The Triangle Fire Read Online Free PDF Page B

ladder stopped rising.
    The crowd yelled in one voice: “Raise the ladders!”
    “But the ladder had been raised,” Rubino says. “It was raised to its fullest length. It reached only to the sixth floor.”
    The crowd continued to shout. On the ledge, the girl stopped waving her handkerchief. A flame caught the edge of her skirt. She leaped for the top of the ladder almost 30 feet below her, missed, hit the sidewalk like a flaming comet.
    Chief Worth had arrived at the scene at 4:46½, had ordered the second alarm to be transmitted at 4:48. Two more alarms were called, one at 4:55 and a fourth at 5:10.
    In the first two minutes after his arrival, the Chief had assessed the situation. He directed his men to aim high water pressure hoses on the wall above the heads of those trapped on the ledge. “We hoped it would cool off the building close to them and reassure them. It was about the only reassurance we could give. The men did the best they could. But there is no apparatus in the department to cope with this kind of fire.”
    The crowd watched one girl on the ledge inch away from the window through which she had climbed as the flames licked after her. As deliberately as though she were standing before her own mirror at home, she removed her wide-brimmed hat and sent it sailing through the air. Then slowly, carefully, she opened her handbag.
    Out of it she extracted a few bills and a handful of coins—her pay. These she flung out into space. The bills floated slowly downward. The coins hit the cobblestones, ringing as she jumped.
    Three windows away one girl seemed to be trying to restrain another from jumping. Both stood on the window ledge. The first one tried to reach her arm around the other.
    But the second girl twisted loose and fell. The first one now stood alone on the ledge and seemed oblivious to everything around her. Like a tightrope walker, she looked straight ahead and balanced herself with her hands on hips hugging the wall.
    Then she raised her hands. For a moment she gestured, and to the staring crowd it seemed as if she were addressing some invisible audience suspended there before her. Then she fell forward.
    They found her later, buried under a pile of bodies. She was Celia Weintraub and lived on Henry Street. Life was still in her after two hours in which she had lain among the dead.
    William Shepherd, the United Press reporter and the only newspaperman on the scene at the height of the tragedy, had found a telephone in a store and dictated his story as he watched it happen through a plate-glass window. He counted sixty-two falling bodies, less than half the final total.
    “Thud—dead! Thud—dead! Thud—dead!” Shepherd began his story. “I call them that because the sound and the thought of death came to me each time at the same instant.”
    As he watched, Shepherd saw “a love affair in the midst of all the horror.
    “A young man helped a girl to the window sill on the ninth floor. Then he held her out deliberately, away from the building, and let her drop. He held out a second girl the same way and let her drop.
    “He held out a third girl who did not resist. I noticed that. They were all as unresisting as if he were helping them into a street car instead of into eternity. He saw that a terrible death awaited them in the flames and his was only a terrible chivalry.”
    Then came the love affair.
    “He brought another girl to the window. I saw her put her arms around him and kiss him. Then he held her into space—and dropped her. Quick as a flash, he was on the window sill himself. His coat fluttered upwards—the air filled his trouser legs as he came down. I could see he wore tan shoes.
    “Together they went into eternity. Later I saw his face. You could see he was a real man. He had done his best. We found later that in the room in which he stood, many girls were burning to death. He chose the easiest way and was brave enough to help the girl he loved to an easier death.”
    Bill