Free The Triangle Fire by William Greider, Leon Stein, Michael Hirsch

younger child and Mr. Blanck held the older one and we began to fight our way out of there.”
    When Markowitz saw Blanck paralyzed by uncertainty, he dropped his order book and picked up the smaller child. “I pulled him by the coat and I said, ‘Come along, Mr. Blanck.’ We went right through the loft to the Greene Street stairs. I could feel the flames in back of me. I could feel the heat of them as we went to the roof.”
    Blanck’s partner, Isaac Harris, had posted himself at the Washington Place elevators where he remained to guide the girls until he realized that the elevators seemed to have stopped running.
    At this point, “I started to holler, ‘Girls, let us go to the roof!’ We all rushed to the Greene Street stairs. The smoke was getting heavy and the room was getting dark.”
    When the girls shrank back from the smoke, Harris urged them on: “Go, one of you, two of you. If you can’t all go, better at least one should get out.”
    Harris led the way up the stairs. Halfway up between the tenth floor and the roof was the window facing the rear yard and through it blew a blast of flame. The girls turned up their coat collars or shielded their faces with their muffs. They reached the roof, their clothing scorched, some with their hair smoldering.
    On his way to the roof, Bernstein found Lucy Wesselofsky in a fainting condition. He helped her up.
    Lucy was one who had tried to calm the girls “by shouting that everyone would be saved if they would stop trying to pile into the staircase all together.
    “In fact, on the tenth floor, where there were about seventy people working, all were saved except one. She was Clotilda Terdanova. She tore her hair and ran from window to window until finally, before anyone could stop her, she jumped out. She was young and very pretty. She was to leave us next Saturday to be married three weeks later.”
    One of the first to reach the roof was Joseph Flecher, an assistant cashier. He approached the edge of the roof and cautiously peered over the side.
    “I looked down the whole height of the building. My people were sticking out of the windows. I saw my girls, my pretty ones, going down through the air. They hit the sidewalk spread out and still.”
    The roof now became a refuge, an island surrounded by huge waves of smoke and flame. The survivors came staggering out of the structure that covered the Greene Street stairs. They were coughing, screaming, hysterical, and some stumbled perilously close to the edge of the roof.
    The adjoining building on the Greene Street side was 13 feet higher than the top of the Asch building. It could be reached by climbing from the top of the staircase covering to the superstructure over the freight elevator shaft.
    On the Washington Place side, the New York University–American Book Company building towered 15 feet above the Asch structure. But it too could be scaled by way of the roof over the passenger elevators.
    On the tenth floor of the school building, Professor Sommer and the members of his law class had heard the screams of the fire engines. Elias Kanter, one of his students that day, remembers him as a tall, handsome redhead, “ready to adjourn at the end of class to the nearby Brevoort Hotel bar with a handful of students anxious to pursue further some fine point of the law.”
    Professor Sommer halted his discourse and hurried to the adjoining faculty room which had a window facing the rear courtyard.
    “Some of the boys followed me,” the Professor said, “and we saw that the ten-story building across the areaway was on fire. The areaway was filled with smoke. We heard ear-piercing shrieks as the girls in the factory appeared at the windows.”
    The screams of the engines and the girls were also heard in Professor Parsons’ horticulture class on the ninth floor. He dismissed his class of forty girls at once, and while they gathered up their notes and books, he also ran to the rear window. “I was shocked by a sight more