The Haunting of the Asch Building
The year was 1911, the time of Downton Abbey and only a year later the Titanic would make her first and last voyage.
One of the most fashionable pieces of clothing was the shirtwaist, a tailored garment with design detail copied from men's shirts. In the Asch Building's top floors over 500 women toiled in unsafe conditions, setting the stage for one of the worst industrial disasters in U.S. history.
The Asch building was erected in 1900 and belong to Joseph J. Asch. He built the structure without plans that conformed to the building codes of the day.
Just after 4:40 PM on March 25, 1911 a crowd gathered to see the plumes of heavy smoke drifting from the 8th, 9th and 10th floor of the Asch Building in Greenwich Village, New York where the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was located. They employed mostly immigrant women who produced blouses, paying them only $2 for a 14-hour day. Most of them had come from Eastern Europe, Italy or Sicily.
Horror replaced curiosity when a man’s body dropped 100 feet and hit the pavement with a thud. It was followed by a couple who kissed before deciding to die by trauma than fire.
Eventually 20,000 people stood in impotence as 146 people died in the fire or hurled themselves down to the sidewalk. The youngest victim was 11, the oldest 43.
Later an investigation proved the fire started in the southeast corner of the 8th floor. An unknown person lighted a cigarette, and when the bell rang, signaling the end of the day, it was laid near a pile of material still lit.
Minutes after it started a passerby saw the smoke, and the 10th floor was alerted of the danger through a telephone system, however there was no telephone on the 9th floor. The women became aware when they saw smoke pouring in through the windows on their floor.
The women immediately sought to leave the top floors either through the elevator or the emergency escapes, however they soon found the emergency doors were all locked. This was done since the women’s purses were checked every day before they left the building to make sure they were not stealing.
The women pounded on the locked doors but the foreman who had the keys had run off once he notice the smoke, leaving the women to die a horrible death.
The company’s owners, Isaac Harris and Max Blanck, had fled at the first sign of the fire by scrambling across the rooftop. Blanck’s young daughters were visiting with their governess and fled with their father.
There were four elevators but only one was fully operational and could only hold 12 people at a time. A second one barely worked. The elevators lumbered so slowly that some workers escaped using external fire escapes, but those who had waited too long found the flames didn’t let them descend below the 8th floor. Unfortunately the fire escapes did not go all the way down to the ground.
One of the stairwells, crumpled under the heavy weight of so many bodies trying to exit, and 25 people were killed. Two elevator operators continued working the elevators as long as they could. One elevator’s guard rails buckled from the heat, and the second elevator kept running until the operator heard loud thumps and bangs coming from above.
What the elevator operator heard was people who were jumping on the elevator roof in hopes of escaping, however they still died since the distance was too much. The weight of the bodies buckled the elevator and caused it to stop running.
With the elevators not running and all exits blocked people went to the roof to distance themselves from the fire. Fire ladders could not reach beyond the 6th floor. The hoses could not shoot water high enough to reach the top floors. It was only a matter of time before fire and smoke reached those trapped on the roof. Their only hope of living was jumping and hoping they could be caught by the firemen in one of their nets.
Some of the first ones made it safely, but then a young girl fell from a 9th floor window, but was crushed by two other women who fell on her. The nets were too flimsy to catch women who were jumping and pairs or threes. The sidewalk started to fill with bodies two and three deep. The women who were trapped in the elevator shafts died from asphyxiations. None who jumped from the upper three floors survived the fall.
Newspapers printed stories of heartache as family came to find their loved ones among the mangled corpses. Some bodies were so charred that identification could only be made through a piece of jewelry. A young man who had become engaged the day before was identified by his fiancée by his ring.
A man who waited in life for 5 hours, identified his daughters by their clothing. He collapsed in grief and tried to kill himself at the makeshift mortuary. Police stopped him, and he then went on to identify the body of his wife who had also perished in the tragedy.
A brother identified his two sisters, and then went on to find his mother. In a moment he had lost all his family.
Identification of the remains was also made difficult because those who were killed by the fire were reported to no limbs or a head. Two victims had their bodies so fused together they could not be separated.
Ironically a survivor named Dora Maisler later described that many of the workers had left at noon, but returned at 5 p.m. to pick up their weekly pay. Others had stayed behind to make additional money. Fifty of the usual people did not come in at all since it was a Jewish holiday.
A makeshift hospital was hastily put together to deal with the hysterical and suicidal family members. Doctors and nurses from Bellevue Hospital worked for days with the living who were desperate to join their dead family members.
Once all the dead were identified, 31 victims still had no name. The Hebrew Free Burial Association paid for the burial of 23 of these victims in a special section of Mount Richmond Cemetery. The remaining eight bodies were interred in the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn.
Of the total who died, 129 were women, 17 were men, and 60 of these died after jumping from the building. Six persons were not identified until 2011 through diligent research. The Triangle Fire Memorial to the six unidentified victims in the Evergreens Cemetery, Brooklyn, NY, was created in 1912.
The owners, Blanck and Harris who were Russian immigrants were put up on charges of manslaughter, but they were acquitted by the jury. They were only fined $75 for each life lost. When asked why they locked the doors they explained it was to stop theft, which would have amounted to only $20.
As a result of the fire new safety regulations were put in place. Exits and doors could be locked during working hours.
Blanck and Isaac actually profited from the tragedy when they filed an insurance claim for their losses, and were paid $60,000. Blanck went on to open another factory on Fifth Avenue. Two years after the Triangle fire he was arrested for locking the exit doors in this factory during working hours. His fine was only $20.
During the trial, it was found that a report was issued which showed that the company made between $800,000 and $1,000,00 worth of business per year.
These same owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris had two previous and profitable fires in the same place. Ironically they spent little of their enormous profits on the condition of the 8th, 9th and 10th floor of the Asch building which produced so much money for them.
After the fire, the Asch building was refurbished and the space was used for classrooms and a library for New York University. Unsurprisingly it has a reputation for being haunted.
Eventually rumors spread of experiencing feelings of irrational fear when in the building. Many fight the irrational fear, but find they have to leave.
In the afternoon, disembodied screams are heard or at the end of what would have been a work day. The figure of a woman is seen running down one of the hallways in the 8th floor. She also is seen in a bathroom. But the 9th floor is the most haunted, many who step off the elevator, face a mirror and many times see a person reflected that is not them.
Known as NYU’s Brown Building, through the years it has accumulated a whole host of ghostly occurrences. Door handles jiggle by themselves, footsteps are heard running up and down the stairwell and lectures are interrupted by the sound of crackling fire. The smell of fire at times pervades the upper floors to the point that some believe there is actually a fire. There is also a more distinctive but disturbing smell which some have identified as the odor of burning flesh.
Locked doors are unlocked, almost as a reenactment of what happened in 1911.
There are also sightings of large objects fluttering downward past windows. Nothing is ever found to account for what it was.
A secretary who worked in the building for many years explained that one day she was working later than usual, and when she left most of the students and employees had left for the day. As she left the building she saw a young woman stagger past her with a confused look on her face. Her face was smudged with soot and her hair and clothes appeared to be singed. She called out to her but the woman kept walking until she turned the corner. She followed the strange woman, and only found an empty sidewalk.
The names of all 146 victims of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City are listed on the Triangle Fire Memorial, which opened outside the former Asch Building in March 2023.