The Triangle Fire (10 page)

Those who came out of the other ninth-floor window had started down to the eighth floor only to be stopped in a long line blocked by the jammed shutter at the eighth-floor landing. On both floors, small groups struggled to get past the shutters in front of the open windows.

The screaming mass of people became immobilized. Then, out of all six Triangle windows fronting on the fire escape the flames roared forth. The heat and the weight of the struggling bodies bent the iron slats and railings, twisting them from the tenth floor down, crumpling them against the side of the building and dumping the flaming human load to the yard below.

A. D. Feldstein, manufacturer of hats and caps in the Waverly Place building which backed onto the courtyard, heard screaming and ran to his rear window.

“I hope I never again hear anything like it,” he said. “It looked to me like a big pile of rubbish coming out of the windows, off the fire escape.”

Down they came, crashing through the skylight and setting the room underneath afire. “As the fire-crazed victims were thrown by the collapse of the fire escape,” the
Herald
added, “several struck on the sharp-tipped palings. The body of one woman was found with several iron spikes driven entirely through it.”

Darkness had closed in. At 6:45 a crew of firemen finished rigging two block-and-tackle hoists from the roof near the corner of the building. Others, in the interior of the building, continued to gather the bodies.

A fire engine with a searchlight had been stationed on Greene Street and another on Washington Place, their rays busily searching the faces of the building.

On the upper floors, the firemen wrapped the bodies, sometimes two and three at a time; they had run out of nets and began using tarpaulins. The bundles of dead were carried to the gaping corner windows, where they were hooked onto the block and tackle.

They came slowly down on both sides of the building corner. “As each body was started downward,” the
World
wrote, “the bright beam of a searchlight picked out its dark outline and followed it to the street. A fireman was on duty at each window it passed in its descent. He reached out and swung it clear of the sills. On the sidewalk a squad of policemen reached up as each body came to the end of its spotlighted journey.”

The hellish performance was greeted only by the wailing of the bereaved men and women and children who had come to search for their own, which, said the
American
, made “a plaintive note above the hum and chug of the engines.”

At about 8:15
P.M.
Battalion Chief Worth and a group of firemen working on the ground floor of the burned building near the Greene Street entrance heard faint cries for help. Listening intently, they decided the cries were coming from below.

Carrying lanterns, they went down to the basement, where they splashed through water up to their hips. Boxes floated around them. Their lanterns cast only short rays into the darkness so they decided to use a device by which miners locate trapped companions.

They broke up into two parties and started in opposite directions to circle the basement. At the same time they set up a system of connecting shouts by which to take a bearing on the victim they sought.

They finally placed his cries as coming from the southwest corner of the building. They broke through three partitions and battered down an iron door to reach him.

He was in the bottom of the elevator shaft. At first, they saw only his head, directly over the cable drum on which the elevator cables were wound. Just above him was the floor of the elevator that had slipped down from the lobby level.

His name was Hyman Meshel, the
Times
reported. “Crazed by fright and blackened by soot, he was sitting helplessly on the elevator cable drum with his body immersed almost to the neck in water which was slowly rising in the basement.”

The flesh on his hands had been torn from sliding down the elevator cable. His knuckles and forearms were full of glass splinters. His face was swollen and charred by the heat. “His eyes bulged from his head and he whimpered monotonously like a timid and spirit-broken animal,” the
Times
added.

Several times Chief Worth shouted to him, “Get up! We’ve come to help you!”

Meshel made no reply. When they reached him, they carried him head high through the dark, flooded cellar and up to the street. He was rushed to St. Vincent’s.

He had been in the rising water for four hours. In the hospital his wounds were treated and he was massaged in order to restore circulation to his paralyzed legs. Then he was able to tell how he had ended up nearly drowned in a blazing building.

He was working on the eighth floor when the fire started. In the excitement he had run to the Washington Place elevator. The door to the elevator was closed. Somehow, he beat in the glass upper portion of the shaft door and swung himself over the lower half. In the shaft, he could see the underside of the elevator above him. He grabbed one of the cables and began to descend hand over hand. But he grew faint and began to slip, tearing the flesh from his hands. He dropped to the bottom of the elevator shaft.

How long he lay there he did not know. But when he regained consciousness, he found he was lying in rising water. He could hear it splashing from a great height. Dazed, bruised, bleeding, he began to climb up the side of the elevator pit. But grease pots and wiping cloths on the pit embankment had caught fire, and it seemed to him that there were flames all around. He crept back into the elevator pit where he crouched in the water to escape the unbearable heat.

“As the water rose in the basement, Meshel began to fear that he would be drowned,” the
Times
reported. “He climbed up on top of the cable drum and sat there with his back braced against the wall while the water crept slowly up to his neck. The cold so paralyzed him that he was unable to move, and the fear that after suffering so much he would be drowned made him semi-conscious.”

The Edison Company strung rows of arc lights along Greene Street and Washington Place. Between eight and nine o’clock, they also strung lights through all the floors of the burned building. At 9:05 the lights in the building were suddenly turned on.

The shimmering glare lit up each gaping window. Huge, distorted shadows raced across the ceilings and walls visible through the window frames to the stunned crowd in the street.

Somewhere in the hollow of the building a burglar alarm began to ring—triggered into life by a broken wire. “It rang and rang,” said the
Tribune
. “Nobody thought to stop it. Nobody thought to investigate it. It rang as a knell all through the night for the black, shapeless bundles being lowered from the windows.”

As each body was received in the street, it was carefully searched for jewelry or other personal effects that might be useful later for identifying the body. The small things were put in an envelope on which was written the same number inscribed on the coffin into which the body was placed.

By eight o’clock, sixty bodies had been lowered and tagged. Death wagons that had already deposited their first loads began to return for a second, bringing back the emptied coffins which would be used again.

It had become clear to Charities Commissioner Drummond and his first deputy, Frank Goodwin, that the city morgue was too small to hold so many dead. He directed his men to convert the covered pier at the foot of East Twenty-sixth Street, at the far end of which were the offices of his department, into a temporary morgue.

Deputy Police Commissioner Driscoll ordered a temporary police station to be set up on the pier and put Captain O’Connor of the East Twenty-second Street station house in charge. Forty men from various precincts were directed to report there at once. Of these, twenty-five were assigned to form a line across Twenty-sixth Street at First Avenue.

The dreary journeys of the death wagons from the Asch building to the temporary morgue went on and on. Most of them drove up Broadway to Fourteenth Street, into Fourth Avenue to Twenty-third Street, then turned east to First Avenue and on to Twenty-sixth Street. Each wagon, its bell clanging through the crowded streets, carried three or four bodies and several policemen.

At the pier the coffins were lifted from the wagons under glaring arc lights that had last been used for a similar purpose in 1904 when the
Slocum
sank in the East River. “In cases where the bodies were not burned too seriously,” said the
Sun
, “they were wrapped in shrouds and laid out on the floor of the pier with heads to the wall on the two sides of the building. The bodies that were badly burned remained in the coffins.”

This was the reason for the shortage of coffins. By ten o’clock, thirty-three badly burned bodies meant that not enough coffins were being sent back to Washington Place; the dead lay there waiting.

Commissioner Drummond sent the Charities Department ferryboat,
The Bronx
, to Blackwell’s Island in the middle of the East River to get the coffins that were stored in the carpenter’s shop of the Metropolitan Hospital. The steamer returned with two hundred at about 10:30
P.M.
and “from that time on there was no delay for lack of coffins,” the
Sun
added.

There was also a shortage of manpower on the pier. Commissioner Drummond called on William C. Yorke, superintendent of the Municipal Lodging House on East Twenty-fifth Street, for as many men as he could muster to handle the bodies in the emergency.

At about ten o’clock, Superintendent Yorke, heading a double line of 24 derelicts, came marching through the entrance of the temporary morgue. Throughout the long night, this group of the city’s disinherited lifted the bodies, cared for the dead.

At the Asch building the mocking burglar alarm continued to ring. At 11:15 another body was lowered from the ninth floor. When it reached the street a helmeted fireman leaned out of the ninth-floor window and shouted to those below: “That’s all on the upper floors!”

At 11:30 o’clock, Chief Croker wearily told the reporters: “My men and I have gone through every floor, every room in the building. We have gone through the basement, we have gone through the airshaft at the rear of the building. Every body has been removed.”

It was, the
World
summed up, “the most appalling horror since the Slocum disaster and the Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago. Men and women, boys and girls were of the dead that littered the street: That is actually the condition—the streets were littered with bodies. At intervals throughout the night, the very horror of their task overcame the most experienced policemen and morgue attaches. The crews were completely changed no less than three times.”

The Mercer Street station house of the 8th Police Precinct was only three blocks from the Asch building. It became the first focal point of the frenzy of those who sought but could not find their loved ones.

They had been kept at a distance while doctors and firemen worked on the bodies on the sidewalk. Under police escort, they were taken to the Mercer Street station house. Before the overwhelming proportions of the disaster were realized, the station house had been designated as a headquarters, and the first injured were brought there.

Then an order was issued that no more injured were to be brought to the station house. A line of policemen covered the entrance and inquirers were told to proceed to the morgue.

But from six o’clock on, crowds of women kept coming into the precinct building. Even after the doors were shut “the crowd of crying mothers and sisters was lined up by twos and when admitted, were asked to give the names of those they sought and then to go to the morgue,” the
Sun
reported.

Mention of the morgue made the women hysterical. A policeman opened the door of the section room to come out. “In a wink,” added the
Sun
, “the crowd had burst into the patrolmen’s sitting room, vainly looking for bodies. The women screamed and beat their foreheads on the desk rail.”

One of those who stormed the precinct house was Gussie Horowitz, a tucker who had escaped from the eighth floor. Back and forth, she elbowed her way through the crowd, calling her brother’s name. Rose Katz grabbed her arm.

“Your brother Morris is all right,” she shouted to Gussie above the din. “He came down from the eighth floor with me. He was a little hurt. He sent me to look for you!”

The blotter of the Mercer Street station house confirms the fact that while the bodies were being transported to the morgue on the pier, the small objects which had linked them to life were brought to the police station.

Some of the first of these were turned in by Patrolman Meehan who had come galloping down Washington Place even before the arrival of the first fire engine. The day book entry on Meehan ends on a practical note that comes as a relief in all the horror: “At 4:55, while putting an unknown woman who had been injured in the fire into an automobile, he caught his coat and tore the tail of same.”

By 9
P.M
. the miscellany of scraps of lost lives entered on the precinct record included: “One lady’s handbag containing rosary beads, elevated railroad ticket, small pin with picture, pocket knife, one small purse containing $1.68 in cash, handkerchiefs, a small mirror, pair of gloves, two thimbles, a Spanish comb, one yellow metal ring, five keys, one fancy glove button.”

Under “property found by Fire Chief Ed Croker” the following is listed: “One lady’s handbag containing one gent’s watch case number of movement 6418593 and a $1 bill, one half-dozen postal cards, a button hook, a man’s photo, a man’s garter, a razor strap.”

Then: “Patrolman Edward Clark brought to this station one portion of limb and hair of human being found at fire. Sent to morgue in patrol wagon.”

Toward midnight, many of the stricken moved dazedly in the circuit from Washington Place, to Mercer Street Station, to the morgue on Twenty-sixth Street, and then back to Washington Place. The early morning scene at the Mercer Street station house was heart-rending, said the
Times
.