"We were all crying," she recalls, on a recording kept in the archives of the Kheel Center at Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. She remembers that after she made her way down to the street, she looked back up to the top of the building, engulfed in flames. Pauline Pepe, a 19-year-old who lived in New York's Little Italy, survived the fire. It was their only way to escape the flames - doors were locked to prevent theft, the building's single fire escape collapsed, and after several trips to rescue workers, the elevator broke down. Scores of workers jumped from the eighth and ninth floors of the 10-story building to their deaths. Most of the people who perished in the fire were Jewish or Italian-American women - and several of the victims had been in the U.S. Twenty-two of the fire's victims were laid to rest at Mount Richmond, and the Hebrew Free Burial Association still uses the cemetery to inter Jews who cannot pay for their burial. On a recent morning, a small group of men and women met to recite the Jewish mourner's prayer for Triangle workers buried in the Mount Richmond Cemetery on Staten Island. On the 100th anniversary of the tragedy, people around the country are remembering the victims, and the labor legacy they inspired. The deaths of 146 garment workers in New York City - most of them young, immigrant women - led to legislative reforms on a national level and spurred the growth of organized labor. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire on March 25, 1911, remains one of the greatest workplace tragedies in American history.
On March 25, 1911, the New York City building caught fire, and 146 workers lost their lives in one the country's worst workplace tragedies. One hundred forty-six of them would not return home that afternoon.Young Laborers: Most of the garment workers in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory were young, immigrant women. This is the equivalent of $172 to $295 a week in contemporary currency, or $3.30 to $5.70 per hour. At the Triangle Factory, workers earned between $7 and $12 a week for their 52 hours of work. It was a Saturday-the workweek was nine hours a day on weekdays plus seven hours on Saturdays. One hundred and six years ago today, they set off to the factory, to spend the next seven hours sewing and cutting. A shirtwaist at that time was not a dress but a blouse: It buttoned down the front, and when worn with a long plain skirt, formed the uniform of the modern woman. They worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, at 23–29 Washington Place, a building that is now part of NYU. So many of them were school age but too impoverished to even dream of attending. Maybe in their off hours, they liked listening to music, or dancing, or, if they could get hold of a copy, leafing through Vogue. They were the daughters of immigrant families, mainly from Italy and Eastern Europe.
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