The Triangle Fire by William Greider, Leon Stein, Michael Hirsch

the elevators.
    The escape routes were closing off. Ida Nelson, clutching her week’s pay in her hand, ran to the fire escape windows. She looked out and all she could see was heavy smoke laced with flames.
    “I don’t know what made me do it but I bent over and pushed my pay into the top of my stocking. Then I ran to the Greene Street side and tried to get into the staircase.”
    In the few minutes since Anna Gullo had gone down the stairs, that route had been cut off by fire. Now Ida Nelson saw that “I couldn’t get through. The heat was too intense.
    “I ran back into the shop and found part of a roll of piece goods. I think it was lawn; it was on the bookkeeper’s desk. I wrapped it around and around me until only my face showed.
    “Then I ran right into the fire on the stairway and up toward the roof. I couldn’t breathe. The lawn caught fire. As I ran, I tried to keep peeling off the burning lawn, twisting and turning as I ran. By the time I passed the tenth floor and got to the roof, I had left most of the lawn in ashes behind me. But I still had one end of it under my arm. That was the arm that got burned.”
    Rose Cohen had already reached the roof by the time Ida came through the door. Both were sleeve setters, but in the huge ninth-floor factory they had never spoken to each other. However, Rose recalls that “there was one little girl who, like me, saved herself by running to the roof. She had wrapped white goods all around herself and one piece was still burning. I ran to her and helped her beat out the flames. Then I tried to hold back another girl who tore herself away from us and ran back into the stairway to look for her sister.”
    Rose had been on her way to the dressing room when she heard the cry of fire. She remembers that many of the girls still in the aisles were “caged in by the wicker work baskets.” As she ran she tried to down the rising panic in her heart with the thought of what, she says, “all greenhorn immigrants like my parents used to say: ‘In America, they don’t let you burn.’
    “I ran into the dressing room with the machinist and some of the others. The walls of the dressing room began to smoke. We ran back into the shop. Girls were lying on the floor—fainted. People were stepping on them. Other girls were trying to climb over the machines. Some were running with their hair burning.
    “I followed the machinist to a window and he smashed the glass with his hand to let the smoke out—it was choking us. Instead, the flames rushed in. For a few seconds I stood at that window. My hair was smoldering. My clothes were torn. I turned and ran to the Greene Street exit.
    “I put my hands on my smoldering, long hair and I started up the stairs. On the tenth floor, I went in through the door. The place was empty. All I could hear was the fire burning. Here, I thought, I would die—here was the end. I didn’t realize that right above me—one more floor—was the roof.
    “Then I heard some one calling, ‘Come to the roof! Come to the roof!’ I turned and saw him in a corner near the staircase holding an armful of record books. If not for him I would have died there on the tenth floor. My life was saved by a bookkeeper.”
    The red flames had raced across the big room, feeding on the flimsy fabric, the wicker baskets, the oil-soaked machines and floor. The machine tables were burning. Solid fire now pushed forward from the rear of the shop, including the Greene Street stairway. It divided the trapped ones into two groups.
    One group remained cornered in the areaway in front of the Washington Place elevator doors and staircase. The stairway door remained closed, the girls clawing at it and screaming.
    The second group was trapped, scattered, in the aisles between the sewing plants. Now the advancing flames forced them back down the aisles toward the windows facing Washington Place. Some climbed over the rows of machines only to get caught in the last aisle running along the