Connecticut Author Explores Historic Fire

"At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven. One hundred and forty six died in the flames. On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes- The witness in a building across the street who watched how a young man helped a girl to step up to the window sill, then held her out away from the masonry wall and let her drop. And then another. As if he were helping them up to enter a streetcar, and not eternity."

- An excerpt from the poem “Shirt” by former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky.

In her novel, Triangle, Connecticut author Katharine Weber wrote a fictional account of the fire based on a 90-year-old secret.

The book is based on the memories of a famous survivor of the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire, Weber said, that were not factually consistent.

In a 2006 author discussion at the , Weber explained the novel's plot.

“Why would you change or conceal” a fact and “then stick to it for 90 years,” Weber wondered. She was intrigued by the thought of what it would be like to live with a secret for so long.

The Triangle factory fire in 1911 was the worst workplace fire in New York City, Weber said. More than 50 workers in the Triangle factory fire jumped from the eighth floor to their deaths in an attempt to escape the flames.

Weber said her research revealed that the oldest living survivor of the fire, Rose Freedman, could not have made it out of the building the way she claimed. “I searched blueprints of the building,” Weber noted, the survivor “couldn’t have done it that way.”

That discrepancy is brought into the plot of the book, but Weber said that doesn’t mean her novel is a mystery. Rather than a “whodunit,” she said the book is a “measure of how tolerant you are of ambiguity” until the truth is revealed at the end of the book.

The term “shirtwaist” refers to women’s cotton blouses that were first manufactured in the early 1900s. “It was a man’s shirt made feminine. It was the first time women dressed in separates” and not a one-piece dress, Weber said. “It was very new and radical” for women who were beginning to enter the workforce.

During her discussion, Weber showed a vintage shirtwaist that is featured in a close-up photo on the jacket of her book. She said it was made circa 1910 and was “machine made and hand-finished,” and could possibly have been made at the Triangle factory.

The early 1900s were a period of major transition in American industrialism. Weber said labor union movements had been very active before the fire and the Triangle disaster strengthened unions like nothing else could have.

Weber added that Francis Perkins, the Secretary of Labor for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, had witnessed the fire and subsequently pushed for safer working conditions.