Most of the victims were unglorified, but the Triangle fire a
century ago propelled other individuals to greater prominence.
Among them were Frances Perkins, Alfred E. Smith, Robert F.
Wagner, Rose Schneiderman, Anne Morgan and Max D. Steuer.
Frances Perkins, a 30-year-old Boston-born social worker, was
visiting a friend on the opposite side of the park that
Saturday, March 25, 1911, when they heard sirens and screams and
rushed to the scene. “We could see this building from Washington
Square and the people had just begun to jump when we got there,”
she recalled years later. “They had been holding until that
time, standing in the windowsills, being crowded by others
behind them, the fire pressing closer and closer, the smoke
closer and closer.” Miss Perkins, the executive secretary of the
National Consumers League and a lobbyist for the fire-inspired
Committee on Safety, galvanized New York’s officials. “The
Triangle fire was a torch that lighted up the whole industrial
scene,” she said. With two Democratic c