The Triangle Fire

In an era of a rising unionization, The Triangle Fire, calligraphy written my Leon Stein, describes one of the worst industrial disasters in the nation’s history that ended up killing 146 of the 500 Triangle Shirtwaist Company employees, which happened to be female immigrant workers. These immigrants came to the United States with their families in search for a better life. Instead they found themselves working long hours only to receive low wages along with horrendous working circumstances with very little freedom.

This thrilling event happened in New York on the late afternoon of March 25, 1911. The tendentious Max Blank and Isaac Harris owned the top three floors in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in the Asch Building. Most of the workers were Italian and European Jewish woman immigrants. It was near closing time for the young workers until that calm afternoon quickly turned into a frightening moment for everyone. At this moment people’s lives were flipped upside down forever when the fire broke out on the eighth floor in the Asch Building. To this day, there is no set cause as to why the fire started. All they have is that people heard an explosion that came from the eighth floor followed by bundles of clothes falling from the sky. The people soon noticed that not only were there bundle of clothes falling but those ‘bundles of clothes’ were actually some of the young workers jumping and falling from the window seals. The outburst of the fire was horrible, woman were falling through the ceiling while other taking their lives by jumping out the windows. Female workers found themselves in trouble when they tried to open the ninth floor doors to the Washington Place stairs but the doors appeared to be locked. On the other ...

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...event the immigrant workers from taking breaks. They also had younger workers at the age of 14/15 by having child labor matching up to the child labor back in the Gilded Age. The Asch building also relates to hundreds of other industrial areas that were treated cruelly and unfairly. Many strikes also happened throughout the gilded age just as the Ladies' Waist and Dress Makers' Union, Local No. 25 of the ILGWU did. An example from the gilded age would be the first labor strike, the railroad strike of 1877, where they refused to work due to cut wages. Hundreds of people died in the railroad strike. Another example is the Haymarket riot, where they demanded an eight-hour workday where this too had hundreds of people die. In peroration, the 19th and 20th century industrial labor was a crucial time in history. Many strikes, deaths, and under paid immigrants occurred.