fascinatinghorror

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Added 2022-08-16 10:15:00 +0000 UTC

I was very lucky with the sources for this story, as there are some fantastic, well-organised, well-maintained and thorough archives online relating to the fire.

This one, maintained by Cornell University and the Kheel Center, is my favourite. Among many other things, you can read multiple accounts from survivors of the fire, which include details that would simply have been lost to time in any other form.

I'm talking about details like the fact that the workers on the 9th floor were in an unusually buoyant mood on the day of the fire, because one of them had just gotten engaged. Or that some of the men from the factory tried to form a human ladder from one building to the next to help trapped workers escape... but fell to their deaths in doing so.

Those are just a few of the details from one interview. If you're interested in learning more about the fire, I'd really recommend browsing the others. They give an absolutely unrivalled window into what it was like to live through.