NEW YORK’S BIG FIRE.

Evening Star, Issue 14574, 24 May 1911, Page 2

NEW YORK’S BIG FIRE.

HOW THE TEN-STOREY FACTORY WAS BURNT.. ; . /The English mail just to ipind’brings : Wditioual details of the terrible tire tragedy which occurred at a New York sky-scraper on Saturday, March , 25, brief particulars of which were given at the time by cable. Jt was in this fire that 155 girls lost their lives. The New York correspondent of the London ‘ Daily Telegraph,’ writing to that journal on Sunday, says:— Washington place and Green© street, where this latest horror, unexampled in the American metropolis since the Brooklyn Theatre was burnt, (took place, Is a district as populous as Cheapsido (London), and although the factory was dignified by tho name of sky-scraper, it was only ten storeys high, a plainfeatured, triangular, corner building, which had been officially inspected and approved only ten days ago as “fireproof.” Seven hundred workers, mostly young Italians, Germans, and Russians, all employed as sowing machinists, were —Caught as in a Trap—when tho flames burst out on the eighth floor and spread with murderous speed from top to basement. How the fire originated nobody knows, but within a few minutes of five o’clock, which must have been very shortlv after the time the affair started, girls, some of them human torches, were jumping from the window ledges. There was a veritable * r “ rain of bodies from tho eighth, ninth, and tenth storeys to the street. Newspaper representatives are not allowed /to go within the fire lines in America, but they got very near. My own clothes were saturated with water, and the Weather was cold, but tho fascination of that fixe, and the blind, vain desire Which possessed everyone within tho neighborhood to render help, if help were only possible, held one chained to the scene. —The Earlier Scenes.— In one place nets were held out by strong hands to catch the bodies, but were torn asunder by the burden of their human freight, and the remains were piled up high on the pavement, thirty or forty girls in a batch. I looked up and saw on the parapet ten storeys above a frightened girl of about nineteen, trying to hold back another girl much younger. The latter shrieked and twisted, and, tortured by fear and pain, got away from the elder girl, and a moment later was hurling towards tho street. Her body turned completely over several times in the mad descent. That was only one incident out of scores witnessed by hundreds of people, ami I could fill a page with others equally awful. —Toll of the Dead.— The dead were employed by the Triangle Blouse Company, of which Max Blanck and Isaac Harris arc proprietors. The ten-storey building, ■ owned by Joseph Aseh, of South Norwalk, Connecticut, had 1,500 sewing machines on three of its floors, and one fire-escape, which ran down into tho courtyard. After the fire broke nut two lifts made fifteen journeys, coming down with a dozen persons each time, hut when the elevators ceased running the girls crowded at the top of the building, and cither fell or were pushed down both shafts. Theii bodies were piled up on the top of the lift-cage. Twenty-five girls were found dead in a shaft. —Firemen at Murk.— Within a few minutes after the first cry of fire had been yelled on the eighth floor of the building, fifty-three bodies were lying half-dressed on the pavement, with blouses and skirts in tatters, showing'that they had been torn in tho panic within the place before the girls got to the windows to jump to death. Inside the building the firemen believed shore were still dozens upon dozens of 1 girls and men, and they wasted no time upon those whom at a glance they knew 1 to be dead. It was more than an hour 1 and a-half before the firemen could enter' the floor wherh the fire started, tiro- 'ghth, and they came back then 1 wi-.i the word that a quick survey : showed, according to Fire Chief Crofcer, ! about fifty dead bodies ou that floor alone. Among those on the top floor ( of the building when tho fire broke out 1 were Air Blanck, one of the proprietors, 1 with his two children and a governess. ‘ Mr Blanck had just ordered a taxicab J to send his children and the governess home when the fire was discovered. All ' of them got out safely. Dozens of girls 1 crawled outside tho windows and ( crowded upon the foot-wide terra-cotta ■ ledge which ran along the window sills \ of the ninth floor. First one girl jumped, then another, and another, and | another. Somo of them fell true and ; straight as a plummet. Most of them 1 turned many times, shrieking as they 6 fell. One girl deliberately took her hat i and laid it on the ledge, before she f leaped. _ The greater number of the 1 victims jumped from the east, side of ‘ the corner building. To the spectators 1 the fire seemed to last for hours, but c it was really f

—All Over in Half an Hour, — and was practically confined to the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors. The ages of the victims mostly ranged from sixteen to twenty-three, but somo were finite old women. Most of them could not speak English, and belonged to a class of emigrants who had recently arrived from Europe. Many, despite, their youth, were the main support of their families, and scores of the Italian girls in their teens were married, some having children. There is just one fire escape in the building; that is an inside tire escape, and it seems to have been useless from the first. The building really was fireproof, and at the close showed hardly a sign of damage, but its contents were highly inflammable and unprotected. A thirteen-year-old girl hung for three minutes by her finger tips to the sill of a tenth-storey window. A tongue of flame licked her fingers, and she dropped. Another girl threw her pocketbook, then her hat, and then her furs from a tenth-floor window, and a moment later her body came whirling after them. At-a ninthfloor window n mmi end wo’""n peared. She kissed the man, who then hurled her to the street, a;.d jt;;, , , himself. Both were killed. A girl on the eighth floor leaped for the firemen’s ladder, which reached only to the sixth floor. She missed it, struck the edge of the life net, and was picked up with her back broken. From ono window a girl of a be at thirteen years, a woman, a man, and two women with their arms about one another threw themselves to the ground in rapid succession. The Uttle girl was whirled to the hospital in an automobile still breathing, but she arrived dead. One girl jumped into a horse blanket held by firemen and policemen. The blanket ripped like cheesecloth. Another dropped into a tarpaulin held by three men, but her weight tore it from their grasp, and she struck the street, breaking almost every bone in her body. —A Hero of the Fire.— One man ran from window to window, picked up girls bodily, and dropped them to the pavement. Either ho thought nets were there to catch them or he believed that this was the easiest way. And when ho dropped the last girl within his reach he climbed on to the sill and jumped straight out, with his hand raised as a bridge jumper holds his arm upward to balance himself. He was one of the heroes of the fire, thinking of others’ safety first and of his own last. Other instances of heroism came to light, and probably there were many others of which wo shall never know. Two little girls, sisters, jumped hand in hand. They became separated in their flight, but reached tho ground at the same moment, both dead. About 200 employees, mostly women, had in the meantime climbed to the roof of the buildirig, crazy with fright. Across a small court at the back of the edifice are tho rear windows of the New York University Law School. At the first cry from the burning factory two law students,' Charles Kremer and Elias Kanter, led a party of students to. the no! of the Law School building, which

is a storey higher than the one where the fife occurred. - Kanter, Kremor, and the other students dragged two short, ladders to the top of the Law School, and by making a sort of extension ladder of then! Kromer scrambled down on to the roof of tho burning building, and tried to get the girls into an orderly line, and send them u - the ladders to where his school-fellows were waiting to drag them to safety. Tho students took fully 150 women,'girls, and men away from the blazing structure in this way. At the other end of tho roof from tho students’, ladders about fifty men and women were fighting with one anotheg to climb about five feet from tho roof of their own building to tho roof of the adjoining house at Wavprley place and'Greene street. The students say the men hit and kicked the women and girls for a chance to climb to the slightly higher roof and safety. —Student’s Brave Deed.— Mr Kromer, when tho last of the group nearest tho Law School had been saved, swarmed down the ladder to the top of tho Asch buildifig, and went down the roof scuttle through tho smoke to the top floor. He cornel see only one girl, a dark Neapolitan, with streaming eyes, who ran shrieking towards him with her hair burning. She had come up from the. floor beneath, and as she reached Kremor she fainted in his arms. Kromer also was a hero, and took no account of his own safety. Ho smothered the sparks in tho girl’s hair with his hands, and then, lifting her bodily, tried to carry her up the narrow ladder to tho roof. But because she was unconscious ho had to wrap long strands of her hair around his hand and drag her to fresh air in that way. , His friend Kanter helped him to get the girl up the ladder to the Law School roof, and tho two students, after she had boon revived, got a taxicab for her, and sent her home. —Recovering tho Bodies.—

When tho bodies had boon covered with tarpaulins the police crossed again to the pavements under tho windows from which the girls jumped, and picked up the cheap belongings which the poor creatures had clutched when they ran to the window-sills, including many leather handbags, broken combs, and hair ribbons, and parts of clothing that had been torn olf in the wild panic on the floors above. In the gutter, full of water, a policeman found a rosary, the police piled all these scraps with the bodies, and then began the task of placing the remains in pine coffins. Police-surgeons examined them. Ono girl who was at first thought to be dead was laid in a coffin, and then uttered a cry. She was taken out and placed in an ambulance. Some of tho articles found will serve to identify the crushed bodies, which would otherwise escape recognition. A locket picked up had initials. “Does anyone know the owner of a locket with tho monogram • G.S. asked a policeman. Nobody knew then, but now somebody knows, because all night relatives were engaged in searching for their dead amongst tho rows of poor, disfigured, charred remains exhibited at tho mortuary. —Girl Becomes Insane.—

AVhile the killed were being carried away a hatless girl, about twenty years old, came shrieking out of nowhere up to the piles of bodies. There was no time to ask her name or whether she had been inside the building. Tho surgeons all around closed upon her, and dragged her to an ambulance. She bit and screamed every foot of the way, but they forced her on to the ambulance cot, and took her to the hospital. She was a machinist, whose brain had been unbalanced by her terrible experiences. Long after the fire was out till hung around the building. I remained until midnight, and then walked to the morgue. The last time I was there was on the occasion of the General Slocum steamer disaster. The worst incidents of that unexampled calamity were matched by yesterday’s experience. Thou, as yesterday, there was panic and fright, but tho children in most instances died by drowning, and not by fire. Before yesterday I had seen death in many terrible shapes, and heaps of "dead —dead dervishes, dead floors, dead children, and tho Slocum dead—but for sheer horror and pathos that heap of dead girls I saw yesterday ou the pavement, with broken bodies and tattered clothes, with a little girl falling from the top of the heap ledge by ledge until her final roll into the gutter, was without parallel.. As, a mere blaze, you have fires in London every day more spectacular than that of yesterday’s. Technically speaking, that conflagration was of what American firemen call the “ mushroom ” category. In all so-called fireproof buildings the flames of tho woodwork fittings and of inflammable goods stored inside the structure shoot upward to the top floor and then “mushroom”—i.e., spread out like a mushroom along the top ceiling, and creep back downward along tho four inside walls. The result is a furnace inside tho edifice, with little evidence, flame or smoko, to be seen from tho street until the fire is far advanced.

—Extraordinary Escape.— About 9 p.tn., when tho flames had long been extinguished and all the dead removed, a man in the sub-cellar of the factory was heard crying for help. Down through the collar and into the sub-cellar climbed Firemen Wolff, Levey, and Wouschcr, who had been detailed to go to the rescue. Tho lower chamber reeked with gas, and water was still dripping from the flooded floors above, but the throe firemen kept on, guided by the man’s voice, until they found him. Ho was standing in 4ft of water, right beneath one of the lift cars, and hanging to the safety clutch of tho car with both hands. He had expected that in a few minutes the water would be over his bond, but ho nroposed to cling there until his last breath was gone. This man was so weak from fright and exposure that he had to be taken out in tho firemen’s arms. He was Herman Miscber, a cutter, who was working on tho eighth floor when he heard tho shout of “Fire!” He shouted “Follow me!” and ran to the stairway. In the hall he encountred the flames, so he raced nnstatrs. . At the tenth floor, he said, tho lift-shaft door was open, so ho jumped in, grabbed the lift cable, and slid down to tho collar. He said three women came down the cable behind him, but no trace of them could be found. Mischer was taken to the hospital, as his face and hands were cut, and he was weak from fright. In a dozen cases the searchers found envelopes containing the week’s wages concealed in tho girls’ stockings. Most of tho victims wore Italians, and mourning services were held by the Italians in all their churches. If the fire had occurred ten minutes later all would probably have been saved, because the wages had boon paid, and the week’s work was ended.