Hellraisers Journal – Thursday December 28, 1911 Blanck and Harris Found “Not Guilty” in Connection with Triangle Fire Deaths
-Verdict was delivered at 4:46 p. m., December 27th.
From the New York Tribune of December 28, 1911:
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David Weiner, whose sister, Rosie, perished in the fire, collapses after confronting Blanck and Harris.
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The wives of the two defendants in the Triangle fire trial threw their arms around their husbands’ necks as they left the courtroom.
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday May 3, 1911 Louis Duchez on Murder of Shirtwaist Makers in New York City, Part I
From the International Socialist Review of May 1911:
THE MURDER OF THE SHIRT WAIST MAKERS
IN NEW YORK CITY
BY LOUIS DUCHEZ
Photographs by American Press Ass’n.
[Part I of II.]
TRUTH is, indeed, stranger than fiction.
As I write this story of the bold, brutal and cold-blooded murder of one hundred and twenty-five [129] girls, averaging nineteen years of age, and twenty [17] men, here in New York, I wonder if what I have seen and heard and felt is real.
It was Saturday evening, March 25. Only five minutes more and the slaves at the sewing machines would be hurrying to their “homes,” carrying their starvation wages for the week. More than 500 of them were employed by the Triangle Waist Company, the non-union concern which led the fight on the shirt waist girls more than a year ago. The slave pen was located on the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of a “fire proof” building in the very heart of the congested section of the city.
In some corner unknown on the eighth floor highly inflammable materials caught fire. Before anyone had time to look around big tongues of flame were licking up everything in the room.
A general rush was made for the elevators and stairways. The elevators did their best, but during the few minutes in which the tragedy occurred only fifty girls were lowered.
The stairways were the principal ways of escape—and the doors leading to these stairways were locked. For it was the custom of this firm, as it is the custom in other shirtwaist factories in New York, to lock the doors after work begins in the morning and to keep them locked all day, so that the employes may be searched before going home for pieces of goods, thread or buttons, and so that they may be prevented from going out and “stealing time” during the day.
Everywhere throughout the three floors silk and cotton goods hung from racks or were piled up on tables, and the little blaze which started in the unknown corner was like a spark in a powder magazine. In ten minutes the three floors were all afire. Huge clouds of flame belched from nearly every window.
Finding the doors locked to the stairways, the girls rushed to the windows. With their hair and clothes afire, they leaped from the eighth, ninth and tenth story windows. Some were seen climbing upon the sills and deliberately plunging to the pavement. Others, it is said, were pushed out by the pressure behind. In one instance two girls came down from the ninth story in each other‘s arms. Others were seen embracing and kissing each other before making the fatal leap.
Hellraisers Journal – Monday April 24, 1911 Stories from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
From The Outlook of April 15, 1911:
THE FACTORY GIRL’S DANGER
BY MIRIAM FINN SCOTT
On Friday evening, March 24, two young sisters walked down the stairways from the ninth floor where they were employed and joined the horde of workers that nightly surges homeward into New York’s East Side. Since eight o’clock they had been bending over shirt-waists of silk and lace, tensely guiding the valuable fabrics through their swift machines, with hundreds of power driven machines whirring madly about them; and now the two were very weary, and were filled with that despondency which comes after a day of exhausting routine, when the next day, and the next week, and the next year, hold promise of nothing better than just this same monotonous strain.
“Operators Wanted. Inquire Ninth Floor.”
They were moodily silent when they sat down to supper in the three-room tenement apartment where they boarded. At last their landlady (who told me of that evening’s talk, indelibly stamped upon her mind) inquired if they were feeling unwell.
“Oh, I wish we could quit the shop!” burst out Becky, the younger sister, aged eighteen. “That place is going to kill us some day.”
Hellraisers Journal – Friday April 7, 1911 New York City – 100,000 Parade in Tribute to the Unidentified Dead
From the New York Evening World of April 5, 1911:
The funeral of the unidentified victims of the Washington place disaster this afternoon was made memorable by parades of mourning in which probably 100,000 members of labor unions took part in Manhattan, and 5,000 in Brownsville and East New York. Owing to the confusion attending the formation of the Manhattan parade it was late in starting. Once it got under way business generally came to a halt in the district between Washington Square and Thirty-fourth street in and adjacent to Fifth avenue….
The great massing of men and women preparatory to the start of the parade, the many mourning emblems, the evident depth of the sorrow of the marchers, the silent determination of the moving throngs would have been impressive enough on a bright, cheerful New York spring day. In the gloom of fog, with a misty rain falling and the streets sticky and slippery, the slowly passing columns, sombre in black garments and partially concealed from the view of those above by black, shining umbrellas, took on a sullen aspect almost awe-inspiring…..
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