Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, Part 2: Escape or Die

William Shepherd walked down the cobblestone streets in Greenwich village on the afternoon of Saturday, March 25th, 1911. It was a trendy place that any young reporter for the united press should be on a weekend. With an inclusive crowd, political activism, and a future home to Jackson Pollock it was, and still is, much like the Buckhead area of Atlanta, Lakewood in Cleveland, or the south end of Charlotte today. Counterculture, a diverse population, and an amazing night life lived in these stre…

*THUD*

William paused and shrugged when he heard the strange sound.

*THUD*

On Washington square in late Spring afternoon, it was such a strange sound to hear this loud thud with a sort of splat at the end.

*THUD*

Curious, William stopped after the third time he heard the sound. Looking up from the corner of Washington Square and Washington Place, he noticed a puff of smoke coming from the factory known as the Asch building.

*THUD*

“The first ten thuds shocked me. I looked up and saw that there were scores of girls at the windows. The flames from the floor below were beating in their faces.”

*THUD*

As William stood in shock, nearly fifty three women and girls jumped the 120 to 135 feet out of windows to escape the flames within the Asch building. Over a thousand people flocked from the nearby park and streets to try and help those escaping the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory while it was on fire. Out of nearly five hundred people in those three floors, one hundred forty-six would not live to see the next day. Over sixty of those souls chose to try jumping to escape, rather than die in flames.

Posted in Triangle Shirtwaist Factory | Leave a comment

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, Part 1: The Cost of Fashion

Today it’s difficult for us to imagine how a simple women’s garment, the Industrial Revolution, and labor practices could all be related. Right now, women wear t-shirts, polos, uniforms of all kinds, and dressy clothes on special occasions. But in 1911 the culture of New York City and the nation, was much different. Labor laws, women’s rights, and building codes all changed after a tragic disaster brought all of these different issues together.

Now, 112 years later, Jeff Moss, Tyler J. Thomas, and Tim Coleman will share with you the factors that led up to this disaster, and how building codes and the hardware that makes life safer changed as a result.

Posted in Triangle Shirtwaist Factory | Leave a comment

How did ASSA and ABLOY get their names?

ASSA

ASSA founder, August Stenman.

ASSA founder, August Stenman.

August Stenman, son of master craftsman Frans August Stenman, purchased the Thunell hinge manufacturing factory in Eskilstuna, Sweden in 1881 and created a new company, August Stenman AB, in the process. The new company was quite successful in developing automatic hinges and various screws in it’s early years. August Stenman AB began selling locks and keys in the first half of the 20th century under the ASSA name, which, according to legend, was drawn from August Stenman’s wife’s symmetrical, embroidered family monograms: August Stenman Stenman August, or ASSA. The company would officially rename itself Assa-Stenman AB in 1967.

ABLOY

Disc-detainer lock inventor, Emil Henriksson.

Disc-detainer lock inventor, Emil Henriksson.

In 1907, drawing from his work with cash registers, Emil Henriksson, a precision mechanic in Helsinki, Finland, invented the world’s first disc-detainer lock. This lock was patented in 1919 under the name Henriksson’s Patenttilukko, or “Henriksson’s Patent Lock”. Henriksson’s lock was manufactured by Ab Låsfabriken – Lukkotehdas Oy (a contraction of Swedish and Finnish), which was created in 1918 with shareholders Suomen Finanssiosakehtiö (34.5%), Emil Henriksson (25%, which was given in exchange for rights to his patent), Josef Nordqvist (20%) and Gösta Rosenberg (20%). Ab Låsfabriken – Lukkotehdas Oy was eventually shortened to Ab Lukko Oy and, shortly thereafter, the trademark ABLOY was derived from it. Continue reading

Leave a comment

Lake View School, Collinwood Ohio, Part 4: A Village in Mourning

The Remains of the Lake View School.

The Remains of the Lake View School

The Investigation Begins

The very afternoon of the fire, investigations began. Fire Marshal Brockman interviewed the burned and bandaged Fritz Hirter on the grounds of the school. Fritz lost his eight-year-old Ida, and ten-year-old Walter, and had witnessed his thirteen-year-old daughter Helena burn to death inside the school. While there was some initial speculation that Hirter was somehow responsible for the blaze, this was quickly disputed and he was later hailed as a hero.

Official reports of the investigation have been lost to history, however according to news reports of the time and the book, “Complete Story of the Collinwood School Disaster, and How Such Horrors Can be Prevented” by Marshall Everett, 1908; no official cause was ever determined.

There was electrical wiring in the building, but that was ruled out. Also, the steam pipes leading from the boilers up through the school were reportedly wrapped in asbestos to insulate the wooden components of the structure from the intense heat. However, there were many identifiable factors to the large loss of life that were immediately apparent.

We have already mentioned and discussed the choke-points at the bottom of the stairs. Having any kind of narrowing at a point of egress not only causes a delay in getting out, but it almost certainly guarantees an outcome as we have discussed in this series. Those who are trying to escape can and will trip and fall; and those behind them don’t realize it until it’s too late and they fall on top of them.

That decision to build the partitions proved to be fatal. Continue reading

Posted in Lake View School | Leave a comment

Did Jack Daniel really die after kicking his safe?

Born in Lynchburg, Tennessee, in either 1846, 1849, or 1850, Jasper Newton Daniel, better known as Jack Daniel, was a distiller who created the iconic Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey brand.

One of the most notorious stories associated with Jack is that, in a fit of rage, he kicked his safe, which led to a toe infection that eventually took his life. Jack Daniel’s website mentions this story and states, “After arriving at work early and unable to open his safe, Jack kicks it out of frustration and breaks his toe. The injury worsens and will eventually take his life.” The Jack Daniel’s Distillery tour features this story along with the actual safe and tour guides have been known to state that if Jack had simply dipped his infected toe into some of his whiskey, he could have saved himself.

Jack Daniel's Safe

Jack Daniel’s Safe

So did Jack Daniel really die after kicking his safe?

According to author Peter Krass, who wrote Daniel’s 2004 biography Blood & Whiskey: The Life and Times of Jack Daniel, Jack Daniel didn’t die after kicking his safe. While he had fits of rage towards the safe (it was well known that he always had trouble remembering his combination), the safe kicking incident happened years before Jack died and it was completely unrelated to what ultimately claimed his life: complications from gangrene. Continue reading

Posted in General History | Comments Off on Did Jack Daniel really die after kicking his safe?

Lake View School, Collinwood Ohio, Part 3: A Village on Fire

Firefighters work to extinguish the fire at the Lake View school.

Firefighters work to extinguish the fire at the Lake View school.



Author’s Note: The events we will be discussing occurred one-hundred-fifteen years ago. Many of the details have been lost to history. All attempts at accuracy have been made however, official records are often incomplete and media reports of the day are somewhat unreliable. A list of our source material will be provided at the end of this article.

A Village Reacts

In the streets near the school there were shouts and screams as the smell of smoke drifted through the air. People literally dropped what they were doing as others rushed by yelling at them that the school was burning. Twenty-four-year-old John Leffel is near the school and when he sees the smoke, he begins running as fast as he can to try and help save the children that were still trapped. The closer he gets to the building; the heat and smoke are so intense his eyes burn and it’s hard to breathe but he keeps running to the buildings rear entrance, hoping that it’s not too late.

“I ran to the school when I saw the smoke. The rear entrance, where the storm doors blocked up the arch, was heaped up with little bodies. I seized the first children I could reach and dragged them out. Some of the children seemed half suffocated. Some were unconscious. I did not stop to look. I seized them by the arms or legs or bodies and tossed them out behind.”

Andrew Dorn and Wallace Upton both live and work in the neighborhood and also run to the school. They each have children trapped inside and run to the back door as well. By the time the men are able to break free a stuck door, children are in a pile at the bottleneck of the bottom of the stairs. They are already starting to burn. Andrew finds his daughter, nine-year-old Gretchen, and tries desperately to pull her from the crush of children, dislocating both of her arms in the process but still cannot free her. He is finally forced to let go as he himself is starting to burn. Wallace manages to rescue eighteen children by pulling them from the heap, despite having second- and third-degree burns covering his arms. Only later does he learn that his own child was among the ones he managed to save. Continue reading

Posted in Lake View School | Comments Off on Lake View School, Collinwood Ohio, Part 3: A Village on Fire

How did DORMA, Kaba, and dormakaba get their names?

DORMA

On July 1, 1908, Dörken & Mankel KG was founded by Rudolf Mankel and his brother-in-law, Wilhelm Dörken in Ennepetal, Germany. The new company thrived from the very start and in 1913 they broke ground on a one-million plus square foot facility. The pair registered their new brand name, DORMA, with the German Patent Office in 1927. In 1936 Wilhelm left the company making Rudolf it’s sole proprietor. DORMA GmbH Co. KG was established in 1970.

Kaba

In 1862, Franz Bauer, along with three colleagues, established a manufacturing company in Zurich, Switzerland that specialized in safes and cash registers. One early safe model, the “Franz Bauer safe”, was so exceptional that it was displayed in the 1878 Exposition Universelle, or World’s Fair, in Paris, France.

Franz died in 1908 and left the company to his sons, Adolf, Carl, and Edwin, who renamed the company Franz Bauer Söhne AG. A stock corporation, Bauer AG, was created in 1915 and Leo Bodmer, an engineer and largest shareholder at the time, became the company president. In 1934, engineer Fritz Schori created the world’s first reversible key and patented the lock under the name Kassenbauer, or “cash register maker”,  in honor of the companies’ founder, who’s surname also meant “maker” in popular usage at the time, analogous to Smith in Anglo countries.

Kassenbauer was eventually shortened to Kaba and in 1975 Bauer AG was renamed Kaba Holding AG.

The Bauer AG factory.

The Bauer AG factory.

dormakaba

On April 30, 2015, DORMA, still owned by members of Rudolf Mankel’s family, announced it’s intention to merge with Kaba Holding AG to form dormakaba Holding AG. The merger was completed in September of that same year. Continue reading

Posted in General History | Comments Off on How did DORMA, Kaba, and dormakaba get their names?

Lake View School, Collinwood Ohio, Part 2: School on Fire

Lake View School on fire.

Lake View School on fire.

Author’s Note: The events we will be discussing occurred one-hundred-fifteen years ago. Many of the details have been lost to history. All attempts at accuracy have been made however, official records are often incomplete and media reports of the day are somewhat unreliable. A list of our source material will be provided at the end of this article.

The School Day Starts

Twenty-six-year-old Grace Fiske had entered the school well before her third grade students began arriving. Grace was born in New York, but later moved with her parents to Collinwood. Her father was a trimmer on a steam ship, and her mother was a housewife. Having become a teacher at age twenty-six is still not uncommon even today, nor is being unmarried and living with your parents. The house at 10522 Orville Avenue was only a few blocks away from the school so the daily walk was easy.

As her students began arriving a little after eight o’clock, there were the usual greetings and grumblings from students as they put away their coats and got their books, papers, and pencils ready. With forty-nine students, the room was completely packed. Over-crowding was a serious issue at Lake View. As we discussed in part one, the significant increase in population in such a short time led to issues throughout the village. Every classroom in the entire building was packed full. Even the third floor gymnasium that had been converted into classrooms was full of students. On that day in March, three-hundred-fifty students packed into a building that had been designed for only about two hundred. This forced teachers and staff to crowd the desks together and cram the kids in tight. Children were typically less than an arms length away from another classmate. This over-crowding also forced architects to build in additional wardrobe spaces in the school during the 1906 expansion. As a result, wardrobe rooms were constructed around the stairways as well. Continue reading

Posted in Lake View School | Comments Off on Lake View School, Collinwood Ohio, Part 2: School on Fire

Lake View School, Collinwood Ohio, Part 1: Growing Village

Lake View School.

Lake View School.



Author’s Note: The events we will be discussing occurred one-hundred-fifteen years ago. Many of the details have been lost to history. All attempts at accuracy have been made however, official records are often incomplete and media reports of the day are somewhat unreliable. A list of our source material will be provided at the end of this article.

A Growing Village

In the mid to late eighteen hundreds, Collinwood, Ohio was a mostly agricultural community. Located just outside of Cleveland, there were lots of wide-open spaces, fresh air, and a small community of locals. In 1877 however, The Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway began a massive expansion along its Lake Erie line. Cornelius Vanderbilt and The New York Central and Hudson River Railroad purchased a majority of stock in the line in order to provide an ideal line between New York and Chicago.

New York Central Lines Train in Collinwood, OH.

A New York Central Line train in Collinwood, OH.By 1898, the railway had constructed a yard in Collinwood that literally split the town in half. Local real estate companies planned to use large swaths of land for residential construction. Anticipating future growth, these investors planned lots for residential housing and commercial buildings alike. In addition to the railroad maintenance shops, there were other industries like Browning Engineering, Peerless Manufacturing, and the Lind Paint Company, all building facilities along the tracks.

Property developers had built scores of single-family homes in anticipation of the coming population boom. Most of these houses were twenty by thirty-foot, two-story structures. Families moving to the area typically had between two and five children. Although living in a cramped, twelve-hundred square foot home could be tough at times, they made it work on the hopes that the money coming in would lead to bigger, better things. However, there were certainly some drawbacks of the time. Rockefeller Creek, which ran through most of the village, was the primary outlet for sewage of the residents. In 1909, an inspector from the Board of Health described the creek as a “practically open sewer”. More than two-hundred-thousand gallons of thick, raw sewage from the town oozed into the creek every single day. Continue reading

Posted in Lake View School | Comments Off on Lake View School, Collinwood Ohio, Part 1: Growing Village

The Iroquois Theatre Fire, Part 3: The Aftermath

Investigating the Iroqouis Theatre fire.

Investigating the Iroqouis Theatre fire.

Author’s Note: The event we will be discussing occurred one-hundred twenty years ago. Record keeping during that time period was sometimes shaky at best. We have endeavored to base our program on facts that we can verify to a reasonable degree. That being said, there are still some accounts that vary wildly. In producing this show, we have made every attempt to be as accurate as possible with records available today.

The Investigation Begins

Firefighters arrived on the scene at around three-thirty that cold afternoon with steamers set up in the Couch Place alley, Dearborn Street, and in front of the main entrance on Randolph Street. Entering the structure wearing the leather turn-out coats of the time and carrying hoses that would be carrying water at a volume and pressure considered completely inadequate today, the men managed to knock down the flames and control the fire.

The Iroquois Theatre's Burned Interior.

The Iroquois Theatre’s Burned Interior.

Modern firefighters have high intensity flashlights that mount on their helmets, but in 1903, the fire department had only the light from open candles or kerosene hand lamps. Buildings that have burned are always very dark, even if they burned during the day. When you couple that darkness along with lingering smoke, it makes seeing anything especially difficult. Only eight days before the fire was the winter solstice, or shortest day of the year in 1903. With other buildings surrounding the Iroquois fire, limited daylight, and being inside of a large structure with only candles for light, rescuers had to grope around in the darkness for limbs in order to pull out victims. Continue reading

Posted in The Iroquois Theatre | Comments Off on The Iroquois Theatre Fire, Part 3: The Aftermath