A Tragic East Side Story

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Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire on March 25, 1911.

New York’s Lower East Side circa 1910: The population density of the neighborhood outnumbered the most crowded sections of Bombay, and the local mortality rate doubled that of the rest of the city. Poverty was everywhere, with men working 70 hours a week in sweatshops and still taking piecework home to continue working on for a few more pennies. Disease was rampant, and there were near epidemics of dysentery, typhoid fever, and tuberculosis.

Joseph Telushkin in his The Golden Land relates an anecdote about Molly Picon, the Yiddish actress who used to tell of how her mother raised ten children in a four-room apartment. “How did she manage?” a friend asked. “She took in boarders,” Molly explained.

The apparel trades were among New York’s major industries even before the waves of Eastern European Jews began arriving. The industry required significant manpower, which explained why the majority of Jewish immigrants housed on Manhattan’s Lower East Side were absorbed into this field. Thus, while the filthy city was abuzz outside with the din of sirens, police whistles, and fire engines all enveloped in a cacophony of noises emanating from the stables, tinsmiths, junk shops, garages, street traffic, and the clatter of people running their errands, inside the sweat shops was a different soundscape – no less assaulting.

The noise of the sewing machines was a relentless discord of mechanical clatter: motor belts churning, arhythmic drubbing, and the staccato clicking of the needles descending and ascending. Overlaying this uproar was the frequent metallic clang of a needle striking a hard surface, the creaking of the wooden floors, the scraping of chairs over the floorboards, and the rare shouts of a worker (most factories prohibited workers from speaking to each other) attempting to be heard over the deafening racket. The relentless noise drowned out any human individuality.

The workers in New York City’s sweatshops labored under draconian and cramped conditions, facing merciless pressure to achieve ever-higher production quotas. According to the Museum of the City of New York, a garment worker in 1905 was expected to sew at a rate twice that of her 1900 counterpart. The factories had scant safety or fire protection, mandated a 65-hour work week, and expected workers to provide their own basic materials such as needles and thread.

Employees, working long hours, were compelled to sew as quickly as possible to earn enough to live on, which led to frequent injuries, such as fingers getting caught and impaled by the sewing machine needle, as well as errors. Payment operated through the “piecework” system corresponding to each individual garment or portion of a garment which they completed. This system, as opposed to a minimum hourly wage, resulted in exploitative conditions, as completed garments could be rejected by employers displeased with the final product.

Little Rose Cohan (Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side) arrived in America to join a father she basically never saw. “When he went away in the morning it was still dark, and when he came home at night the lights in the halls were out. It was after ten o’clock.” As a young teenager, Rose endured a 12- to 14-hour oppressive workday. She wrote about the hectic, chaotic, and frantic atmosphere of the noisy factory where everyone operated the machines like mad, working as fast as they could.

The sweatshop boss would hand her “only two coats at a time to do. When I took them over and as he handed me the new work, he would say quickly and sharply, ‘Hurry!’”

Young Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant Clara Lemlich, who would become a famous labor activist, described in the New York Evening Journal (November 28, 1909) the unsafe conditions and unfair treatment of workers in the factories:

There is just one row of machines that the daylight ever gets to – that is the front row, nearest the window. The girls at all the other rows of machines back in the shops have to work by gaslight, by day as well as by night…The shops are unsanitary – that’s the word that is generally used, but there ought to be a worse one used. Whenever we tear or damage any of the goods we sew on, or whenever it is found damaged after we are through with it, whether we have done it or not, we are charged for the piece and sometimes for a whole yard of the material.

During their long, monotonous, grueling, and dangerous 12- to 14-hour workdays, young Jewish immigrant workers were exposed to hazardous conditions with minimal safety provisions. The constricted and often dank factories were rife with flammable materials, fire escapes were minimal and poorly maintained, and the doors were often locked to prevent theft and unauthorized breaks. Labor practices were exploitative and low wages standard.

The powerful factory owners who wielded significant political and economic influence demanded complete compliance with the existing work conditions and refused to negotiate with their workers; strikers were often fired, blacklisted, or physically intimidated. What could the abused workers do when they were dependent upon the factories for employment?

The workers’ objections were tragically validated by the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire on March 25, 1911, which killed 146 workers. When the fire erupted, workers on the eighth and tenth floors managed to flee, but warnings did not reach the ninth floor in time. There were but two exits: The front one leading to the stairwell had forks of flames and noxious smoke and the heavy iron rear door was locked. The only fire escape buckled under the weight of the seamstresses’ bolting from the inferno. According to Rose Freedman (quoted in Telushkin’s book), the last survivor of the blaze (who died in 2001 and had escaped by climbing to the upper floor), “The executives, with a couple of steps, could have opened the door.”

Many workers waited near the windows to be rescued, but neither the ladders nor the water gushing from the fire trucks could reach past the seventh floor. Thus, many of the workers – girls aged 14 to 23 – leapt to their death rather than being burned alive.

The Triangle Shirtwaist fire highlighted the catastrophic neglect that put profit and efficiency before human lives. The fire drew attention to the plight of the sweatshop employees that ultimately led to legislation ensuring humane and safe working provisions.