Skip to main content
Like
Create new Glog
previous
next
Email share
15 views | 0 likes | 0 reposts
BESSIE COHEN Survivor of 1911 Shirtwaist Fire, Dies By Micheal T. Kaufman, courtesy of The New York Times Bessie Cohen, who as a 19-year-old seamstress escaped the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in which 146 of her co-workers perished in 1911, died on Sunday in Los Angeles. She was 107 and one of the last two known survivors of the Manhattan fire, according to the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees.Her son, Jack Kosslyn, an acting teacher and casting director, said she died at the Jewish Home for the Aging in Los Angeles, where she had lived for the last 14 years. Until six weeks ago, he said, she had retained much of her vitality and memory.Over the years, she had graphically recalled for her family, as well as for historians and documentary filmmakers, what she experienced and witnessed on March 25, 1911, when the worst factory fire in New York history raged through the top three floors of the 10-story Asch Building on the northwest corner of Washington Place and Greene Streets.Inside, about 500 women, mostly Jewish and Italian immigrants, worked behind locked doors making shirtwaists, blouses of lightweight fabric, depicted as the uniform of modern womanhood in the illustrations of Charles Dana Gibson. It was a Saturday afternoon, and Mrs. Cohen, then Bessie Gabrilowich, was on the ninth floor. She had come alone from Russia to New York two years earlier and had worked in several shops as a stitcher, saving money to bring her sisters to America. The workers were near the end of their 6-day, 52-hour workweek, and since one of the women on the ninth floor had just become engaged, someone had brought a cake, and slices were being passed around. For the rest of her life, Bessie Cohen would remember that earlier in the day, she had urged her friend, Dora Abramowitz, who was 15, to ask the foreman to give her a 50-cent raise to bring her salary up to the $3 a week that Bessie was earning. At the moment that someone screamed fire, Bessie was teaching a dance step to a fellow worker. The flames were coming up from the cutting room on the floor below.Within the next 15 minutes, nearly 30 percent of all the Triangle Shirtwaist workers were killed. Mrs. Cohen would later tell her children that after the warning, she went to look for the cheap straw hat she had bought the day before, when she heard a foreman shout to her in Yiddish, "Bessie, save yourself." She looked across the room and could see her friend Dora, looking frightened. But when she looked again, Dora was gone. She was one of those who jumped from the windows and died.The fire trucks' ladders could reach only to the seventh floor. Firefighters held nets below, but so many women were jumping at the same time that the nets tore and did not hold them. Some rushed to the elevator shaft, hoping to escape by sliding down the cables, only to lose their grip. Most of those who lost their lives had worked on the ninth floor. doors leading from the shop areas had been locked, presumably to keep the women at their sewing machines. The owners, who were tried for manslaughter, were acquitted when the jury could not establish whether they had ordered the doors locked or had even known they were locked. But in 1914, civil suits brought by relatives of 23 victims ended with payments of $75 to each of the families. On the day of the fire, Mrs. Cohen would recall, she somehow found her way to a staircase and covered her face with her purse as she ran to the street. The next day, she returned to the street outside the building, where the bodies were arrayed so that friends and relatives might identify them. A newspaper photographer took a picture of her as she collapsed at the sight; Kosslyn said his mother kept that newspaper picture throughout her life.
TRIANGLE SHIRT WAIST FIRE
