The Triangle Fire (22 page)

“Then on the 10th of April, as from a clear sky, a detective goes to the premises and within 25 minutes a lock is discovered. Fifteen days after the fire they seek to say that was the lock of the door.

“Why argue this? Where is the lock of the tenth floor where the fire did not do damage? Where is the lock of the sixth floor where the fire did not touch it? A most mysterious disappearance.

“Right after the discovery by the newspapers of this lock, there is no lock on the sixth floor. All of the locks, may it please your Honor, in that building from the tenth floor down to the basement were identical. No lock on the eighth floor, your Honor, has been discovered. Why, I ask, is there no lock for the tenth floor?

“But the one lock that is wanted—that is found on the 10th day of April. And they say that exclusive opportunity has nothing to do with this case.”

But Bostwick was undismayed. Patiently, he set out to prove that this and only this could possibly be the lock that trapped the girls on the ninth floor.

First he pointed out that this was a unique lock, unlike any other that might have been found on the ninth floor. It was a mortised lock, one set into the wood so that its sides were flush with the wooden surface of the door instead of being set onto the outside surface of the door. No other doors on the floor could have had mortised locks. The dressing room door was closed with padlocks. The toilet doors had no locks. A sliding door in the partition at the Washington Place side was only ⅞ inch thick—too thin to hold a mortised lock.

Secondly, Bostwick continued, this lock was different from all other locks in the building. He began the chain of proof for this by calling to the stand Battalion Chief Thomas Larkin who described the fire that had occurred on the ninth floor on November 1, 1902. That was when a new lock, the one in the box, was put into the door.

Then Bostwick proceeded to tie the lock in with the 1902 fire. He called Charles W. Baxter, superintendent of the J. W. Clark Co. which had repaired the ninth-floor door in 1902. Then he called Emil Woehr, a dealer in builder’s hardware who had purchased the lock along with other materials from the Reading Hardware Co. and had sold it to J. W. Clark Co. in December, 1902. Finally, he called Francis J. Kelly, who had worked for Reading and had filled and delivered the order to Woehr Brothers.

The chain was complete, and Bostwick sought to strengthen it with the word of an expert. He called John D. Moore, a former state commissioner now working as a consultant engineer. Moore swore that the lock could not have come from the Greene Street door because that was a right-handed door and the lock in the box was a left-handed lock which could come only from a left-handed door. The Washington Place staircase had a left-handed door.

Steuer chewed on it. His great talent for detail, his informed imagination came into play. He demanded to know what made a door left-handed.

It was a door which, in being opened, moved counterclockwise, Moore replied.

And what was a left-handed lock?

Moore carefully explained that the extended bolt or tongue of a lock can be drawn back into the lock when closing the door in one of two ways. One way is by turning the knob of the lock. The other is to push the door closed until the beveled side of the bolt hits the metal lip or strike attached to the doorframe. Because it is beveled, the bolt will then gradually be forced back into the lock, ready to spring out again when it is finally in line.

A left-handed lock, Moore continued, is one that will do this on a left-handed door. A right-handed lock placed on such a door would, at the moment of strike, have its beveled face on the wrong side and would present a flat surface to the metal lip, thus stopping the door from closing.

The lock in the box was a mortised lock, a left-handed lock, and the Washington Place door was a left-handed door, Moore concluded.

Now that Steuer understood the difference, he began to use that understanding to pick apart the lock. He had Francis Kelly back on the stand. Kelly had told of handling locks for twenty-one years and had positively identified the left-handed lock in the box as one that he had handled.

Steuer handed Kelly a right-handed lock. He asked Kelly if he could take it apart and convert it into a left-handed lock.

Kelly answered he could, by reversing the latch bolt.

Could any lock be made right-handed or left-handed?

Yes.

When the locks leave the factory, are they different?

No, we ship them all right-handed.

When you make locks, are they made left-handed or right-handed?

We build them so that they can be reversed.

Then there isn’t any such thing as a right-handed or left-handed lock, Steuer concluded disdainfully, turning away from the witness.

Its usefulness thus undermined, People’s Exhibit No. 30 was received in evidence.

The lock had a key.

In opening for the defense, Steuer told the jury: “Louis Brown will tell you that year in and year out, on the Washington Place side on the eighth and ninth and tenth floors, the key was all the time in the lock.” He gave no explanation why this was the case where doors were alleged to have been unlocked.

Brown, the heroic machinist who finally got the eighth-floor Washington Place door open, had apparently taken for granted, in the moment of his heroism, that the door was locked.

“I naturally thought that they must have locked the door,” he told the court. “There was a key always sticking in that door…. All I tried to do was to turn the key in the lock. But the key wouldn’t turn to unlock the door. It did not turn. So I pulled the door open….”

Steuer explained to the jury that “the key would not turn because the door was not locked.” But he did not explain the need for an ever-present key if the door was kept unlocked during working hours.

Only defense witnesses could describe the key.

May Levantini said it hung by a piece of colored string. Ida Mittleman testified it was attached to the door by a piece of tape, “or something,” which William Harris said was a length of white lawn. And cleanup man Nathan Salub told the jury that “once at the door I saw the string was worn out and I myself picked up a piece of white goods, a strong string, and I tied it to the door.”

Levantini said the string was ½ inch or more in width; Harris estimated a width of 2 to 3 inches. Levantini described the string as being ½ yard long; building engineer Casey called it 6 to 8 inches long and insisted that the key was also 6 inches long.

Not one witness for the people from the ninth floor mentioned the key or the string. But the defense called two witnesses who had not only seen the key but also had actually used it.

Steuer had some difficulty in reviewing the testimony of Gussie Rapp, a ninth-floor forelady and one of the two witnesses. He declared to the jury:

“Gussie Rapp told you that the Washington Place door was always unlocked and that the key was in the door. I want to withdraw that statement. What she did say was she said that the door was always unlocked—no, that was not it. She said this: That there may have been—she has no positive recollection of it—that there may have been a time when that door was locked when she came to it. But if it was, she simply had to turn the key and pass through.”

The other witness who handled the key, even on the day of the fire, was May Levantini who declared: “The door was locked. I turned the key that was in the lock and I opened the door.”

Steuer called more than a score of witnesses who testified to the ease and the frequency with which people ordinarily passed through the ninth-floor Washington Place staircase door. He called seven salesmen, five foreladies and assistants, three porters, two shipping clerks from the tenth floor, two watchmen of whom one doubled as a quitting-time purse inspector, the company superintendent, the machinist, the painter, a big department store buyer, the ragman, the building superintendent, the building engineers, and others.

In turn, the people called more than a dozen workers who swore that in the moment of peril they had tried to exit through that door and had found it locked.

Joseph Brenman had pushed through the crowd: “I tried the door, I took hold of the handle and pulled it.” It wouldn’t open. Anna Gullo said: “I tried the door. The door was locked.” Mary Bucelli declared: “I tried to open the door but I couldn’t.” Ida Nelson swore: “I pushed at the door but I could not open it.”

At Bostwick’s request, Katie Weiner, who had lost a sister in the fire, rose from the witness chair in a hushed courtroom and stepped to a side door within easy view of the jurors. She put both hands on the door knob and began to wrestle with it, her voice filling with tears as she said:

“I pushed it toward myself and I couldn’t open it and then I pushed it outward and it wouldn’t go. I was crying, ‘Girls, help me!’”

Ethel Monick insisted she was the first to reach the door. “I tried the door and I could not open it. So I hollered, ‘Girls, here is a door!’ and they all rushed over and tried to open it. But it was locked and they hollered, ‘The door is locked and we can’t open it!’”

In the confusion, many had thought they were the first to reach the door.

“I was just about the first one to catch hold of the knob and I twisted it and turned it and it was closed and it wouldn’t open,” Rose Mayer swore.

“I was the first at the door,” said Rose Glantz.

“I was the first one at the door,” said May Levantini.

May Levantini, mother of three, had saved herself by sliding down the elevator cable from the ninth floor. She was the strongest witness for the defense, for in her words was the proof that those who died at the Washington Place door were not the victims of a locked exit but of fire in the staircase.

She had run to the door and found “the key was right in the door tied to a string. I turned the key. I opened the door. I looked out and I saw the girls running down from the eighth floor. And as I looked over that way, flames and smoke came up and they made me turn in. I turned right in and ran to the elevators.”

In support of Levantini’s testimony, Steuer called the Mittleman sisters, Ida and Anna. He reminded the jury that Anna had said she followed Levantini through the open door and looked down over the banisters. “The door was open and she saw the flame and she saw the smoke and she saw the girls going down the stairs. And fearing that she could not get down safely, she turned back through the open door.” Mary Alter, the tenth-floor typist, strengthened the argument by telling how she too had opened a door to the Washington Place stairs, the door on the tenth floor, and had seen the smoke and the flame below. When Bostwick asked if she was certain she had seen flames she replied that “as I looked over the rail I saw a great volume of smoke and I saw a red streak.”

Certainly if Mary Alter had seen the flame from the tenth floor, May Levantini and Anna Mittleman had seen it from the ninth, Steuer inferred.

But Bostwick wondered out loud how there could be both flames and living people in that eighth-floor doorway at the same time. “Every girl went through that door and still there was no flame,” he stressed. Machinist Brown had been the last one out that door and was untouched by fire. No injured were found in the stairwell.

Bostwick was also bothered by the mutual dependence of the Levantini and Mittleman testimony. He read from the record to show that Ida Mittleman admitted her sister had refreshed her memory about the incident at the door. “She told me about how the two of us did go in the hall and that is what I do remember; and about the door, she said she saw me open it,” Ida Mittleman had declared.

In turn, Anna Mittleman had admitted discussing the events with May Levantini. “She told me she opened the door,” Anna Mittleman had said.

Bostwick insisted that “Levantini lied on the stand,” that “it was not until after she had seen Flecher and Bernstein that she said she opened the door.”

Bostwick added it up for the jury: “Anna tells May and May tells Anna, and all of this is after they have seen Bernstein. But they don’t remember anything about it. They simply are convinced from what they have heard that Levantini was telling them the truth. Anna says that Ida told her so and vice versa.”

Just as May Levantini was completing her direct testimony, Juror No. 3 directed a question to her. He wanted to know: “What did you do to the door after you came back in?”

“I pushed it in back of me and ran for the elevator.”

“You closed it?” asked the juror.

“Yes sir.”

“Did you lock the door after you came back in?”

“No, sir. I would never think of turning that key again.”

Yet no others got through the door.

Because it was locked, the people charged, it was at this door that Margaret Schwartz had died.

Bostwick relied heavily on Kate Gartman and Kate Alterman to prove this charge. These two had emerged with Margaret Schwartz from the dressing room.

“In going to the elevator doors, there is a partition,” Kate Gartman said. “I had seen Margaret Schwartz grab hold of the partition. I don’t know—she kind of leaned or fell toward the dressing room. Then I saw the elevator come up.”

Bostwick saved Kate Alterman for the last. And it was as if Steuer had been waiting for her. Earlier he listened to Lena Yaller tell how she had escaped from the ninth floor to the roof. He asked her to tell the story again. When she finished, Steuer asked if she could tell those words over again. Apparently convinced that Steuer was questioning the accuracy of her account, she quickly answered: “I could tell them ten times.”

Now he listened to Kate Alterman’s direct testimony of Margaret Schwartz’s last moments:

Then I went to the toilet room. Margaret disappeared from me and I wanted to go up Greene Street side, but the whole door was in flames, so I went and hid myself in the toilet rooms and bent my face over the sink, and then I ran to the Washington side elevator, but there was a big crowd and I couldn’t pass through there. Then I noticed someone, a whole crowd around the door and I saw Bernstein, the manager’s brother, trying to open the door, and there was Margaret near him. Bernstein tried the door, he couldn’t open it.