Watched this amazing episode of New York: A Documentary Film on PBS last night. The most gripping part of it was the account of a famous fire at a textile sweatshop:
1911 – 146 people — mostly young, immigrant girls — are killed in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. A crowd of helpless bystanders watches in horror as some of the victims jump to their deaths in a vain effort to escape the heat and flames. The owners are tried for manslaughter for having locked their employees in the building but are acquitted.
I realized this building is only a few blocks out of my way to work, so I stopped by this morning. It’s now part of New York University. There’s a plaque on the building telling of the fire and of the building’s national historic status. Looking up at the 8th and 9th floors I imagined what it must have been like to lean out the window trying to avoid the flames and then eventually jumping to certain death. Thousands of onlookers stood below helpless, the ladders too short and the nets broken. The documentary included accounts from the scene, journalists describing the thud of women hitting the ground and dying instantly, one after another.
I don’t think I could work on those floors, knowing it was where the dead women were piled up, dead from smoke inhalation or burning, just outside the doors that were locked from the outside.