Isaac harris triangle shirtwaist

It was a warm spring Saturday in New York City, March 25, 1911.  On the top three floors of the ten-story Asch Building just off of Washington Square, employees of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory began putting away their work as the 4:45 p.m.

quitting time approached.  Most of the several hundred Triangle Shirtwaist employees were teenage girls.  Most were recent immigrants.  Many spoke only a little English. 

Just then somebody on the eighth floor shouted, "Fire!"  Flames leapt from discarded rags between the first and second rows of cutting tables in the hundred-foot-by-hundred-foot floor.

Triangle employee William Bernstein grabbed pails of water and vainly attempted to put the fire out.  As a line of hanging patterns began to burn, cries of "fire" erupted from all over the floor.  In the thickening smoke, as several men c