Duly Noted: Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Some six months ago, a post in this department noted the fiftieth anniversary of a relatively unknown tragedy in Park Slope. Today's post marks the 100th anniversary of another tragedy, but one you've likely heard of: the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire -- often held up as a catalyst for workplace safety laws, and as a prime example of why measures such as fire drills are necessary.


The fire killed 146 workers -- most of then young women -- at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which occupied the top three floors of the ten-story Asch Building on the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street, just off Washington Square. It started in a wastebasket on the eighth floor, and spread quickly, growing so quickly that it was out of control before anyone had much chance to control it in the first place.

Remains of the fire
escape (NY Times)

One worker on the eighth floor placed a call to the tenth floor, but no call alerted those on the ninth floor. One of the NY Times articles says this is because the worker who received the call on the tenth floor did not hang up the phone, but I think in von Drehle's book it said that the ninth floor did not have a phone. Either way, most of those on the eighth and tenth floors escaped, while many of the 250 workers on the ninth were not so fortunate. Some made their way down the fire escape before it collapsed -- and indeed, in photos of its twisted remains, the fire escape looks rickety and hardly of much use in evacuating a crowded workplace in a fire. Many of those who escaped by means other than the stairs did so by way of the freight elevators; Joseph Zito and Gaspar Mortillalo, who ran the elevators, risked their own lives to save as many as they could, until the elevators failed.



Further reading
David von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America
Leon Stein, The Triangle Fire


Links
Article on Wikipedia
Blog posts from The Bowery Boys:
-  "Some Basic Information" (Feb. 28)
-  "Where they lived" (Mar. 24)
Posts from the New York Times City Room blog:
-  "A Half-Hour of Horror" (Mar. 21)
-  "The Building Survives" (Mar. 22)
-  "A Frontier in Photojournalism" (Mar. 23)
-  "Liberating Clothing Made in Confinement" (Mar. 22)
Blog post from the New-York Historical Society
Blog post from Ephemeral New York, on Zito and Mortillalo
Information from About.com Women's History

Duly Noted: Space Shuttle Challenger disaster

(This is a bit of a drive-by posting, since it's already 3 and I don't have time at the moment to write up more than a summary and a link list.)

Twenty-five years ago, the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated a minute and change after lift-off, killing its seven-person crew. It had been cold the night before, and predictions were for temperature near freezing at the time of the launch; the low temperature caused the failure of an O-ring on the shuttle's solid rocket booster. Engineers for one of NASA's contractors expressed concern about proceeding with the launch under the weather conditions forecast, but were overruled. The launch went forward, and the O-ring's failure allowed heated, pressurized gas to escape and damage certain hardware.


Links:
Wikipedia has an article about the launch. Sub-articles include:
--  Space Shuttle Challenger launch decision
--  STS-51-L Mission timeline
Detroit Free Press coverage: 25 years ago today: Space shuttle Challenger explodes
Space.com article: Challenger Shuttle Disaster at 25: NASA Recalls Darkest Moments
New York Times coverage from 1986:
-- The Shuttle Explosion: Suddenly, Flash of Fear Dashes Watchers' Hopes
-- Thousands Watch a Rain of Debris

Duly Noted: Plane Crash in Park Slope

If you also read Brownstoner, you might have seen that Green-Wood Cemetery will be unveiling a memorial today to the 134 people killed when two airplanes collided off of Staten Island. The wreckage of one, La Guardia-bound TWA Flight 266, landed on Staten Island (1) near where the collision occurred; the other plane, United Airlines Flight 826, bound for International Airport (now JFK), crashed at the intersection of 7th Avenue and Sterling Place in Park Slope.

Of the passengers and crew on those two flights, only one survived the initial crash. But that survivor -- an 11-year-old boy who had been thrown into a snowbank -- later died; half a dozen people on the ground were also killed.

Weather conditions at the time of the collision were what could be called, at best, sketchy: it had snowed earlier, and rain and fog still lingered (2). And while neither flight had reported any mechanical problems, but the United flight was apparently having trouble with its navigational receivers. Either way, it had strayed a dozen miles off course and into that of the TWA flight.

Witnesses speculated that the United flight's pilots were attempting an emergency landing in Prospect Park. On the face of it, it's not an unreasonable supposition, since the park is only a few blocks away from the crash site at Stirling Place and 7th Avenue, but it's uncertain whether the pilots still had control of the plane.

Further reading:
Wikipedia has an article about the crash; the "References" section contains a few sources not linked to here.

In addition, the New York Times has been running a series of articles about the anniversary.

• "A Collision in the Clouds" (December 12)
• "How It Happened" (December 14)
• "Scarred Roofs and Jet Parts" (December 15)
• "Sights and Sounds" (December 16)
• "50 Years Later, Traces of an Air Crash Linger in Rusty Metal, and Memories" (December 12)
• "The Neighborhood in 1960" (December 13)
• "The Boy Who Fell From the Sky" (December 16)
• "A Little Brother Remembers" (December 16)

The last two articles are about Stephen Baltz, the 11-year-old who survived the initial crash, but died a day later.

Additional stuff:
Brooklyn Public Library's "Brooklynology" blog had a post about the crash, as seen through one photographer's lens; it had not worked its way through my feed reader when I initially published this post.