When the windows broke, air rushed in, sending more fragments of burning fabric floating around the room and igniting whatever they happened to touch.

Someone dragged in a fire hose from the stairwell, but when Bernstein shouted for the hose to be turned on, nothing came out. There was no pressure to carry the water down from the rooftop tanks. Within 30 seconds, the Green Street stairwell was completely blocked by a wall of flame. Bernstein watched in horror as a buttonhole machinist desperately tried to swat out the fire, raising up his pants, then his jacket, finally lighting his hair on fire. Bernstein shouted for everyone to head to the west side of the room, towards the Washington Place stairs and the two passenger elevators. It was now 4.45 p.m.

Dinah Lipschitz had waited long enough. She picked up the phone and frantically dialed the 10th floor. The switchboard operator, Mary Alter, answered. Lipschitz shouted fire into the receiver and then promptly the line went dead. Had Alter even heard her? Lipschitz tried to call the 9th floor, but she couldn't get an answer. Maybe she had warned the 10th floor, but how would she warn the 9th? Imagine you're a rookie fireman in New York City, stationed with Company 18. The station house is on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, not too far from where you live. At 4.45 p.m., a call comes in.

There's a fire in the Ash Building. You climb into the back of the large metal buggy engine, and another fireman whips the horses into action. You're going so fast, you almost miss the turn onto Green Street. You make it here in just two minutes. You jump down from the buggy. There's people everywhere, standing around, gawking. Step aside, step aside, excuse me. I need you to move.

You see Fire Chief Wirth striding towards you. We've got to get those hoses going. Tap into the city line. Yes, sir. You spring into action, uncoiling the fire hose and dragging it to a hydrant. You're so busy, you hadn't really taken in your surroundings. But when you look up, you realize this fire is different. It's burning on the eighth floor. The window trim and sashes are on fire, sending flames into windows on the floors above.

It must be 80, maybe 90 feet up. You can see people up there, out on the ledge. Another fireman from your company ties off the hose to the hydrant. I think there's going to be a problem with the ladders. Yeah, we got a lot of problems. Help me with this damn hose. No, look up there. There are people up there.

Yeah, I see them. They're putting the ladders up now. You start to run some numbers in your head, but they're not making sense. The other fireman snaps at you. Train the hoses toward the windows. Your hose fills with water, shooting out in a steady stream. Nearby, firemen crank the ladders higher and higher, but around the sixth floor of the building, they shudder to a stop. They don't build ladders longer than 50 feet.

The other fireman's expression is grim. Just keep the hose on the windows, and I'll try and stop them from jumping. On the Triangle factory's 10th floor, about 60 workers were packing up finished blouses for shipping. Max Blank and Isaac Harris had large, walled-off suites on the west side of the floor. That afternoon, Mary Alter was running the 10th floor switchboard after another employee called in sick. When Lipschitz called and told her there was a fire, Alter abruptly left the switchboard and ran to find Max Blank.

She felt such a sense of urgency that she left her phone dangling off its hook, effectively shutting down the system for the entire factory. It was 4.42 p.m. Someone pulled the fire alarm and the bells started clanging. Mary Alter burst into the shipping department to find Isaac Harris, who was barking orders. An air shaft dividing the north side of the factory and the next building over, already filled with flames and heat. Just like a chimney, the air shaft pulled the fire from the lower floor upwards. Flames whooshed through windows on the 10th floor, igniting packing boxes and stacks of linen. Isaac Harris frantically rang for the passenger elevators and ordered his panic employees

inside. The packed elevators traveled down to the street, released its passengers, then zoomed back up to the 10th, bypassing the 8th and 9th floors. Though he didn't know it, Harris had made a lucky decision picking the Washington Street elevators. The Green Street freight elevator was already out of commission. Harris's decision might also have been reflexive because the two passenger elevators on the Washington Place side were used by customers and management only, never by regular employees. While Isaac Harris had swallowed his panic and taken charge, his partner, the gruff, boisterous Max Blank, stood terrified and frozen with fear, gripping his daughters, Henrietta and

Mildred, at his side. They had come to visit the factory that afternoon to later go on a shopping excursion with their father. Meanwhile, Samuel Bernstein, the floor manager, forced his way from the eighth floor up through the stairwell to the shipping department on the tenth floor. He wanted to warn the ninth floor, but the heat on the stairwell kept him from getting the door open. But through the door's small glass window, he saw the ninth floor was already on fire. At that moment, only Bernstein knew how bad things really were. The only way out was up to the roof one story above.

To get there, the workers had to brace themselves for a terrifying run up the Green Street stairwell, which was already choked by flame and smoke. Coughing and crying, the workers dashed up the stairwell, covering their mouths, some of them wrapping their hair in cotton fabric. Flames licked at Mary Alter's skirt through the windows of the stairwell. The heat was incredibly intense, blowing right into their faces. Finally, dozens of workers emerged onto the roof. To the fresh, open sky and wind-whipped spring breeze, everyone could breathe again. But their elation quickly passed when they realized there was nowhere left to go.

The pavement was 130 feet below, above them and stretching out in all directions, a clear and taunting sky. Away from the fire, even in the open air, they once again found themselves trapped. The ledge of the next building over was too high to reach, and the fire was rising. Richard Bandler revolutionized the world of self-help all thanks to an approach he developed called neuro-linguistic programming. Even though NLP worked for some, its methods have been criticized for being dangerous in the wrong hands. Throw in Richard's dark past as a cocaine addict and murder suspect, and you can't help but wonder what his true intentions were. I'm Saatchi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the hosts of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away. We recently dove into the story of the godfather of modern mental manipulation, Richard

Bandler, whose methods inspired some of the most toxic and criminal self-help movements of the last two decades. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Scamfluencers and more Exhibit C true crime shows like Morbid and Kill List early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Check out Exhibit C in the Wondery app for all your true crime listening. Now streaming. Welcome to Buy It Now, the show where aspiring entrepreneurs get the opportunity of a lifetime. I wouldn't be chasing it if I didn't believe that the world needs this product. In each episode, the entrepreneurs get 90 seconds

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You are the embodiment of what an American entrepreneur is. Oh, my God. Are we excited for this moment? Ah! I cannot believe it. Woo! Buy It Now. Stream free on Freeview and Prime Video. Imagine you're a law student at New York University.

You don't especially want to take Professor Sommer's class because it meets every Saturday afternoon. But there was an open space and you needed the credits. Besides, Professor Sommer is a great teacher. He has a genial way about him that makes an otherwise dry lecture go by in a flash.

You even heard a rumor that he used to be a sheriff. With his height, red hair, and warm but take-charge manner, you can kind of see it. As the professor is getting into the heart of his lecture, you hear sirens approaching the university building. Not one or two, but a bleating chorus. Other students at their desks crane to see out the window. The sirens now sound like they're right next to the building. Gentlemen, I believe we have an intrusion of some kind.

This prompts some chuckles, but you're looking out the classroom window. Sir, there's a whole lot of smoke. Professor Sommers runs over and looks, too. That's a factory building. Oh, God, it's full of people. Everyone, go to the roof, now! You don't quite understand, but you obey.

You and your classmates leave behind your books and belongings and hurry upstairs. Outside, on the ledge, you can see people climbing out onto the roof of the adjoining building, 15 feet below. They're coughing and swatting their clothes. You're horrified as one man staggers out almost to the far edge of the roof below, so close you're afraid he'll stumble over. We've got to do something. The fireman's ladders can't reach them. There's nowhere for them to go. There's a ladder in one of the hall closets somewhere. Someone go find it. One of the students runs back down to check the hallway. Then you spot something over in the far corner of your building's roof. Two ladders propped against some old paint buckets.

For the factory workers 15 feet below, those ladders might be just the ticket they need to climb off the roof and onto your building. Hey, quick, give me a hand. Every Triangle employee from the 10th floor who managed to make it to the roof would climb those ladders to safety on top of the NYU building. It was a matter of bravery and luck. In a small way, the workers of the 8th floor were lucky too. Once the fire broke out, they were able to ride elevators to safety or brave the fiery Green Street stairs down to the

street. But there would be almost no luck at all for the women trapped on the ninth floor. The bell rang for quitting time. A young sewing machine operator named Kate Alterman had just finished her day and was in the dressing rooms to change. She exchanged gossip and pleasantries with Margaret Schwartz, another young machine operator. Both women were in their late teens or early twenties. There had been talk of dancing that evening, all the rage on the Lower East Side. As Altman walked back out to the ninth floor, she was immediately thrust without warning into chaos.

Smoke drifted up through the floor radiators. Women were shouting and rushing past her. It was 4.45 p.m. Three minutes after the 10th floor caught fire and five minutes after the 8th floor had been alerted. The 9th floor would be the last to know there was a fire. That floor was devoted entirely to sewing, and most of the space was taken up by tables where about 250 employees worked.

Wooden tables were piled with highly flammable shirtwaist material. Everything afire needed to grow at terrifying speed. There was one narrow lane of free space that ran east to west along a line of small windows that looked out over the air shaft. Altman saw panicked women climbing over the rows of sewing machine tables,

forcing their way towards the Green Street stairwell on the east side of the building. They ran for that exit because they were familiar with it. Many didn't even know about the Washington Street stairs on the west side of the building. The women who forced their way to the east side of the floor were immediately confronted by an inferno. Charged with pressurized air from below, the fire jumped up through the Green Street stairwell, flames licking through the windows, and an unbearable heat blasting into the room. With every passing minute, the fire circled tighter around the workers on the ninth floor. Fire caught the edges of the workers' shirt cuffs, skirt hems, and the tips of their hair.

They screamed and shoved each other, tripping over one another as they rushed through the blinding smoke towards any exit they could find. Kate Alterman and Margaret Schwartz rushed to the passenger elevators and the Washington Place stairwell, but the stairwell door was locked. A few men tried to kick the door open, but it wouldn't budge,

and no one could find a key. Terrified by the sounds of bursting glass and screams and the horrible groan of burning timbers, workers piled up against the exit door that wouldn't give. Five minutes ago, 20-year-old Anna Gullo, a forewoman, had been distributing pay envelopes. Now she was trapped in a crush of women by the locked Washington Place door.

Somehow, she managed to shoulder her way free. She tried to open a nearby window, but it was stuck. Smas she managed to shoulder her way free. She tried to open a nearby window, but it was stuck. Smashing the glass with her hand, Anna gulped lungfuls of fresh air. Behind her, the tops of sewing machines were beginning to melt. Far below her, people moved around like ants. There were fire engines. Tiny firemen waved their arms at her. She made the sign of the cross and climbed onto the window ledge. Her mind raced as she contemplated jumping. But she couldn't do it.

She would later say she didn't have the courage to jump. Nearby, Kate Alterman made a quick decision. She headed for a group of women all the way across the room towards the Green Street exit. She felt someone pulling at her dress as if to hold her back and blindly kicked at them with her foot. It may or may not have been Margaret Schwartz, who called out, my God, I am lost, as flames caught her hair and then engulfed her. Altman, though, kept moving, heading toward the stairs and the roof. Mary Buccelli had worked at Triangle for two years.

She knew there was a fire escape, and she made her way towards it. She pushed and kicked and knocked people down who were, in turn, pushing and kicking her. At a moment like that, she would later explain, there is big confusion. You see a multitude of things, but you can't distinguish anything.

I was throwing them down. I was only looking for my own life. Nearly every aspect of the fire escape's design was flawed. It was built along the wall of the air shaft where the flames were rising. The fire escape was rickety and narrow. More importantly, it didn't even empty onto the street. Instead, it led to a glass skylight above the second floor.

As more and more workers climbed onto the fire escape, the stairs groaned. Then the fire escape wrenched away from the wall. The owner of the hat factory next door watched as the fire escape, crammed with screaming workers, plunged down story after story, finally crashing through the skylight. I hope, he said, I never hear anything like that again. Gaspar Montialo and Joseph Zito were the passenger elevator operators that afternoon in the Ash Building. When the bells to their cars began to ring incessantly,

they both began a series of harrowing rescue missions. Zito ferried workers from the eighth floor to the ground floor, before racing up to the tenth. His elevator car had no ceiling, and rode just a few feet away from Mortialo's. Zito could hear the screams echoing down the shaft as, again and again, his car rose to the upper floors and descended back again to the street with survivors.

His last trips were to the ninth floor. As soon as the doors opened, workers fought their way on. The elevators could hold about a dozen people. On all of his trips, Zito's elevator carried twice that. By 4.51 p.m., the fire had been burning for 11 minutes,

but workers on the ninth floor had only known about the fire for six. The elevators were the last refuge for women trying to escape. Some were so desperate they jumped down the elevator shaft. Some landed on top of the elevator cars, crushing the passengers already jammed inside. Some grabbed for the elevator cables, burning the skin off their hands. Some, their clothes already on fire, fell into the open elevator shaft and missed the cars entirely, falling past like streaks of flame. Zito and Mortiello's elevators rescued roughly 150 people, but as the fire grew, they had to stop.

Heat had warped the rails of their elevator cars. Fanny Lanzer, a 21-year-old forewoman, managed to keep her wits during the panic. She helped younger girls to the elevator. She shooed them towards the Green Street exit and told them to head for the roof. Finally, she watched the last elevator descend. She must have guessed it would not return. And with nowhere else to go, she made her way towards the open windows. Dazed and hysterical, the survivors spilled out onto the sidewalks in front of the Ash Building.

What they discovered was a hellish sight. Fire engines clotted the landscape, spraying water against the walls. Fully extended ladders hovered uselessly around the sixth-floor window line. Police had cordoned off both streets. Hundreds of onlookers gaped upwards, pointing and shouting and crying out. There were still people way up there in the windows of the Ash Building. Firemen extended wide cloth nets and held them open. A horse-drawn ambulance drove right onto the sidewalk. It was thought perhaps the roof of the ambulance might help break a fall. Fire chief Wirth's men waved their arms,

shouting not to jump, but high atop the ash building, the sights of nets and people waving might have seemed like instructions. The first person stepped off the ledge around 4.50 p.m., then another and another. Their bodies crashed right through the useless nets. People jumped alone. They jumped together, holding hands. Some were on fire as they fell.

Bodies piled on the streets in charred, misshapen forms. Over 50 people chose to step off the ledge rather than burn alive inside the triangle factory. One young woman took her purse and opened it, inexplicably flinging the coins into the air before she jumped. A young man in a hat stood on the ledge, his hand extended, helping one young woman and then another step into thin air as if he were helping the ladies into a streetcar. When a third woman emerged, they embraced and kissed each other. Then he held her out and dropped her, stepping off the ledge himself just after. Around 4.56 p.m., 16 minutes after the fire began, the last person jumped. Both police and firemen charged up the

stairs of the burning building, helping some of the workers to safety. They kicked open doors where they could, but the heat of the fire was too strong. Firemen had begun tackling the blaze on the eighth floor, but by the time they were able to get to the ninth, it was too late. The Mercer Street police, the same police force that 15 months ago had been arresting and beating triangle strikers,

were stunned by the pile of corpses on the street and the ones that were being lowered down by firemen from above. Now in the gathering darkness, a feeling of despair and helplessness crept over everyone. There was nothing else that could be done. It would take many days to determine how many people had been working that day and how many people had perished. Names of the victims would be reported incorrectly in a rush to print newspapers. There were approximately 450 people who passed through the Triangle Building on March 11th. The number of dead would eventually settle at 146. But for the grieving relatives, fighting through confusion and anguish, The nightmare was just beginning.

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A ballistic missile threat has been detected inbound to your area. Your phone buzzes and you look down to find this alert. What do you do next? Maybe you're at the grocery store. Or maybe you're with your secret lover. Or maybe you're robbing a bank. Based on the real-life false alarm that terrified Hawaii in 2018, Incoming, a brand-new fiction podcast exclusively on Wondery Plus,

follows the journey of a variety of characters as they confront the unimaginable. The missiles are coming. What am I supposed to do? Featuring incredible performances from Tracy Letts, Mary Lou Henner, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, Paul Edelstein, and many, many more, Incoming is a hilariously thrilling podcast that will leave you wondering, how would you spend your last few minutes on Earth? You can binge Incoming exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+, in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. These friends and family, in their grief, knew where to go, because in 1904, the ferryboat Slocum had caught fire and sank, killing over a thousand people. The bodies were brought to

Charity's pier, and soon after, it was rechristened, Misery Lane. On this night, around midnight, the gates to the pier swung open. Those waiting filed in, weeping, peering into the boxes of the dead, looking for a distinguishing feature that might prove to be someone's sister, aunt, or daughter. A specific piece of jewelry. One young woman was identified by the fillings in her teeth, or for the mail workers, perhaps their shoes. One man, Serafino Maltese, identified the body of one of his daughters, but then another. And when he identified his wife, he fainted. All three women had been working at Triangle when the fire broke out.

Clara Lemlech came to Misery Lane as well. The young agitator, whose passionate speech ignited a general strike just two years ago, now fought back tears as she walked past the boxes and boxes of corpses. She was looking for a cousin who worked at Triangle, but Clara's cousin would not be among the dead. For four days, Misery Lane remained open. Police did their best to discourage ghoulish thrill-seekers and pickpockets from joining the lines, but there were just too many.

It is possible also that along with the thieves, city officials might also have been light-fingered. The mother of Antonia Colletti filed a complaint with the coroner's office, stating that her daughter's body was robbed of $1,600 kept sewn into the hem of her skirt. Six years of earnings. The city mourned openly. On April 5th, 100,000 people brought the streets of New York to a standstill. They marched silently in pouring, relentless rain, a parade of black umbrellas. They passed shops and buildings adorned with black bunting.

Another 250,000 New Yorkers stood in solidarity on the sidewalks. Guilt, soul-searching, and anger followed. Mary Dreyer of the WTUL immediately called for an investigation into the fire. Socialite Ann Morgan helped rent out the entire Metropolitan Opera House for a memorial meeting as labor unions, city reform groups, and clergy gathered to try and make sense of their grief. The unions and the Red Cross had both pitched in, forming a relief committee for victims' families. But a greater sense of alarm was growing. Would the tragedy of the Triangle Fire simply fade away and be forgotten,

like the Newark Factory Fire of 1910 or the Slocum disaster of 1904? But notably absent from so many large meetings were city officials. Governor John Dick sent his regrets in a letter, saying the memorial conflicted with the funeral for a city official. Labor leader Rose Schneiderman, who had been instrumental during the Shirtwaist Strike two years before, gave an angry and impassioned speech challenging the city to take action. She said,

This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Public officials have only words of warning, warning that we must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse to back all of their warnings. I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. It is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement. Among those gathered at the Metropolitan Opera House that day was a young woman named Frances Perkins.

At 31, she was the executive secretary of the Consumers League. Her focus was on workplace safety. Friendly and politically shrewd, Perkins had begun to learn her way through the system of graft and political entrenchment in Tammany Hall. She was not intimidated by imposing ward bosses, though they were surely surprised to see a young woman on the other side of their desk as she calmly laid out a platform of progressive ideas. The Consumers League also sent Perkins to the State House to lobby for legislation that had been held up for two years, a 54-hour workweek bill. Perkins soon discovered, though, that Albany politics worked exactly the same way as New York City politics. Tammany Hall controlled it, too.

Over several months, Perkins lobbied to bring the 54-hour bill back to life. Al Smith was the Statehouse's gregarious Democratic majority leader and a Tammany man, but he took a liking to Frances Perkins and her reform bill. Still, the 37-year-old cigar-chomping Smith had to break some bad news. There was no chance the bill would pass, no matter what she did. The cannery companies in New York had no interest in shorter hours for their workers because their fruits and vegetables would spoil. And Smith was right. The 54-hour bill died in committee.

Fresh from these real-life lessons in legislative politics, Frances Perkins returned to New York just days before the Triangle Fire. She was at a friend's apartment across from Washington Square Park when she heard the sirens. She arrived in time to see the bodies falling. As part of her research for the Commerce League, Perkins had been studying details of sprinkler systems and fire escape plans. Now she saw with absolute clarity how the absence of these measures led to a horrific outcome. But just three months later, in June of 1911, something surprising happened. Governor

Dix formed what he called a Factory Investigative Commission to report on unsafe conditions in factories across Manhattan and eight other cities in the Northeast. Frances Perkins was nominated to the commission alongside her friend, Mary Dreyer. If Perkins was worried the commission's investigations were just lip service, she would soon discover otherwise. Since the fire, Tammany leader Charles Murphy had been busy with a bit of political recalculation. This new immigrant working class, which Tammany had mostly ignored,

could be just the vehicle for the Democratic ticket. The tragic fire created just the right moment to shift gears, to move away from the business-as-usual attitude which allowed the fire to happen. Now Tammany would champion the working class, which after all, voted just as often as the business owners and were much more numerous. Murphy was a good listener. He listened to the teachers and shopkeepers when they came to visit. He listened to Congressman Al Smith and Smith's partner in the statehouse, a man named Robert Wagner. Smith and Wagner were both young men, and they were telling Murphy the wind had begun to blow in a different direction, towards progressive reform. Murphy, just rounding out his 53rd year, decided to listen to the younger men.

If there were problems in the workplace, the people of New York should know about them. The Factory Investigative Commission would be a fine way to begin. Imagine it's a sunny morning in 1911. You're nine stories in the air, picking your way through the ashes of what used to be the Triangle Factory. You're working with a man named Barney Flood, one of the chief detectives of New York City. You were worried the smell would be too awful, but Detective Flood reassured you,

it's all gonna be fine. All the bodies have been removed, just ashes now. Consider yourself lucky. In the Lower East Side neighborhood where you live, everyone in every building knows someone who died. A lot of those workers were Jewish, but a lot were Italian, like you. The neighborhoods have finally united around one thing. Grief. 146 dead, and you know you're lucky that you weren't one of them. Detective Flood stamps nearby, searching with a flashlight. You should have been here the day after the fire.

God, I've never seen anything like it. Someone's going to have to pay for this. That's one thing I know for sure. Your shovel strikes a large chunk of metal. You drag a bit more debris away from the object. It's shaped like a door. Hold on, hold on. Hey, let me see that.

The detective bends down and wipes off the edges of the door. In the beam of his flashlight, you can see what he sees. A bolt protruding from a metal casing. Oh, good God, that's it. That's it. You're not sure why he's so excited.

Is this what we're looking for? The detective doesn't answer. Instead, he carefully fiddles with the lock bolt, prying the lock casing away from the door itself. The bolt is shiny and rectangular, but the locking apparatus is singed and dark colored. You see this? See how the bolt isn't burned? Yeah, looks good as new. That's because the bolt was in its casing during the fire. You try to grasp what he's saying as a breeze blows dirt and ashes in your face.

You mean, you mean the door was locked? That is exactly what I mean. The discovery of the clean bolt by an Italian laborer named Giuseppe Savino proved a turning point in the Triangle Fire investigation. Detective Barney Flood returned the next day to a city courthouse where a grand jury had been convened to look into the fire. The evidence Flood presented led to a swift indictment. Days later, Flood and his detectives arrested Max Blank and Isaac Harris at one of their other shirtwaist factories just a few blocks from Triangle.

But despite the arrests, determining who was to blame for the fire was up to District Attorney Charles Whitman and his lead prosecutor, Charles Bostwick. D.A. Whitman was a political man, young and ambitious. He couldn't go after the building commission or the city inspectors, but he could make it personal. And now he had the lock from the factory door. And he had a key witness with an incredible story to tell. Max Blank and Isaac Harris, the Triangle factory owners,

they would be his target. Next week on American History Tellers, the city of New York puts the Triangle owners on trial and as Tammany Hall reconfigures itself, the politics of strikes moves up to the statehouse. From Wondering, this is American History Tellers. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free

on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham for Airship. Sound design by Derek Behrens. This episode is written by George Ducker, edited by Karen Lowe, edited and produced by Jenny Lauer Beckman. Our executive producer is Marshall Louis, created by Hernán López for Wondery. In the Pacific Ocean,

halfway between Peru and New Zealand, lies a tiny volcanic island. It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn and it harboured a deep, dark scandal. There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn once they reach the age of 10 that would still have heard it. It just happens to all of them. I'm journalist Luke Jones, and for almost two years, I've been investigating a shocking story that has left deep scars on generations of women and girls from Pitcairn. When there's nobody watching, nobody going to report it, people will get away with what they can get away with.

In the Pitcairn trials, I'll be uncovering a story of abuse and the fight for justice that has brought a unique, lonely Pacific island to the brink of extinction. Listen to the Pitcairn Trials exclusively on Wondery+. Join Wondery in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.