On March 25, 1911, a fire engulfed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City, marking one of the most devastating workplace disasters in American history. The tragedy claimed the lives of 146 workers, primarily women and immigrants, many of whom were young teenagers. As the fire raged, workers faced horrific choices, with some choosing to leap from windows rather than succumb to the flames. The factory's owners, Isaac Harris and Max Blanck, had cut corners on safety, locking exit doors to prevent theft and neglecting to install adequate fire safety measures. Despite the overwhelming evidence of negligence, both men were acquitted of manslaughter, prompting public outrage and a reevaluation of labor laws in the United States.

This episode looks into the many failures that led to the tragedy, examining the socio-economic conditions of the time, the exploitation of vulnerable workers, and the subsequent reforms sparked by this horrific event. Through expert commentary and historical analysis, we explore how this disaster reshaped labor rights and workplace safety regulations, ultimately leading to significant changes in American labor laws. Furthermore, we reflect on the personal stories of the victims and the long-lasting impact of their loss on society. The episode serves as a poignant reminder of the importance of labor rights, workplace safety, and the ongoing struggle for justice in the face of corporate negligence.

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It's a Saturday.

It's payday and it's five minutes to quitting time.

It's probably springtime and people are thinking about what bills they're gonna pay with the money they're about to receive.

And then there's a cigarette or a match or a spark.

Nobody's entirely sure, but whatever it is, finds the scrap bin on an eighth floor of a building described lovingly as fireproof.

Within 18 minutes, 146 people are dead.

Mostly women, mostly immigrants, and many of them teenagers.

At least two of them, 14 years old, 62 of them chose to jump to their deaths rather than burn.

And the two men responsible both lived and also walked out of courtroom.

Found not guilty, reopened their business three weeks later and eventually collected $65,000 more from their insurance company than what their property was worth.

And that shook out to around $445 of profit per body.

Eventually the entire architecture of modern American labor laws and workers comp and commercial insurance, osha, all of that thing would spiral from this tragedy.

But how it unfolded and what led to the perfect storm of the fire in this building.

We will get to all that and more on another episode of the Remedial Scholar.

I feel I was denied critical need to know information.

Belongs in a museum.

Stop skipping your remedial class.

Hello and welcome, young and old.

I am the remedial scholar, Levi.

And I'm happy you guys are here with me today.

Also with me, one of my longtime friends, my bestest friend, I might say my lawyer and trusted insurance man, even though I'm not technically under his umbrella.

But it's okay.

Welcome to the show, Colton.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Yeah.

Now you know why I invited you.

Because we may have discussed it at a previous date.

That's not to be thought about too much.

But go ahead and share with the.

Share with the class why you are here for this specific episode.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, so I'm not an actual lawyer.

I just Play 1 on TV.

But my insurance experience should come in handy this episode.

Yeah, and he has been my lawyer since sixth grade when I just automatically deemed him that one day.

And it's just kind of been a thing ever since.

So I, I've been serving loyalty ever since.

Yeah, yeah, we go way back.

We get all the way back to kindergarten.

So.

That's right.

That is right.

All right.

Well, yeah, I'm.

It's going to be great.

We're Talking about some 19th, 20th century terrible business practices and all of the great things.

So I'm excited for you to have the 21st century insurance lens to view it through because it's.

It's just a crazy perspective switch of like how they did things back then before they were like, we should probably not do it so badly, but only takes people to die every now and then and.

Yeah, well, you know, as the kids say, I think this episode is going to be lit.

Lit Foreshadowing.

Yeah.

Well, the good news is, is that if people are listening to it, they can see the title and they know what it's about.

But that's great.

It's actually kind of funny though, because sometimes I'm like writing the episodes as if it's like some mystery that people aren't gonna know what I'm talking about.

Even though definitely know what the topic is, because it's right there.

Building up to your grand reveal.

News flash.

It was there the whole time.

So, yeah, we got a little bit of world building to do because, you know, this, this disaster happen in a vacuum.

It's definitely causes eight.

It's.

It's just a ca or.

Well, it's caused by the context in which it is.

So we're going to set the stage to be that what would be the worst workplace disaster in United States history until we were in second grade.

And it's, you know, those aren't mutually exclusive.

We didn't cause it by being in second grade.

Although one would make the case that I might have tried at some point.

Maybe third grade for sure.

But fourth grade.

Fourth grade was.

Oh, your best year.

Yeah, yeah.

Different episode that.

So I had talked about this, you know, the last time we tried to do this episode with September 11th being on the record as the worst workplace disaster in United States history, which is unfair because it's like not the building's fault that that happened.

Like, like, yeah, it's like, you know, a thing that just happened because these people work there.

It's like, well.

So I don't know if it should be on those kinds of lists, but it is.

So it's a.

It's technicality for sure.

But I will say those towers were a lot safer than some.

Some historical buildings that we may or may not discuss today, huh?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's kind of crazy that it took 90 years from the story that we're talking about today before one of the worst events, like any just business setting, happens in the United States.

And I'd argue around the world, but there's probably some workplace disasters in Japan in the 40s that were a little bit worse, but again, not because they were at work, but so we go to Greenwich Village in Manhattan, where a 10 story, Neo Renaissance style iron and steel building with smooth brick exterior sits kind of in its own pocket of these similar type buildings that are built around the same time.

And it was described as fireproof, which is true because it's still there.

I mean it didn't burn down, it just, there was a fire in it.

So not really fireproof, it was just more fire resistant, I guess.

But yeah, so had a bunch of different offices in it.

Like much of the many level buildings of today is, you know, different floors are dedicated to different buildings.

The top three floors of this building belonging to the Triangle Waist company who produced the Shirtwaist, which was a popular blouse for the working woman who didn't, you know, want to wear a dress to work because that kind of hindered their mobility.

And as they were getting more jobs in the industrial sector, they had to move around a little bit.

And it was, I imagine it probably allowed them to not be as like just temperature wise hot because you know, you have a separation of garments now, so you got, got a little softer top.

It's not a full dress, so it's a lighter material, I'm assuming.

And airflow, I don't know, I don't

wear a lot of dresses, so I, I couldn't tell you.

Yeah, and I mean, let's be honest, women's clothing in general is a mystery to most of us.

So.

Amen, brother.

Yeah.

And there were standards, they were just bad and very few, but they had some standards.

And overall this entire thing, all of like the prime destruction of the event, all of the Deaths happened within 18 minutes, which is pretty crazy.

The full fire would continue, but all of the damage that could have been done to this company was done within 18 minutes.

So the end of the working day for these people.

It was the, you know, the top three floors, 8th, 9th and 10th golf engulfed in flames.

And then 146 people would die.

Most of them immediately, and then a few others later on due to various complications.

Most of them were immigrants, most of them were women.

But before we get to the fire itself and all of the legal upheaval, we gotta, we gotta ask how did we get there?

Last time we tried to do this too, which is.

Mark Twain had coined this term and it was around his time that he was describing.

But basically it was tough.

It was hard for anybody who wasn't on the upper echelon of society.

A lot of the business owners, the well to do's and the politicians was a big thing that Mark Twain noticed.

He was quite angry about Congress for most of the later years of his life.

And he used some pretty colorful language and unique ways to describe how crappy they were.

But I didn't have any of them prepared so I can't quote him on it.

But he take my word for it.

But the Industrial Revolution and the explosion of the, of the United States in the world economy in this aspect was huge.

People in the United States began working more and more of these industrial jobs because it just spread like wildfire, no pun intended.

So you know, this, this time was great for business owners, it was great for the wealthy.

Now there wasn't that many of those.

It was the top 1% that held 50% of the nation's wealth, which is, I mean that's crazy.

So long ago.

That's.

Yeah.

Some things don't change.

Yeah.

For the better.

We're going to find out that there's a lot of that.

So that's exciting.

Social Darwinism was in full effect at that point with the rich being a big fan of this.

They didn't have to help poor people because that would make them weak.

They got to learn how to survive.

So why, why would we help them?

And then the government.

Not helpful either.

Mainly because a big percentage of them were friends with the business owners who already felt this way.

Again, how crazy back then.

It seems so long.

Foreign to me.

Yeah.

So I mean, yeah, workplace safety pretty much a joke.

The people who had to pay to make things safer would just rather not do that because it was cheaper that way.

And labor laws routinely struck down because it was unconstitutional for the government to tell the businesses how to treat their employees.

Which there's a hint of truth in that, I'm sure.

But also government does have a responsibility to the people who give them money all the time to make sure they don't die because somebody wanted one too many sweaters made or something.

So yeah, yeah, I, I talked about this kind of sentiment in my episode on the Battle of Blair Mountain, which is coal miners in West Virginia who started their own little uprising.

It was an armed uprising and there was guns and airplanes dropping grenades and stuff on people.

So it was pretty intense, which is, you know, it makes sense because they're coal miners in life sucked and the companies owned basically everything about their lives.

So yeah, you know, you're going to get a little violent about that, but it's kind of.

The entire working culture was rough.

we're number one and usa.

Yeah.

And these people obviously, you know, getting paid pretty well to work in these crazy abhorrent conditions, you know.

Right.

They had to be.

Why would you subject yourself to.

Most of them worked 14 to 16 hours a day, six or seven days a week.

Less than half of working Americans earned a wage above poverty level.

And there's no disability, no minimum wage, no workers comp.

And no liability for the employers either.

And most employers, had they actually been sued, managed to fend off the lawsuits with a trio of legal defenses which are known as the unholy trinity defenses.

And you know a little bit about this you want to share with the client.

Yeah.

So again, professional experience is commercial insurance, which includes workers compensation.

Now I just, just went over this in my last continuing education class.

So it is presumption of risk.

Right.

If it, if it's risky and you're doing it anyway, well, you, you're assumed to know the risk.

Yeah.

You have contributory negligence.

Right.

So if you're even 1%, if you contributed even 1% to your injury, they, they were able to deny 100% of, of the damages.

And then yeah, when we went over this fellow worker, fellow employee, I think there's a different term for it.

There's a nice term.

Fellow servant.

Yes, fellow servant.

Yes.

So yeah, me, the employer, I didn't hurt you.

It was your co worker go sue then instead.

Right.

And so yeah, all these were borrowed from our English law system, which I mean we still have.

Right.

But they were not yet reformed.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

So it just really was a nice little, little way for companies to just be like, look, obviously we didn't do any of this.

Look at exhibit A.

Their buddy was operating the machine and he's the one that hit them or whatever and just let them shed off cases so easily is coated in PAM or some, some grease or something.

They're just slippering through them.

Very slippery.

Yeah.

So only one in eight workers injured on the job received any compensation and typically not scaled to help them very much.

It is, you know, pennies on the dollar, I'm assuming.

But in put that in perspective.

Claims had initial acceptance and around 67% of the denied claims were eventually converted and accepted.

So come a long, long way since.

Since then.

Which is good because it's crazy to me that companies would even like especially with how dangerous they were back then.

It's like, how are you not going to think that you contributed to this at all?

But that's what it is.

Like just that type of personality.

Yeah.

That's probably fairly accurate for, for most.

Yeah.

I, I would say the others just didn't know anything different.

Right.

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

That's what the law is.

Business went.

Yeah.

Probably some apathy there, but yeah.

I guess, I mean modern, modern day workers comp.

Right.

Like it's, it's a no fault system.

So those, those stats are.

I agree.

They're great.

Yeah.

Pretty much any illness, pretty much any injury that happens at or because of work is covered.

Yeah.

Do, do we have time for my favorite claim story?

We can.

Yeah, go ahead.

Oh, hell yeah.

So I insured an all female firm, professional office setting.

Right.

They went.

This is Nebraska.

Okay.

But for the Christmas party they went over to Council Bluffs, Iowa so that they could go to the holy nude strip clubs.

Again, all female friends

get way off.

I know.

Yeah.

So.

So again they went out of state for a Christmas party at a strip club and one of the workers was dancing with another patron there when she slipped and fell.

Smacked her face face first.

Concrete floor.

Yeah.

Broke diva.

Oh.

I get a, I get a call from the business owner late at night.

I, I pick up like that's.

This is a normal call.

Yeah.

Recounts the story to me.

She's like, is this, is this workers comp.

Is this, is this a claim?

And I said, I think so.

Yeah.

But they're a work trip.

We'll see.

Yeah.

Yeah.

100 covered.

And that worker's got nice new teeth.

Awesome shiny teeth in her, you know.

Oh yeah.

The American dream.

Yeah.

And I like that you kind of tied that in together because this is all female firm.

And now we're going to talk about the women of the industry in this story, which is a big part of it because most of the victims were women.

And the best part about being a business owner at the turn of the 20th century is that you didn't need to just employ adults.

You could Also get some children to work for you, which was awesome.

You know, they got tiny hands, good for thieving.

Think we could bump those numbers up.

And that's around 1.75 million children.

And it's not like they're doing the burger flipping or, you know, shining a floor or something.

They are working in textile mills at factories and doing all sorts of crazy stuff.

In the textile mills, specifically, half of the workforce was children, which is hilarious to me.

Like, you'd go to your company meeting and it's just a bunch of kids like, yep, our day out there.

And I get back to the wife and kids.

Aren't you taking a smoke break?

Exactly.

Day boss is really riding me out there.

And like, they're not putting in weekend hours like we see now where kids are in most places are limited to a certain amount of hours per week they can work.

And this is also part of the system, the society at the time, because they were contributing almost a quarter of the total family income on average for, you know, people at that level that under the.

Under the wealthy, basically.

And, you know, if they weren't working in a factory in the city, they're probably working on the farm, the family farm.

So, you know, is probably higher than the percentage given, honestly.

And then that was struck down two years later.

Eventually it would, you know, come back up.

But they tried it for two years and they're like, no, this is.

We have to have kids.

We have to have them working.

They yearn for the mines.

And then you have immigrants.

That place has always fascinated me.

I think I had to do a project on it in elementary school and I was like, this is.

This might be the coolest building ever, I think, because I had that, you know, early bonding with it.

But.

And you know, several of our relatives went through there, which is pretty sweet.

But anyway, big chunk of immigration related to various famines involving maybe potatoes and also like various, like onslaughts and not full on genocides, but, you know, they were getting there.

They were the Russians really Did not like Jews.

And that was pretty evident.

And they got out of there, which was smart because it would only get worse.

But the thing was, this is 67% of these Jewish immigrants had industrial skills because they were working at these places in their home countries.

And it made them super hireable when they came through.

You guys have experience, which is good because you need 10 years of experience for these entry level jobs.

Some things never change.

No, that.

That's not real, I think.

I don't know.

But the other big population at the time was the Italians.

Spaghetti.

2 million of them immigrated in the first decade of the 20th century.

And most of them would live on the Lower east side of New York City.

And it was not a luxurious time.

It was not what you'd expect, you know, New York City to be.

It's a lot of overcrowding.

And the tenement housing that was constructed, which is essentially just shanty towns but built upward instead of outward, tenements were built on these 25 by 100 foot plots.

And they had four to six floors with four separate apartments per floor and around 300 square feet for the whole thing.

And you get a kitchen, a bedroom with no windows and a front room that had windows, but the whole thing didn't have a bathroom.

There's community bathroom outside, which was awesome.

It sounds great.

You know, I'm pretty sure New York City still has those.

Yeah, I think they're slightly more spacious, but because these, it's not like these were well constructed either.

But imagine like you, you've.

If you've ever lived in an apartment, you can imagine how awful this must be.

Because, like, apartments nowadays carry noise.

But like, imagine living in one of these things.

Just concrete.

Yeah.

There's a quote from a architect named Ernest Flagg.

He's a very respected architect in New York City.

And he said the greatest evil which ever befell New York City was the division of blocks into lots of 25 by 100ft.

For from this division has arisen the New York system of tenement houses.

The worst curse which ever afflicted any great community.

So he's very passionate about it, which, I get it.

He's an architect.

He really likes nice buildings.

And these were not.

So it makes sense.

Did not.

Did not mince his words on those.

Did he come in and design the next phase?

Maybe 11 months or 12 months.

I don't know.

I don't think so.

I feel like you probably stayed away from that kind of thing and didn't

want any part about it.

But 2.3 million people live this way, which is two thirds of the city's population.

And they lived in 80,000 plus tenement houses.

There's so many of them.

The Lower east side was the most saturated with population.

And this was like, oh, it's so packed with people and this guy's just murdering people and nobody knows because there's just so much going on.

And this is like infinitely worse.

He would add a field day there.

Maybe he did and we don't even know.

But yeah, so they, like I said, they didn't have any toilets, they didn't have any light fixtures.

There was no ventilation.

There was you know, essentially just, it was just kind of a room.

And that's a little bit, that's kind of it.

And in these conditions, infant mortality was very high.

So high in fact that it brought the entire country's infant mortality.

Like it messed with the ratio.

I guess I was going to say it brought it higher, but I don't think that makes sense.

So I didn't.

But then I did anyway.

No, that makes sense.

Okay.

And with it in this, you know, already dismal situation, women were fighting to be treated fairly in a male dominated society.

I mean, it's way better now, I guess, but it is better.

It's, it's important context for what's ahead.

Since women were really just kind of only barely passed the breaking into the, the workplace barrier.

You know, if you wanted a job, that was cool, but you're not going to find your career 9 to 5 opportunity, no dolly Parton moments for you.

You are entering these workplaces and the company owners are seeing this as like we're just kind of entertaining your fantasy of wanting to buy your own stuff before you get married and you know, never think about work again because baby.

So by the time the Triangle Shirtwaist factory opened its doors, American industry had perfected a system of exploitation that was almost elegant in its efficiency.

It had waves of a, all of these different immigrants, Eastern European, Italian, these desperate, disoriented and politically invisible people.

You know, a lot of them weren't able to vote or didn't know how so it's not like they were able to change things as they came in.

And then they would get poured into these factories where 14 hour days, peace rate pay and zero protection legally were pretty much just the terms of their survival.

And women kind of bore the sharpest edge of this.

They had the most tedious fine motor to work.

This endless seaming and button attaching, needle threading, all this little tiny stuff that you didn't quite have machines to do yet.

But for some reason, women can do this stuff.

And they were paid way lower than everybody else.

It's great.

It's funny because the more I talk about that part in particular, the more references in my brain from my own work history come into play where I've worked at places where everything's lower or shorter.

And it's because they were expecting to either be hiring a lot of women or children, who knows?

But when I was working at Sherwin Williams, the guy who was our sales rep for the brand Purdy Brushes, he told us that their factories, it's only women that assemble them, which is super interesting.

If you ever buy a Purdy paintbrush and look on the back of the handle, there's a little sticker and it's an initial and it's usually a lady.

And not that you'd be able to tell that through the initials, but.

Oh, I can recognize the lady's initials.

Yeah.

But he was like.

It's literally like they're the only ones that can do it like that.

Like, they've tried implementing men in there and they just don't last.

They don't.

It's like some kind of.

What specifics with their.

Their motor control.

I don't know.

It's very weird, but I don't know.

Big meaty claws.

Yeah, we have big dumb fit into it.

What?

And they have little tiny smart hands that just do all the things right.

And we're just like clunking through everything and knocking stuff over and making a mess and not cleaning it up anyway.

Okay, I'm going to make my own brand and it's going to be called Ugly brand brushes.

And we'll have just a hand print on the back.

That's the dude that made it.

Looks like.

But it paints.

They just like.

It looks like Angelica's doll from Rugrats.

It's just.

Take that Purdy.

Yeah, yeah.

So many of these women that were working were trying to support their families, and even though they weren't expected to be working career jobs, nobody in power cared because all of these things were made possible because women couldn't vote and they couldn't put any political influence in how things were handled for them because you kind of need to be able to vote to decide who is, you know, kind of representing you in that area.

So that was tough for them.

And then you have politicians who, you know, refuse to regulate the factories because that's their buddy's factory and there's no consequence for manufacturers or skirted regulations because, you know, they got to make a little bit more money.

And yeah, that's.

So now we're going to talk about the shirtwaist, which is the fabric outfit thing that they were making at this factory because in the fold of this confusing and dangerous working environment that we have laid out so far, entered this unlikely consumer driven product.

You know, a lot of people talk about the iPhone as one of America's biggest gifts to the market or Henry Ford and his assembly line produce model T's.

But you know, I'm just saying could be the Shirtwaist.

It might be pretty cool.

I'm a big fan of not happen to be pulled around in a rigid wagon pulled by a horse that poops constantly.

But I don't know, shirtwaists, they're a little bit different and definitely a little bit different.

I had to look it up.

I had no idea what we're talking about here.

Yeah, I also didn't.

And I remember talking about this fire in school and I remember thinking that shirtwaist was the waist you made while making shirts.

Like it wasn't, it wasn't an outfit in my mind or part of one, I guess, but essentially what the shirtwaist is, it's a, it's a blouse for the working woman.

It was, it was skinnier on the waist.

You know the name, but it also ended at the waist which is, you know, because it's not a whole dress.

And yeah, shirt waist, that's, that's what you get.

Couldn't just call it shirt because that's would make too much sense.

But yeah, it was the hottest thing in the early 90s fashion.

It was, is the blouse that took America by storm.

It had this slim cut on the waist and then flourished out shoulders.

And this was the image of the modern woman, which was basically popularized by the Gibson girl, which is a stylized illustration series that was the image of what it was like to be a woman on the edge of fashion, the cutting edge of fashion in society.

And these drawings were published in the hottest magazines of the day like Life magazine and Harper's Weekly and Colliers.

And it portrayed the aesthetic that every woman should be, you know, according to these people paying for these advertisements anyway, the Gibson girl was not a real person.

She was what it felt like to be on the up and up.

You know, if you wanted to be a lady who played tennis and rode bikes and swam and did, like, all sorts of cool stuff, you wanted to be a Gibson girl.

And she sounds pretty cool.

She's pretty cool.

It's essentially like a precursor to Barbie.

You know, she does all these things and you want to be her.

Yeah.

But, you know, and it's also like this representation of.

For a lot of these immigrant women who are coming to this country is like, oh, that's what women in this country are.

And so they have this, like, semi idolized thought process about them.

And maybe they are tearing pictures out and hanging them on their tenement walls to decorate this terrible living situation and give them a little bit of, you know, aspiration to work for.

And in this kind of thing is, you know, you would have the magazine and then you'd see the Gibson girl doing something cool.

And then, like, you turn the page and then it's an advertisement for a store that sells them these.

These shirtwaists, which is kind of like, you know, the fashion trends that exist because they are depicted in reality TV or on Tick Tock or whatever.

Like, you see that thing and you're like, well, I want that thing now.

And it's just a very Keeping up with the Joneses type thing.

Like the little rubber rip rubber with the livestrong ones.

No, no, even before then.

Right.

Like, they were just simple, simple round wristbands.

Rubber wristbands.

Are they the colors interlock?

Those had a.

Those had a phase as well.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

Gotta have it.

Yeah, it's.

It's the hot, hot, hot.

And Keeping up with the Joneses is a phrase that comes out of a suburb of New York City around the same time, which is kind of interesting to me.

And, you know, it's not applicable to the immigrants in the area in the same way, but it is kind of a thing where they're like, well, I'm not trying to keep up with somebody because they have stuff that I want.

I'm trying to be like them because they're getting out of this situation.

They got a promotion or they, you know, got out of the tenements.

Like, I wanna.

I wanna do that.

And how do I do that?

Well, it all circles back to everybody wearing a shirtwaist, essentially.

So it's like this weird version of Dressing for the job you want, and it could get you, you know, a promotion or, you know, maybe.

Maybe spruce up your wardrobe and meet the nice fella down the.

Down the hallway or something.

I don't know.

But it was a means to having a nice but affordable outfit like your neighbors.

And that's the world that the shirtwaist was born in and was the perfect object for this system because it was affordable and it was manufactured on such a wide range, and that's why it was affordable.

It only costs a few dollars because there's these huge factories cranking them out like nobody's business.

And anybody from the lady working at the factory could wear one.

Or the aristocrats, you know, maybe some wealthy lawyer's daughter has one or somebody, you know, J.P. morgan's daughter probably has one.

I don't know.

But it's.

It's kind of pun intended for the word irony, because, you know, irony shirts anyway.

Of women working a factory that made these garments.

And they're like, I gotta have one of these.

It's like, you know, how.

How they're made?

Like, do you.

Are you sure?

But they're, you know, it was the hot commodity, which is.

Is what it is.

But, you know, circling back to the low labor costs and how they were kept so low, New York City was the place to get clothes made back then.

The garment industry was made up of almost half or made up almost half of the industrial workforce.

And the entire business model was a chain of retailers who then bought from the manufacturers who contracted subcontractors to pay the workers and have the factories.

It wasn't always like that.

Some people did a big chunk of that stuff either which way.

But, yeah, the overall sentiment was make items as cheap as possible, with the most of those costs coming from cutting corners and paying people as least as possible or the least as possible.

Words are hard sometimes, you know, it's okay.

I'm here for you.

Yeah.

I appreciate it.

Now enter the antagonists of today's story.

Isaac Harris and Max Blanc.

They were.

Ooh, these guys.

They are Russian Jewish immigrants and fled the pilgrims in the 19.

God damn it.

And Harris was a tailor.

He was a very skilled tailor.

He worked in factories, production factories, and worked his way up through the sweatshop.

Sweatshop system himself, which is, you know, how they were able to kind of build their own empire once they moved To America.

And Blanc, he was the entrepreneur.

He had a lot of natural charisma that lent itself to sales and deal making.

Like you like this guy.

This guy's got the.

Got the riz.

The kids say Levi's talking about you.

Our dear listener.

Yes, dear listener much?

You know, they didn't have any formal education, but really good instincts from the school of hard knocks, you know.

Oh yeah, they met the way that many lifelong friendships begin.

Kindergarten.

No, Blanc had married a Russian immigrant whose cousin just happened to be married to Harris.

Which is a tale as old as time.

It's.

It's classic.

Yeah, if I had a nickel, you know.

And Harris ran the factory floor and production.

Blanche handled the sales and contracts and business relationships.

Naturally, they gained an advantage early on installing new power driven sewing machines which were five times as fast as the foot pedal models, which is, you know, gave them the ability to undercut competition by just sheer speed of turnaround and also price because it was cheaper, because they could make so many more.

They show they sold their shirtwaist for $3 each with.

Would we.

The math came out to like $110 or something like that in today's money.

That's.

That's roughly what it was.

Yeah.

So I mean, not as accessible, but I mean, apparently it was.

Well, I think, I think clothing was just more expensive back then because.

Yeah, you don't have the cheap labor.

And shirts $110 if you wanted to.

I mean, heck, hoodies are like $60 sometimes.

It's like, why, man, you just put a hood on it.

I don't.

I know what you're doing.

Fooling me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They were accessible enough to sell in volume, but then premium enough to mark up at a decent margin.

Newly built, poorly named.

It's like omen.

A bad omen for shadowing.

Yep.

And originally they.

They took just the ninth floor, but then as their business grew, they took the 8th and then the 10th.

And so that was the top three floors that they had.

So pretty decent.

And that's eight years.

I mean, that's pretty good, man.

And that was annual sales.

That's.

I don't know what their profit was, I guess, but I have to imagine probably pretty decent.

So they're manufacturing around a thousand of these shirtwaists a day.

And it quickly became the largest shirtwaist manufacturer in the country, which they were the largest in the city, which meant they were largest in the country because the city had a chokehold on it.

And they were dubbed the shirtwaist kings by the press.

Yeah, well, Levi, your original script on this left out an important detail.

What's that?

Well, they started out as the square shirtwaist company.

Cut a few corners and ended up as Triangle.

I love it.

That's amazing.

They.

They also did have the diamond shirt, but.

Yeah, diamond shirtwaist or something like that too.

Got even more corners.

Yep.

They usually just kept cutting them.

You know, if you keep cutting corners on a triangle, you get more corners.

A lot of people don't know that,

but depends on which corners you got.

Well, all of them, you know, and it seemed all like they were on the verge of becoming the next Levi Strauss, which.

Pretty high praise.

I mean, guys got cool name at least.

They, Their personal lives began to grow as well.

They moved their families out of the cramped tenements and into.

Into large brownstones on the Upper west side.

So that's huge.

You know, they had servants and chauffeurs and cars, summer houses.

Their children attended private school.

And they were major figures in their immigrant Jewish community.

They donated a lot of money to synagogues and they were active in social organizations.

Men of standing, fancy pants.

And they were the epitome of the American dream.

I, you know, if I recorded this 15 times, I'd still pronounce it that way.

That's how it's pronounced.

Yep.

It's the only way to do it.

So the conditions of this, this company, they arrived at 7:30am and then would work until at least 6:30pm and then at least seven hours on Saturday.

And they were paid a piece rate, which is you're getting paid per garment you're making.

Yeah, peace out, dude.

You're getting paid per garment.

So not per hour, which incentivize them to go faster and stay longer because, you know, it didn't matter how long they stayed.

They were only going to make as many.

As much money as the garments they were making, which, you know, as they got faster and faster, the owners would just then slide the scale and be like, okay, well now you get paid per 10 or whatever, which is super cool.

Paying for the effort.

Yeah, yeah, you guys are.

It's easier for them.

It's.

I would like to pay you in.

What is it that they.

The influencers try to pay people in exposure.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Which Is going to have a different meaning here in a little bit.

But women at the Triangle Factory might earn A$50 a week, which is way less than their male counterpart, who would earn around 15 to $23 a week either way.

Not great.

But, you know, hey, couple weeks at the factory and you can buy one of the shirts that you made 14,000 of in the last two days.

But that really makes me wonder as they're like making these and they're figuring out how much those things cost versus how much they're getting paid.

Like, do you think it ever clicked?

And they were like, you know what?

This isn't worth it.

I'm.

Well, I don't want to jump the gun, but I think there's a reason why.

Yeah, yeah.

But they would also do the super fun thing where they would designate new workers as learners and then just keep them as such because, well, it was cheaper.

They had to pay them more when they were not learners anymore.

Even if they could run the factory by themselves, they would leave that label on as long as they could.

And then, depending on what time of year demands would force workers to maintain an 80 hour workweek with no overtime pay.

And then as soon as demand lessened, layoffs commenced.

Got to get rid of the fat.

Yeah.

So some things never change.

Yeah.

This factory in particular had a sign that, you know, that you work on Saturday, but it had a sign on the exit that said if you don't come in on Sunday, don't come in on Monday.

Which is just kind of.

That's, that's the vibe here.

And it's, you know, I mean, it wouldn't kill him to have a pizza party.

I think that would improve things a lot.

Workers were fined for arriving late.

They were at fault.

No matter what, no matter what caused the delay, they were fined.

They were fined for any damaged goods, Even if they weren't at fault.

If the machine snagged a garment and ruined it, they were fined, even though they're not the ones that you put the machine in.

They were also timed on their bathroom breaks and then fined for singing, talking, and unauthorized breaks, which.

So Amazon.

Yeah, yeah, I kind of.

I do support the fines for singing, but I would like it adjusted to be for whistling.

I think that would be great because it's always the person who doesn't know how to carry a tune that wants to whistle and you're like, come on, man, shut up.

Workers were expected to supply their own needles and thread, and then in some cases they were paying rent on the sewing machines.

That they had to use to do their job.

So even if the employee, you know, had paid for them already, and then the previous person who worked in that spot probably paid for it again in rent, they just kept paying for it.

It's a good business model.

Yeah, well, can't argue with that.

It's really great because no matter what, it didn't matter.

Like, if you upset somebody and they left, oh, there's just another worker that is going to come in because there's so many immigrants and so many people who needed jobs at this point.

So, you know, somebody's always looking for something and you leave.

Also, if you leave, we're going to blacklist you, so you can't get a job here or ever.

So the demographic for this job, or the.

In this job specifically, is heavy.

On the female side, it was 80% women.

70% of them were age 16 to 25, and then 65% of them being Eastern European Jewish, because again, that's a huge influx of them immigrating over.

And employers really liked working with Eastern European younger Jewish women because it was in their minds, least likely that they would organize and start unions, which is certainly a thought which also later on we'll talk about one of, like, the prominent labor union leaders, and she's a small Jewish woman, which is kind of ironic.

But workers who couldn't read or write English, they were preferred.

They had no clue if they were being taken advantage of when it came to deductions, contracts, complaints, anything like that.

So employers were like, we'll find something for you to do that you don't need to talk or read.

It's.

We'll draw pictures on there for you.

That is the ideal employee.

Yeah.

The Italian community was coming in with their mafia roots.

They were doing this middleman thing where they would control the wages and job placement and food supplies and then charge their fellow immigrants for everything at.

At every stop of that.

They were also used as strike breakers.

And the owners would kind of use this as a way to pit all of the different immigrant communities against one another so they wouldn't, you know, have any solidarity and organize.

But, yeah, oh, this is where I put the blacklist thing.

So, yeah, if you, if you file the complaint or quit or anything like that, you were blacklisted and they spread your name all around town and you couldn't get a job.

So that was great.

So you kind of just had to do the thing.

Now, this is.

This is my favorite part of the script because we're getting to the building itself, which we have our little mini game for you at the end because, you know, it's such a luxurious building.

It was pretty new at the time.

A lot of really cool commodities going.

For instance, it was.

I mean, they had 10,000 square feet to work with, which was pretty cool.

There's 240 workers, which rounded out to about 42 square feet per.

And then you have sewing machines and racking and factory equipment.

That adds to that as well.

They had baskets made from wicker all around the.

The edges to throw scraps in and also like to grab material from.

That's just fine.

Pretty cool.

The sewing machines were wall to wall.

They were all over the place.

And they needed regular oil to maintain them.

So there was oil on the floors and then oil drums.

There was cotton scraps strewn about.

There was big bins that held these cotton scraps that were accumulated for months at a time.

Because it, I don't know, probably took a worker away from their job to go empty them.

So they probably made them big on purpose so they would have to dump it less often if I'm, you know, getting in the head of these guys.

Well,

and then also no sprinkler system.

There's.

It was going to cost around $5,000 at the time to get one put in.

And the guy who built the building didn't want to pay for that.

Even though the building cost $400,000, he didn't want to include that.

And then the business owners didn't opt to pay to get it put in when they, you know, decided to start doing factory stuff in there.

And then there's no fire alarm.

Basically just a guy that goes, there's fire.

And then they didn't have regular fire drills.

And then they had a standpipe hose system, which was apparently state of the art when it was put in.

And we'll come back to.

There was a fire escape which went down to the second floor skylight.

I don't know, maybe I don't understand what fire escapes are for, but I feel like they should go all the way down.

That could just be me.

Maybe I don't understand buildings very well.

The ash building is only allowed to have fires above the second floor.

Okay.

Yeah.

So once you get to second floor, you're good.

Yeah.

It's all done.

Yeah.

Also part of the fun, the abundance of tuberculosis among the workers.

It actually carried the nickname of the Taylor's disease because it was the most common cause of death among garment workers, which is super crazy.

It spread quickly due to the, you know, the closed Environment, the lint filled air, no real good ventilation system or at all.

They would just kind of open a door and that didn't.

Or a window, I mean, didn't open doors.

That'd be crazy.

All right, so here's, here's where you come in.

You got your insurance hat on.

Based on these materials, how would you feel if this business was like, hey, we need insurance.

Colton, can you help us?

Yeah.

Between the flammable materials and the more flammable materials and the wall to wall machinery and the lack of ventilation and the lack of sprinklers and the incomplete fire escape, it's great.

Yeah, this is, this is the ideal client all around.

Just a sound investment in general.

Well, you said yourself the, the building's fireproof, so.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Pay no attention to the name of the Ash building.

It's named after Guy.

Not ominously, we promise.

And I mentioned, you know, the doors not being closed because they didn't like to let people out.

Especially in this place, this factory in particular.

They locked the doors because they didn't like people stealing.

And I get it, that's fair.

But I don't know that it's $100 a shirt waste.

Yeah, that's true.

Dollars.

Yeah.

You know, just these people just walk around all willy nilly, doing what they want, grabbing shirts, putting them in their basket or whatever.

And they would like quitting, quitting time.

They would inspect the bags that they brought in to make sure they weren't stealing anything.

So, yeah, it's a lot of theft prevention.

Also, it was a way to kind of keep the union people out at the same time.

So it kind of worked twofold.

In some sources they talk about it's a way to keep the unions out.

And then other sources, it's like, well, they didn't want people stealing, so I assume it's both of them.

And each source is like trying to tell a different story slightly, but either way, not great.

You're locked in there.

And you know, if you can read the title of this episode, you probably know that that's probably not great, but.

Yeah, I don't know.

Two birds, one door.

Yeah.

They say

the guy, the Harris, the.

The tailor, the guy had worked at several factories before he even made it to America.

This was kind of like my thought is that he had experience in this.

He had seen people stealing at the factories he had worked.

So he was like paranoid that it was going to happen.

And it was like it was his thing, lock the doors.

And we had to check their bags on the Way out.

The production floor was arranged so that four men could walk around like if they were on like risers almost as people were working.

Oh, not enough room for five men though.

Yeah, only four men.

And they.

The rubber soled shoes were starting to become a little more popular and these guys would wear them to make sure they could sneak up on people, make sure they weren't taking any unlicensed breaks.

Man, you gotta, you can't be just standing there.

You gotta be doing something while you're standing there.

You got time to lean, you got time to make some shirts.

Okay.

So that's the exciting vibe in the factory.

And it was, you know, this factory was like a lot of them.

So just extrapolate that into all of the different places that New York City at the time.

And just by pure coinkiting, it was sparked by a walkout of workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory.

So that's weird.

That's crazy because you would think that that place is awesome.

I don't know.

Women just complain about stuff all the time.

JK Obviously around 20% of the workforce walked out.

And then news spread around the city.

You know, the garment community, very tight knit.

Got him.

Nice.

Yeah.

For those of these.

I almost didn't follow that thread.

Colton loves puns and like, just so when I get one, I feel pretty good because he's usually pretty quick.

Yeah.

Even some local debutantes in the area were supporting the striking women.

Women with the last names like Vanderbilt and Morgan and others were offering their money to aid and then also would just march with them and kind of like stand between the actual workers and like the police to give them some sort of protection.

Because the police aren't going to beat up JP Morgan's daughter.

Feels like a bad career move on their part.

But yeah.

And then these strike break or strike, the strikers, they would be attacked by strike breakers or arrested.

You know, this is not fun.

But this strike itself was kind of successful for a big chunk of the garment community because a lot of them were given some, like, they conceded some things.

There wasn't a full unionization, but you know, they were like, hey, we're gonna help out a little bit.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Company was fun.

If not one of the few who refused.

Not only did they not sign, they hired detectives which would then identify workers who were striking and A, fire them.

B, hire thugs to attack them.

And then C, pay prostitutes to, like, create a scene that would give the police context to arrest the workers.

And then they would, you know, bribe the police to look the other way or to pick these women up.

And then they would create a fake union at the end of it with Harrison Blanc's relatives playing the union reps and be like, oh, we're good.

Things are great over here.

Just call them.

And then they call, and they'd be like, yeah, nope.

Yep, everything's gonna dip.

The cmi.

Pretty cool.

Dad's brilliant.

Yeah.

It's almost horrible, too.

Good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And they were also directly opposed to the one demand that the workers were really upset about, which is unlocking the exit doors, which is, you know, what

a ridiculous broken record.

Get in.

Get something else to complain about for once.

Geez.

It's always locked door.

Locked door.

It's not safe.

Yeah.

So here we go with the.

There's.

We.

We get some fires going.

Not fire, but fires.

Because we have.

Get a couple fires before the fire, a little pre fire fire.

And these men, Blanc and Harris, had several fires at their businesses before the big one.

They had two fires at Triangle itself.

Both.

And then they also had a fire, two fires in their diamond waste company.

And then all of them outside of business hours.

So I ask you, do you find that suspicious at all?

It's not great.

That's for sure.

I mean, frankly, I don't find it suspicious with those.

How terrible.

I mean, it's.

It is.

It has everything you need.

Yeah.

To start a fire, like any.

Any small thing going wrong.

Smokey the Bear would be so disappointed.

Oh, yeah.

So disappointed.

Listen, only you guys could.

Could prevent this, and you're not preventing it.

Not even.

Not even a little bit.

Only you can prevent factory fires.

That's.

That's how you got to start.

And then he got blacklisted and sent to the forest.

You're out.

You're out of the factory.

You're in tourists now, man.

Yeah.

And so the last time we talked about this, I mentioned the Insurance Monitor, which is a trade journal.

It's like a magazine dedicated to fire insurance, which is awesome.

They had like a whole.

I bet it was some very cool reading.

Hey, we still have trade journals.

And they're very excited.

I bet they are.

And in this trade journal, in this insurance monitor, they made a specific note in the years before the fire that insurance on shirtwaist stock was fairly saturated with moral hazard and, you know, kind of what this means, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So in speaking conceptually on insurance, there's moral hazard and there's morale hazard.

Right.

So if it's was moral hazard, other.

That's a pretty, pretty damning statement from the journal.

Yeah.

They're saying that the textile mills are run by a bunch of thieves.

Yeah.

We'll set fires to collect on the insurance.

Yeah.

I mean, I feel like that would hinder these guys in obtaining and keeping insurance.

But it didn't.

It.

They.

I would have thought so.

Yeah.

They continued to have insurance at the exact same rate the entire time.

And absolutely insane.

Their position, their.

Their job, if not them specifically, were being like, called out in this trade journal.

So.

Yeah.

Wild.

That everybody was like, ah, it's fine.

Yeah.

So there's even some speculation that their refusal to install sprinklers was because they needed to be able to burn their businesses again should they, you know, need some extra scratch.

But again, some things never change.

Yeah.

What do you know about sprinkler systems?

Anything?

I know a few things now.

Yeah.

More than I really wanted to know about sprinkler systems.

He's so good at taking pictures of them in places that they exist.

I mean, it might be hard for you to see them when you go to businesses, but you bring Colton, he's gonna find him.

You know, there's.

There's some people that cannot identify, and I think they physically just cannot see fire sprinkler systems.

I think.

Well, that means it's the wrong curvature

of the eyeball, I think.

Oh, they got like the fisheye or whatever it's called.

Walleye.

I don't know.

There's some.

It's.

There's a fishy for sure.

Yeah.

All right, so now we're coming to the fire.

Are you ready?

Oh.

All right.

A little too excited for it.

It's a spring Saturday in New York City.

It is pleasant enough for people to be out and about.

The Triangle shirtwaist factory is.

There's their payday.

They're working.

It's Saturday.

You know, they gotta work Saturday and Sunday also.

We'll see you tomorrow.

And they are there for their seven hour shift.

They come in at 7am or 8am and they're actually kind of ending their day, you know.

It takes time to kind of wind the day down, which is 4:45.

You got to shut all the machines down and not clean anything up, you know, just in case they want to set a fire in the off hours.

And again, you know, probably going to work the next day too.

Well, they won't, but they could and they didn't know.

You know, irony, cruel, cruel irony in the situation is that, you know, they were literally ending the day.

And also the other part of that is, is that, you know, in that strike that I talked about a little bit ago, one of the concessions that some of the, most of the other garment companies made is that you guys are only going to work five days a week now.

Not the shirtwait, not the Triangle shirtwaist factory.

We work all of the days, all of the time, because we gotta make

them now as they're gonna make themselves.

Yeah, that's right.

Believe me, if we could get them to, we would.

But these guys would have been so fast to get AI in their factories.

Oh, they'd love it.

They would love it.

We don't have to pay anybody.

This is great.

So as I mentioned before, the company occupied the top three floors of the ash building.

There was around 180, mostly on the eighth floor.

Who were the cutters?

They would cut all the, all the material before it would go upstairs and get sewed up.

And on the ninth floor, which is where all the sewing happened, there's around 260 mostly young immigrant women who worked at the sewing machines.

And then on the 10th floor you had 70 office workers which were bookkeepers and then also like pressers who would like iron stuff.

And then the, the big Jesus Harrison Blanc on the 10th floor, top, big gig of the castle, top of the chair.

And like I said, they were getting ready to leave for the day.

And the eighth floor was actually already starting to line up to get their bags checked, you know, just in case they're trying to steal stuff, because we know they want to.

And nobody knows exactly what happened.

But at approximately 4:40pm which is five minutes before they were going to quit, a scrap bin beneath one of the cutting tables on the eighth floor began to smolder.

And quite possibly due to a match or cigarette, even though smoking banned in the office band at the workplace, it was widely ignored, which is fair because, like, it's gonna cut your appetite down and it's gonna keep you working.

Smoke them up, dude.

And we're insured.

Who cares?

I was about to say a very progressive policy for them to have, but Even, Even better that they have the policy and nobody follows it.

Which right there, you would think if they could pro.

And maybe that's why they never came out and proved that it was a cigarette.

Because if they did, would that void their insurance if they have a no smoking policy and somebody was smoking?

Sure doesn't seem like it back then.

Well, yeah, that's true.

That's a good point.

You could have a literal photo of the guy pouring gasoline in the floor, and apparently it's still funny.

It's so crazy.

Insane.

Yeah.

But as we've kind of mentioned, this setup was really, really perfect for fire.

It, like, you couldn't build a better fire setup than this.

It's so perfect.

There's cloth everywhere, tissue paper hanging out from, like, clotheslines, which held, like, the patterns for the ladies.

So, you know, and there again, there was the baskets on the side around the.

Built around the perimeter of the sewing floor.

And then you have full barrels of machine oil, which is good.

And then no sprinkler system.

And, you know, if you get your fire pyramid out from page 10 in your boy Scout manual, you'll find that you need oxygen, which is, you know, good, and then your fuel, which is all of the fabric and oil, and then heat, which is your match and cigarette, whatever it was.

And then boom, boom goes the dynamite.

And pretty much instantly this fire spreads out because obviously there's so many flammable materials everywhere.

And also, oil barrels were on the eighth floor.

So this fire starts on the eighth floor, and then as soon as it spreads everywhere, which was basically instantly, it gets to the oil barrels.

And that really accelerates things.

Pun intended.

And accelerate.

It barely works, but it works.

I got him.

Yeah.

And it is wooden floors all around, which is another great design of this system.

You got fire burning up into wood floors, which are soaked in oil and then half fabric above them.

So basically, as soon as the eighth floor went up, the ninth floor went up as well.

And the reaction was.

I mean, it was quick.

They definitely were like.

Yeah, they went.

They have fire pails on the wall, which are just buckets prefilled with water.

Not going to cut it.

Here it is a little too much fire for some buckets of water because there's no slowing the thing down.

Did they stop, drop, and roll?

You know what?

I don't think they did.

That's why we do.

That's why we do it, folks.

A worker ran to alert the floor supervisor, and then another one grabbed the standpipe hose from the wall and turned the valve and then nothing happened.

Which is cool.

This state of the art hose that was super cool in this thing.

And they're like, this is awesome.

It had never been used and it had never been maintained.

So it was completely rusted shut.

It was.

That's what you want.

Yeah.

Why would you need a hose for stuff and seems kind of dumb.

We make shirts, not hoes.

I see what you did there.

A bookkeeper rang the 10th floor to alert the owners because.

Gotta tell them.

That's the.

Yeah.

Make sure they're okay.

And then they tried to call the ninth, but they didn't have a connection to the ninth floor.

People on the ninth floor had no idea the fire had even started until it was basically swallowing their floor right away.

So, yeah, we got, we got a couple levels of failure going on here.

Hose system rusted shut, corroded.

Nobody had ever tested it.

No sprinklers, obviously.

The alarm system non existent.

And nobody knew really what to do because they had never had a drill or anything.

So, you know, it's just.

Oh, go ahead.

For our faithful listeners out there, standpipe probably back in the day would have been a reservoir of water connected to a pipe system that is just hanging out there.

Standing there, you will.

You have to manually go and tap it to get water out of it as opposed to a fire sprinkler system that would just go.

Go off.

Right.

But doesn't do much good if you've never checked it and there's not water in there and it's rusted shut.

Yeah.

I mean, some would say that's probably the best way for it to operate.

I would think some might say that.

Yeah.

These, these guys, the guys that own this company would say that because that's

what, what a great excuse to let it all burn.

Yeah.

I'm sure nowadays there's probably some rules in place where you kind of have to have like regular checks on some of these things, like fire prevention systems and things like that.

Yeah.

There's international and state and municipal building codes.

So pretty much anything over three stories has to be sprinklered as like a rule of thumb here.

Yeah.

And if you have a sprinkler system, it has to be serviced annually by, you know, a fire.

Fire technician.

Yeah.

Service.

Right.

And if you don't have to have a sprinkler, you're supposed to have an annual testing and recertification of all your fire extinguisher units.

Right.

So there's.

There's all sorts of checks now.

Yeah, maybe.

Maybe a little bit too Much.

In certain ways.

Yeah.

But when you're dealing with people's lives, a little bit too much is probably better than not enough.

Yeah, clearly.

Yeah.

I don't know.

We're about to find out.

Yeah.

I definitely think that I've seen the.

The, you know, the guy inspecting the fire extinguishers every so often.

Like, I've.

I've seen that, and I've been a part of that in some jobs that I've had.

But I never really thought about that from the sprinkler system angle because, like, that's so far out of my jurisdiction in terms of, like, the jobs I've had.

And I don't deal with that part.

But, like, it does make sense.

Like, obviously, you gotta have somebody come and check it.

Yeah.

So as the word spread and people began to panic, they were not calm and cool and collected as we are trained to do in our fire drills.

They were freaking out, which makes sense because it was a lot of fire really fast.

So I kind of don't fault them there.

And there were a couple ways, specifically four, to get out of this building.

The first was the Green street stairway, which the eighth floor workers primarily used.

It was the fastest escape and the primary one.

And only the quickest of the 9th floor workers were able to use it.

Because soon, very quick, about three minutes, it was impassable because all of the smoke from the eighth floor began to flood it upward.

And you can't.

I mean, you could, I guess, try and get down, but it would disorient them and it would be basically impassable just because it would be hard to breathe and they'd probably pass out.

But around 100 people from the 9th floor did make it out this way, which is good.

And then the 10th floor people use this stairway, too.

But they went up instead of down and get to the roof and then try and get to an adjacent building or something.

And then you have the Washington Place door and stairway.

And this one is the most agitating of this whole ordeal because this is the locked door for the ninth floor.

And, you know, you'd think one of the first things you do when there's a fire is try and open as many doors to get people out as you could.

But the key holder for this floor had already fled out of the other doorway that was now closed.

So the other part of this is that this door opened inward towards the factory floor.

So as people panicked and rushed towards it, they put pressure on it.

It prevented it from being able to pull open if they would have like been able to work together and kind of just sheer willpower get a line of people pulling this thing.

They might have been able to at least pry it open or something, but they are pushing on it.

And ultimately there was around 50 bodies that would be piled up against this door in the aftermath.

And you have the elevators, which is the third form of exit.

And this is my silver lining for this story, because we have two guys running the elevators, Joseph Zito and Gaspar.

Material.

Material.

I don't know.

Anyway, these guys made repeated trips up into the smoke and heat to get as many people out as they could.

They were packing 30 to 40 people into these elevator cars that were designed for 10 to 12 people.

But eventually people began to panic and pry open the doors into the elevator shafts and then scale down the cables or just jumping down.

And the operator, Joseph Zito, said he heard, quote, the rattle of the silver from pay envelopes falling through the grading in the cars.

So that's depressing.

And you know, that.

That probably would stick with you for a long time.

Poor Joseph here only lived to be about 48, so he died from, you know, a lot of health complications later on, and also penniless.

So that's great.

These two guys saved around 150 people.

And this guy died without anything.

So.

Yeah, and he got some form of cancer or something from these fires, I would imagine.

But yeah, yeah, but they saved 150 people, which is, you know, half of the survivors, which is pretty awesome.

And then lastly, we have the fire escape door number four.

This is.

This is one of the things that workers used right away.

But it was 18 inches wide, which is meant for, you know, single file com escapes.

Granted, back then people were a lot skinnier than we are now.

But 18 inches sounds like way too much.

Some would say, but it's not that much.

Pretty large.

Yeah, it had this super cool feature where the doors that opened to the fire escape would actually open and block people from being able to go past them.

So they would have to, like open the door, get people out, and then like back people up and close the door and then go forward again.

Which was really the best design for a fire escape.

Yeah, when you're trying to get the heck out of there, it's super convenient.

And then again, that's how they still design them.

Actually.

We don't want to.

Yeah, I go slow.

Okay.

Gotta back up a little bit.

And then again, these things.

This thing only went to the second floor skylight and also it collapsed under the combined weight of all of the people.

And then heat, which 20 people were on it at the time, and they fell 100ft down to the courtyard and all died, which is terrible.

Especially, like, the.

The amount of, like, I'm going to get out, and then the door doesn't open, or, oh, I'm going to get out.

It's a fire escape.

And then it starts to creak and fall, and you're like, that's got to be terrifying.

Now, at this point, we have some eyewitness statements from one William Shepherd.

He's a journalist who just happened to be walking through the area at the time.

Or was he?

His conspiracy.

He did it.

No, but he's got a very, like, very vivid way with words.

And he ended up being like a novelist eventually.

Either he was at the time or would be after this.

I don't know.

But he.

You'll see what I mean.

He's got.

He's got a really colorful description.

So he was walking through and then saw the plume of smoke out of the building.

And then he was in his Washington Square Park.

And he goes over and he describes the following.

I saw every feature of the tragedy visible from the outside, outside the building.

And I learned a new sound, a more horrible sound than description can picture.

It was the thud of a speeding body or speeding living body on a stone sidewalk.

Thud dead.

Thud dead.

Thud dead.

Thud dead.

62 thud deads.

I called them that because that's the sound.

And the thought of death came to me each time at the same instant.

There was plenty of chance to watch them as they came down.

The height was 80ft.

The first 10 thud deads shocked me.

I looked up and saw that there were scores of girls at the windows.

The flames from the floor below were beating in their faces.

And somehow I knew that they, too must come down.

And something within me, something that I didn't know was there, steeled me.

I watched one girl falling, waving her arms, trying to keep her body upright until the very instant she struck the sidewalk.

She was trying to balance herself.

And then came the thud.

And a silent, unmoving pile of clothing.

Twisted, broken limbs.

Yikes.

And this stuck with this guy, too.

He remembered this for a long time.

I bet this second little description he got.

It's still pretty dark, but it's got a little.

It's got a little sweet human moment in it.

He says, I looked up and saw a love affair.

In the midst of all the horror, a young man helped a girl to the windowsill, and then he held her out and deliberately away from the building and let her drop.

He seemed cool, calculating.

He held out a second girl, did the same way to her, let her drop.

And then he held out a third girl who did not resist.

And I noticed that they were unresisting, as if he were helping them onto a streetcar instead of into eternity.

Undoubtedly, he saw that a terrible death awaited them in the flames, and this was only a terrible chivalry.

Then came love amid the flames.

He brought another girl to the window, and those of us who were looking saw her put her arms around him and kiss him.

And then he held her out into space and dropped her.

But quick as a flash, he was on the windowsill himself.

His coat fluttered upward, air filled his trouser legs, and I could see that he wore tan shoes and hose.

His hat remained on his head.

Thud, dead.

Thud, dead.

Together they went into eternity.

I saw his face before they covered it.

And you could see in it that he was a real man.

He had done his best.

So kind of a sweet moment, all things considered, I guess.

And it, you know, you gotta think about the people that are in this building at the time.

You know, they are seeing this massive, huge amount of fire and watching people get burnt alive or passing out from smoke and it's like, what else are we going to do?

And, you know, we saw a very similar sight during 9 11.

I mean, these people were like, this is.

I can't get out and how many people?

And honestly, the.

There's a documentary that I watched not that long ago about the fire crews, like the first ones on the scene, and they had a film crew with them.

Just happenstance, where was it?

And you start to hear the bodies fall and like, it is crazy because it just sounds like gunshots almost, because they were obviously falling from a much higher distance than this building, but still, like, you know.

And he describes the screams of the women punching out through the sound of the roar of the fire.

And then he said it was 10 or more impacts before he became just numb to the feeling and then counted around 62.

And then he describes that the fire teams arrived and were using the hoses, even though the water wouldn't even reach where the fire was at.

And all the water filling up the gutters, which was just saturated with red.

And the tallest ladder that they had was only reached the sixth floor, which is three floors shy.

And some people even tried to jump down on the ladder, which is a huge distance, but, I mean, better than falling all the way down, I guess, but.

And then you think, oh, well, we get these High rises in the city.

They got to have those nets for people to jump out.

And they did, but people would jump and then they just fell straight through.

So not ideal either.

But he talks about having seen some of these women marching the year prior in the, in the strike and that they were striking for sanitary and safe conditions in these shops.

And he says at the end of that, he says these dead bodies were the answer to what they were asking for, which is pretty, pretty dark.

In a stark different scene to the hellscape down below, the rooftop escapees managed to cross a gap between the ash building and the adjacent building, thanks to an NYU law professor named Frank Summer and his students, who grabbed two painters ladders.

Excuse me.

And all but one person on the 10th floor survived.

And last person was a lady whose hair and dress were on fire when the students found her, which has got to be a crazy sight as well.

These students were that helped them were Charles Kremer, Elias Cantor, George DeWitt, and Frederick Newman.

And Frederick Newman, of course, being the grandfather of Gary Newman, who wrote one of, if not the best song ever, Cars, Cars, Cars.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, they're not really pretty sure Gary Newman's British, but.

But these, these, you know, got to add some levity to this situation.

And the legal eagles did save the day, though.

They had around 150 people that they helped through the roof, which is awesome.

All told, 146 victims died.

141, I think was day of, and then the remaining five died over the next few days.

Of the 146, 123 of them were women, and the youngest were Kate Leon or Leon and Sarah Maltese.

And they were both 14.

And then the oldest was Providenza Pano, who was 43.

Yeah, I still like that name.

The Providenza.

That's such a cool name.

And you don't see it around anymore, which is unfortunate.

So old timey Italian names.

Around 58 to 62 of them jumped from the windows and some of them fell also, just trying to, like, get some air or whatever, which, you know, corroborates Shepherd's testimony.

Fifty or more died at the locked door, which I talked about, and then 35 in the elevator shafts, and then 20 when the fire escape collapsed.

56 of these bodies were burnt beyond recognition and only identified by jewelry, gold, capped teeth, shoe heels or socks.

And then at least one entire family was killed.

The mother and two daughters.

And then the daughters were found at the bottom of the elevator shaft, who they were holding on to each other which is also kind of sweet but super depressing.