Another forgotten aniversary

Forgetting an important date is not too difficult for us. Very often we forget our important meetings, the birthdays of our friends and relatives whom we do not get to meet often thanks to the hustles of the modern life, more often than not we even forget to just pick up the cell phone from our pockets and give a call to a long-ago school or college friend who may be living the next neighborhood, an acquaintance with whom we may have worked just six months back or to some old uncle and aunty just to give them a reminder that they exist in our increasingly sinking universes.

Remembering an event which took place a century is probably a more difficult task to perform. After all this age is the “age of breaking news” whereby we do not even remember the most significant event that took place a week or two back , leave aside what happened a century back. This year was significant in terms of anniversary since this was the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 i.e. World trade centre attacks, an event with great significance, remembrance and tragedy. Yet this year also marks the century of another tragic event which has got very little remembrance until now.

The year was 1911 and the day was 25-th March and the place was Asch Building, at 23-29 Washington Place, New York. It was a completely different world from our times. It was a World where Adolph Hitler was still very much a struggling artist in Vienna; Lenin was moving around Europe to organize followers around his ideas and Mahatma Gandhi a very much practicing lawyer in South Africa. That World was dominated by the great European powers of the day with almost all of current African and Asian nations under their influence. The United States was a fast growing power but still compared to the historical and classical imperial credentials of her more distinguished Western counterparts like the English and the French , the United states was more or less an well-doing start-up compared to the existing industrial behemoths like that of the British or the French empires. So when the event that I am going to talk about now took place on that 25-th March in New York, not many people around the World took notice of it and not many have taken the notice of that event thereafter.

The Asch Building was a ten-story office building in New York; it’s eighth, ninth and tenth floors were hosting the offices of Triangle Shirtwaist Company, owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, recent Russian immigrants to America. The main product of the company was “Shirtwaists” a recently invented and extremely popular Woman’s ware. The company employed around 500 people, mostly immigrant girls in the age group of 13-23. The workers had to work long hours and six days a week and had to settle with a salary which was barely able to meet their only very basic requirements.

On 25-th march Saturday, around 4:30 PM, the time when the normal work had stopped and regular paychecks were being paid to the workers suddenly a fire was observed at one of the trash bins. Probably it was lit by an unfinished match or cigarette. The company had provisions to prevent smoking inside its rooms but probably one of the workers , who proved to be little bit more innovative than the overseers , had been able to smuggle one. At the beginning, the workers who were present, tried to extinguish the fire by pouring water but the fire defeated all of their efforts and grew large. Then the people at the eighth floor tried to put out the fire by opening the fire extinguishing hoses but even those did not work out properly. As fire started growing more rapidly, the workers at the eighth floor informed the residents at the tenth floor where the owners were present and left the place. But the workers at the ninth floor were not aware of this rapidly detoriating situation mainly because of two reasons. One, the fire alarms which were there did not function properly and second, the invention of a device like the cell phones was still to happen almost a century later. So what made the workers at the ninth floor aware of the fire was fire itself, according to one worker.

There were two elevators, a fire-exit and stairways for the marooned workers to escape but as with other things in the day, fate slowly but surely removed those options from their hands. Normally it was regulated by the city industrial authorities that doors at the factories should be opened but the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company had ensured that the doors were closed so that no worker can get away with stealing. So the workers of the plant did not have the doors open to them. The two elevator operators Joseph Zito and Gaspar Mortillalo showed deep courage to keep the elevators running and they were able to save a lot of lives in the process but only till the elevators did function. As if it was inevitable, after some time the unfortunate workers trapped at the ninth floor, all options of escape had run out. Louis Waldman, a visitor described what happened next.

“Word had spread through the East Side, by some magic of terror, that the plant of the Triangle Waist Company was on fire and that several hundred workers were trapped. Horrified and helpless, the crowds — I among them — looked up at the burning building, saw girl after girl appear at the reddened windows, pause for a terrified moment, and then leap to the pavement below, to land as mangled, bloody pulp. This went on for what seemed a ghastly eternity. Occasionally a girl who had hesitated too long was licked by pursuing flames and, screaming with clothing and hair ablaze, plunged like a living torch to the street. Life nets held by the firemen were torn by the impact of the falling bodies.”

This horrible phenomenon of jumping to a sure and ghastly death whereby a human body ends up being a “mangled, bloody pulp” to escape from certain immolation will be repeated ninety years later during the twin tower attacks on 9/11. Human beings are prone to do extraordinary things when faced with extraordinary situations. The girls who jumped from that burning building did so to probably choose a quick end to an otherwise miserable life and not to suffer a more lingering and painful death by immolation. For some girls, probably that decision to jump from that building was the only choice that they could make in their lives where most of their lives’ decisions were made by others. Overall, 146 lives were lost to this original version of 9/11.

The owners by this time were safely evacuated and although they were tried for becoming first and second degree accomplishes in manslaughter but the victims of 25-th March , 1911 were not as fortunate as the victims of 11-th September , 2001. No “war on terror” will be launched, no 9-11 commissions will be formed and no foreign countries will be invaded, to avenge them. The owners would later be acquitted from their charges and that would eventually bring an end to this original version of America’s 9/11 and since the victims of 25-th March, 1911 were not so fortunate, very soon they will be put into the more oblivious pages of history.