Inspiration always comes at the strangest time.
University of Denver alumnus David Von Drehle explained to a crowd in Lindsay Auditorium last week where he received his inspiration for his newest book Triangle: The Fire that Changed America.
Von Drehle received his inspiration for the book while covering a Bronx nightclub fire on March 25, 1990 for the Miami Herald that took place on the 79th anniversary of a historic fire which, at the time, was the largest workplace disaster in the history of New York City.
Von Drehle’s recent book chronicles the 1911 fire in Greenwich Village that killed 146 people and ultimately sparked a string of workplace reforms including the New Deal.
The Triangle Fire, as it became known, took place in the building of Triangle Waist Company. The building still stands in lower New York and serves as a biology lab for nearby New York University.
Von Drehle described the conditions immigrant workers faced working in the building. The eighth floor was a crowded room full of skillful shirt cutters who would cut at least 100 shirts with knives at one time. They worked at long tables and threw their scraps into large bins under the tables.
These scraps were picked up every two months, and usually amounted to about a ton of scraps.
About 4:30 p.m., on that fateful day the workers began to prepare to close the building on the ninth floor by locking all but one door to search all employees before they left the building in order to prevent them from stealing.
Meanwhile, on the eighth floor it is believed that an employee lit a cigarette and dropped the cigarette butt or the match into a bin full of scraps.
The ton of scraps of fabric were “even more flammable than tissue paper,” Von Drehle explained.
“It was like a fire bomb,” Von Drehle added, describing the spread of the blaze.
Bosses on the 10th floor the bosses were notified of the fire and escaped by climbing out the fire escape, onto the roof and to the roof of the building next door. The workers on the eighth floor escaped through the only unlocked door and down the stairs or down the fire escape before it collapsed.
There were 250 people trapped on the ninth floor.
“They panicked,” Von Drehle explained.
Two Italian immigrant workers made three or four trips in the freight elevator to get trapped workers out.
“The real heroes (the two Italians) saved over 100 workers with their courage,” Von Drehle said.
The workers left behind searched for a way out. All the exists were locked, burning or collapsed, and the tallest ladder owned by the New York Fire Department at the time wasn’t tall enough to reach the ninth floor windows.
Outside the factory a crowd of New Yorkers who had been enjoying the spring weather that Saturday gathered. A few of the onlookers began to scream for the employees to jump from the window into the street to save themselves, Von Drehle explained.
“Fifty-four people came out of those windows in the last minute of the fire,” Von Drehle said. It was “parallel to 9-11 because so many people saw it.”
The bodies piled up in the streets so that the emergency vehicles could barely get through to the burning building.
The 80 people who did not jump from the windows died that day in the factory.
However, some good did come out of the fire that day. Among the on lookers that day was Francis Perkins. She later became a member of the commission that investigated the fire and gained greater fame by becoming the first woman to be head of a federal department when Franklin Roosevelt appointed her the Secretary of Labor. Because of what she witnessed that day, she helped enact several reform laws for factories like the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory to prevent sweatshop conditions.
Von Drehle said he wrote the book “to bring some of these victims back to life.” In his book Von Drehle has listed all the victims of fire that day and describes many of their lives in his book
Von Drehle graduated from DU in 1983 and continued his studies at Oxford University before returning to the United States to work for the Miami Herald. He currently works for the Washington Post.
