There was a last desperate attempt to save lives. Charles Swartz, Jr., an 18-year-old passenger, climbed into a boat and helped its owner rescue 22 people. “I went overboard whenever I could,” he recalled, “and swam up to people and helped them in the boat.” A Riverside Hospital switchboard operator swam out to the ship a dozen times, saving as many people as possible before she collapsed, exhausted.
Some passengers saved themselves in grisly ways. “I didn’t have no life preserver at all,” said ten-year-old Henry Ferneissen. “I went down twice and I swallowed a whole lot of water, but pretty soon I caught hold of a dead woman and then somebody grabbed me with a hook. If it hadn’t been for that dead woman I’d been drowned sure.”
One hour after embarking, the General Slocum was a smoldering ruin and most of its thirteen hundred passengers were dead. One survivor said, “To my dying day I’ll never forget the scene. Around me were scores of bodies, most of them charred and burned.”
A view of the paddle wheel and other debris on the burned-out steamship. [LOC, USZ62-138402]
Rescue workers fished hundreds of corpses from the water and pulled hundreds more from the wreckage. For several days afterward, people found corpses of men, women, and children washed up onshore or floating in the river. Some victims were never found. No one knows exactly how many of General Slocum’s passengers died. The official estimate is 1,021. All of the Slocum’s crew survived.
Partial list of the dead. [Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 15, 1904]
A grand jury later indicted two government steamship inspectors, four Knickerbocker Steamship Company executives, and Captain Van Schaick. Only the captain was convicted of negligent homicide. The judge sentenced him to ten years in Sing Sing, an upstate New York prison. Meanwhile, federal officials made steamboat safety regulations more stringent and reformed the U.S. Steamboat Inspection Service.
The General Slocum tragedy is the worst peacetime maritime accident in American history. It was New York’s deadliest disaster until the twenty-first century.
A family that lost five of its members to the fire. [Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 15, 1904]
6
AMERICA’S LAST GREAT URBAN FIRE
SAN FRANCISCO, 1906
A half century after the 1849 California Gold Rush, San Francisco had become the Crown Jewel of the Pacific. It was the West Coast’s largest city and, according to the 1900 census, the ninth-largest city in the United States. But three horrific days in April 1906 left San Francisco in ruins and its future in doubt.
At 5:12 A.M. on Wednesday, April 18, one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded rumbled along the West Coast from Southern California north to Oregon and as far inland as Nevada. San Francisco was only two miles from the quake’s epicenter. In just 48 seconds, the quake toppled hundreds of buildings, felled utility poles, broke gas pipes, and ruptured storage tanks full of oil, gasoline, and kerosene. It also snapped most of the pipes supplying the city’s water from outlying reservoirs.
Market Street, one of the city’s main thoroughfares, before the fire. [LOC, USZ62-98494]
The San Francisco Fire Department’s seven hundred firefighters quickly turned out. At first, there were no fires visible, so they rescued people trapped in collapsed buildings. “At No. 313 Sixth St., the place was completely wrecked and the bare foot of a child could be seen in a pile of debris,” Captain C. J. Cullen of Engine Company No. 6 later wrote in his report. “We cut our way into the premises with axes and shortly afterwards rescued three little children and five adults.” But soon the firefighters had to turn their attention to numerous fires, started by downed electrical wires and stoves in restaurants and homes, that had begun to flare up all across San Francisco.
Engine 15 several years before the 1906 fire. [LOC, HABS CAL,38-SANFRA,72--3]
Residents amid the earthquake’s destruction, watching the spreading fire. [LOC, G4085-0201]
South of Market Street, reporter James Hopper saw fire “swirling up the narrow way with a sound that was almost like a scream.” At Third and Market, “the tallest skyscraper in the city was glowing like a phosphorescent worm,” Hopper wrote, describing the 15-story Call Building, and “fire poured out of the thousand windows.”
In just a few hours after the earthquake, San Francisco was in flames. [LOC, USZ62-44926]
By evening, “the lower portion of Market Street, Chinatown, and Nob Hill was one seething furnace,” observed another reporter. “Thousands of angry flames shot high into the sky, and the cracking timbers, the falling buildings, and the terrific roar of the fire sounded like a dozen cyclones.”
A piano company ablaze. [Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, University of California, Berkeley]
Firefighters tapped every possible source of water, including the sewers. Resorting to colonial-era firefighting tactics, Engine Company No. 26 formed a bucket brigade from a well to a burning building. Other firemen tapped old underground storage tanks, called cisterns, each holding between ten thousand and thirty thousand gallons of water. Sixty of them had been built a half century earlier, after a big fire in 1851 had leveled the young city.
Soldiers patrol the streets to prevent looting. The Call Building, then the tallest building west of the Mississippi River, looms in the background. [LOC, USZ62-96789]
At 17th and Howard streets, reported Captain Cullen, “there being considerable water in a large hole in the middle of the street owing to a broken main, with stones and sand we dammed the water that was running to waste and put our Engine to work after stretching hose as far as Capp St. near 16th St. Here we had a very hard fight as the wind was blowing the intense heat of the fire in our direction. Soon it became unbearable … but after fighting every inch of the ground we succeeded in getting it under control at 20th St.”
One reliable water source was San Francisco Bay. “We laid a line from the Fire Boat to Broadway and Mason streets, a distance of fourteen blocks, taking about 4,000 feet of hose,” reported Battalion Chief John McClusky. “The Fire Boat and three engines [were] all pumping on this single line, [and] with this one stream we worked vainly to prevent the fire from crossing the north side of Broadway.”
The firefighters made one heroic stand after another. “Many of them dropped utterly exhausted at their post of duty, which was quickly taken up by one of their comrades,” a writer observed. “They stood in the smoke of the roaring furnaces to fight the flames and cases are on record where police officers and volunteer firemen had to continually apply a stream of water on the regular firemen on duty in order to keep them from being burned or scorched.”
The firefighters worked around the clock, snatching bits of sleep whenever they could. “When opportunity afforded,” wrote Captain George F. Brown of Engine Company No. 2, his men “got an hour or two of rest in the doorways and in the streets alongside their apparatus, and the little they had to eat during these fifty hours of continuous service was given to them by kind-hearted people.”
The crowds in the streets, said one observer, resembled war refugees: “thousands of families of women and little children dragged themselves from place to place in front of the flames, lying without shelter in vacant lots, exposed to fog and chilling rain.”
The cold drizzle didn’t slow the fire, so the firefighters created firebreaks. Dennis Sullivan, the city’s chief fire engineer for 13 years, had been an expert on the use of explosives. But he and firefighter James O’Neil had been fatally injured in the earthquake. The men setting the explosives learned by trial and error. “It was an earth-racked night of terror,” recalled one resident. “We watched the leaping and hissing flames in the city below us, and heard the crashing of buildings.… By dynamiting buildings, the firemen hoped to check the conflagration. Much dynamite was used, many buildings blown to atoms, but all was in vain.”
Firemen spraying a heavily damaged building. [LOC, USZ62-113371]
One explosion made the fire worse. The flames were nearly conquered, some observers believed, unt
il the firefighters dynamited a building on Van Ness Avenue. The explosion spread the fire, which then destroyed another fifty blocks.
Hours later, firebreaks did work. “The great stand of the fire-fighters was made Thursday night on Van Ness Avenue,” wrote novelist Jack London, who came from his home across the bay to see the fire. “Had they failed here, the comparatively few remaining houses of the city would have been swept. Here were the magnificent residences of the second generation of San Francisco nabobs, and these, in a solid zone, were dynamited down across the path of the fire. Here and there the flames leaped the zone, but these fires were beaten out, principally by the use of wet blankets and rugs.”
A photograph of Market Street that appears to have been taken from an overhead balloon. [LOC, USZ62-49317]
In three days, the fire destroyed 28,188 buildings on 490 city blocks. It covered 2,600 acres, 600 acres more than the Great Chicago Fire. The disaster left half of the city’s 410,000 residents homeless. “Not in history has a modern imperial city been so completely destroyed,” wrote London. “San Francisco is gone.”
Jack London, an author best known for his novel The Call of the Wild, wrote a firsthand account of the fire. [LOC, G399-0200]
Civic leaders tried to downplay the tragedy, historians believe, because they didn’t want people to think San Francisco was an unsafe place to live or work. They reported a death toll of 376 people. Years later, researchers discovered over three thousand had died in the earthquake and fire.
Devastation. [LOC, USZ62-47147]
San Francisco quickly rebuilt homes and businesses. Workmen repaired the broken pipes and 54 of the old cisterns. Then they added 85 cisterns, each holding 75,000 gallons of water. In 1954, the city constructed Summit Reservoir, which holds fourteen million gallons of water at Twin Peaks, the city’s second-highest point. If that runs out, two pumping stations can refill the reservoir by drawing water from the bay. Even with these precautions, San Francisco never quite regained all of its luster. By 1920, Los Angeles had become the West Coast’s largest city.
The San Francisco fire was America’s last “great” city fire. More effective firefighting equipment, better-trained firefighters, reliable water supplies, strong fire codes, and modern building materials have all made large-scale fires less likely.
A weary-looking man trudging up one of San Francisco’s steep hills. [LOC, USZ62-47591]
7
DEADLY WORKPLACE FIRE
NEW YORK, 1911
New York City fire chief Edward F. Croker knew that the city’s factories would be much safer if owners installed fire walls, fire doors, fire stairs, and automatic sprinklers, as New England’s factories had done in the nineteenth century. Not wanting to spend money on these safety features, the factory owners joined together to stop the city from enacting new safety regulations. It took a tragedy to change that.
The Triangle Waist Company in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village made women’s shirtwaists, which is what blouses were called in 1911. The company occupied the top three floors of the Asch Building, a ten-story brick structure on the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place. The building had large windows and open floors about the size of two side-by-side basketball courts. On the eighth and ninth floors, hundreds of young women operated sewing machines at long wooden tables.
On the tenth floor, workers ironed and prepared finished blouses for shipping. The company’s owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, who were dubbed the “Shirtwaist Kings” because their company was the garment’s largest manufacturer, also had offices on that floor.
The Shirtwaist Kings, in the middle, surrounded by their workers. [Kheel Center, Cornell University]
Two years earlier, the company had gained national notoriety because of the “Uprising of 20,000.” Because of low wages and unsafe working conditions, Triangle employees walked off the job and went on strike. The protest spread to other garment factories. After four months, most manufacturers agreed to increase wages and make their factories safer, but not Max Blanck and Isaac Harris. Since jobs were scarce for new immigrants, the Shirtwaist Kings had no trouble finding new workers.
Clara Lemlich, one of the leaders of the Uprising of 20,000. [Kheel Center, Cornell University]
On Saturday, March 25, about five hundred people were working at the Triangle Waist Company. While there were some men, most of the workers were Italian, Russian, or German women in their teens and twenties. Some worked as cutters, snipping the fabric into patterns, while others sewed the patterns together.
A couple of minutes before the 4:45 quitting time, workers were eyeing the door. It was payday and the end of their six-day workweek. Leaving work was often slow because employees had to file past the partition between the sewing room and the elevators so a foreman could check handbags to make sure no one was stealing. And each of the two elevators held only 12 people.
Just as the workers on the eighth floor turned off their sewing machines for the day, Eva Harris ran across the room, shouting, “Fire. There is a fire, Mr. Bernstein.” This wasn’t the first time Samuel Bernstein, the foreman, had heard a worker yell “Fire.” Sometimes an electrical spark or a male cutter careless with a cigarette started a fire. That’s why the foreman kept buckets of water handy.
A garment factory similar to the Triangle Waist Company. [Kheel Center, Cornell University]
Bernstein saw smoke and flames near Isidore Abramowitz’s cutting table on the Greene Street side of the building. The foreman and the cutter threw water on the fire but weren’t able to put it out. Other men grabbed a hose connected to a pipe from the rooftop water tank, but for some reason, there was no water.
Cotton, which burns more quickly than paper, was everywhere—under sewing machines, stacked on tables, and hanging from wires above the seamstresses. As flames raced through the room, Bernstein shouted, “Get out of here as fast as you can.” About 180 people worked on that floor. They crowded into the aisles between the tables and pushed one another toward the stairwells and elevators.
The building had a stairwell on the Greene Street side and one on the Washington Place side. City construction codes required three stairwells, but inspectors had allowed the builder to substitute an 18-inch-wide metal fire escape in the air shaft behind the Asch Building.
A man and several women climbed onto the fire escape. They didn’t know it ended above a skylight, with no way out of the air shaft. But they didn’t like the flimsy metal fire escape, so they broke a sixth-floor window and climbed through.
Other workers on the eighth floor squeezed onto elevators or hurried down the Greene Street stairwell. At the door to the Washington Place stairs, there was a near fatal delay. That stairwell door opened inward, but the pushing and shoving crowd accidentally pinned several workers against the door, so it couldn’t open. Louis Brown, a machinist, pushed people out of the way and flung the door open.
Before fleeing, a bookkeeper called the switchboard operator on the tenth floor to warn the sixty or so workers there. Without thinking of connecting the call to the ninth floor, where over two hundred people worked, the operator ran to tell her bosses.
Hearing shouts, Isaac Harris came out of his office. Looking through the air shaft windows, he saw smoke and flames. The heat suddenly shattered the glass and ignited stacks of blouses. Harris yelled for everyone to go up the Greene Street stairwell, the only one leading to the roof. The hot, smoke-filled stairwell, survivors later said, made them feel like they were running straight into the fire.
By then, the flames had reached the ninth floor. Workers there couldn’t go down the Greene Street stairs because of the eighth-floor fire. In their panic, most probably didn’t think about going up. Others tried the stairs across the room.
“I ran to the Washington Place door,” said 16-year-old Ethel Monick, “but found it locked. I tried and tried to open it.” Managers sometimes locked the doors to keep employees from sneaking out early. As Monick looked for another way to escape, the nearby elevato
r opened and the people rushing into the car swept her along with them.
No one remembered how often the elevators returned to the ninth floor that afternoon. As the doors were closing on his last trip, elevator operator Joseph Zito said, “all I could see was a crowd of girls and men with great flames and smoke right behind them.”
The Asch Building was one of the new “fireproof” buildings. [Kheel Center, Cornell University]
Some workers who couldn’t squeeze into an elevator jumped onto the descending car’s roof or tried to slide down its cables. “I reached out, grabbed the cables, wrapped my legs around them and started to slide down,” recalled Samuel Levine, a ninth-floor sewing machine operator. “I can remember getting to the sixth floor. While on my way down, as slow as I could let myself drop, the bodies of six girls went past me. One of them struck me and I fell to the top of the elevator. I fell on the dead body of a girl.” Firefighters later found 19 bodies atop the two elevators.
The flimsy fire escape that killed more people than it saved. [Kheel Center, Cornell University]
Other workers on the ninth floor tried the only way left, the fire escape. Some climbed down, but others climbed up toward the roof, where college students who had been attending classes in the adjoining building were rescuing Blanck and Harris and their employees. Few people on the fire escape reached safety. Their weight made the metal buckle and they plunged to their deaths.
The New York Fire Department received the alarm at 4:45. Three minutes later, horses pulling a steam fire engine galloped down Greene Street. Seven more engines and hook and ladder companies soon followed. The firefighters saw flames and smoke pouring from the top three floors of the Asch Building and people standing in the ninth-floor windows. The firefighters quickly put up their tallest ladder, but it reached only to the sixth floor.
Fighting Fire! Page 4