The Dark Side of the Garment Industry

On March 25, 1911, William Gunn Shepherd was walking through Manhattan’s Washington Square when he saw smoke coming from a building on Greene Street. The top floors of the Asch Building, which housed the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, were engulfed in flames. Some of the company’s workers, Jewish and Italian immigrants, most of them young women, were screaming at the windows. Outside the building, firefighters arrived but found their ladders would not reach the 7th floor. The girls were trapped inside: The owners, concerned about the pilfering of fabric, had locked the doors from the outside.

“They were burning to death in the windows,” recounted Shepherd, a reporter for the United Press. “One by one the window jambs broke. Down came the bodies in a shower, burning, smoking, flaming bodies, with disheveled hair trailing upward. These torches, suffering ones, fell inertly.”

The Triangle Fire left 146 workers dead, bringing to light the dark side of New York’s booming garment industry. Fueled by immigrants who came off boats through Ellis Island into the Lower East Side looking for work, the neighborhood between Fifth and Ninth Avenues and from 34th to 42nd Streets had become an economic powerhouse. By 1880 New York was producing more garments than all its urban competitors combined. By the turn of the century, clothing manufacturing was the city’s top business. And 10 years later, 70 percent of all women’s clothes in the United States—and 40 percent of men’s—were made in the city.

But conditions for many were brutal, wages barely enough to support families. The Triangle Fire rallied public opinion: Tammany Hall politicians were replaced by reformers who pushed for stricter fire codes. Labor unions, once laboratories for radical politics, successfully championed the plight of sweatshop workers. Another eyewitness to the fire, a wealthy Bostonian in New York attending graduate school, later became the first woman to hold a cabinet position. Appointed as labor secretary by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Frances Perkins often said that the Triangle Fire was “the day the New Deal began.”—Johanna Neuman

Click here to read about Jews in the fashion industry.