100 years, pt. 2

[owlectomy]

If the shirtwaist kings occasionally arranged to have their premises torched, they were hardly alone. In a series of articles published by Collier's magazine in 1913, Arthur McFarlane profiled New York's large and prosperous commercial arson industry, which he blamed for the fact that New York City "has more fires annually than all the capitals of Europe." McFarlane took particular note of the way the whimsies of fashion editors corresponded to the combustibility of Manhattan garment factories. One year, the Paris salons frowned on hats with feathers. "Within a month... three feather factories burned in New York," McFarlane noted, and within two years the last remaining feather companies could no longer buy insurance no matter how high the brokers' commissions. ...

The following year, Paris turned a very cold eye on the venerable shirtwaist. "By the end of 1911," McFarlane wrote, "one small insurance company had paid losses on ten shirtwaist factories. It had had losses on only six during the preceding three years." ...

Arthur McFarlane did not accuse the Triangle owners of arson in the March 25, 1911 disaster. (Indeed, he was careful to acknowledge that fire marshals had not charged arson in any of the partners' factory fires.) They had, after all, an excellent alibi: What men would arrange to burn their factory when they were still in it, as well as their sisters, cousins, precious daughters? But there was no denying the strange relationship that Blanck and Harris had with fire. They seemed to view it as another manageable aspect of their business, avoidable by day and welcome by night; more complicated than the height of a cutting table, perhaps -- but no more roguish than the Bowery gangsters and prostitutes they hired to harass their strikers.

Thus, they prepared for blazes not with safety measures -- as someone with a healthy fear of fire would do -- but by buying ever-larger fire insurance policies. By March 25, 1911, the partners were paying extremely high rates to carry insurance far in excess of the total value of the Triangle's contents. They carried about two hundred thousand dollars in coverage on the factory, which was estimated to be eighty thousand dollars more than the factory was worth (about $1.4 million of excess insurance in current terms). This was at a time when the costs of the previous year's strike, and the ongoing Parisian anti-shirtwaist crusade, had endangered the Triangle's credit rating. How could it possibly make good business sense to carry so much excess insurance?

Here's a possibility: If the owners were planning, in the last days of the season, to consolidate all their excess inventory, from all their factories, at the Triangle, and if they were pretty sure they were going to experience a fire in the night that would destroy all those shirtwaists and all that lawn, then it would be very smart indeed to have extra insurance, and well worth the premiums.

This cool, commercial view of fire as something to be managed, not feared, might explain the fatal decisions the owners made. They could not put sprinklers in their factory if they thought they might need to burn it sometime. And they might think that instituting fire drills, in a world where few factories had them, would make them look suspiciously conscious of the issue.

It would have been otherwise. When Blanck and Harris applied to increase their fire insurance coverage in 1909, the insurance companies insisted that the Triangle factory be inspected ... Apparently [fire prevention expert] McKeon did not object to the layout or cleanliness of the factory. But he did notice that the doors on the Washington Place side were "usually kept locked" to restrict unauthorized comings and goings by the workers. This apparently was a particular obsession of Max Blanck's; many workers remembered how he would test the locks and check the doors every time he passed.

--Triangle: The Fire That Changed America. David Von Drehle, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003.

Why were the doors at Washington Place kept locked? It's hard to know for sure because during the trial, the owners contended that they weren't kept locked, or there was always a key at the door. But Isaac Harris did admit that workers were only supposed to use the Greene Street exit to prevent theft --

An amount of theft that came to, Harris said, twelve or fifteen dollars a year or so.