Last Triangle Fire Survivor Honored by Labor Union

We saw the smoke pouring out of the building. We got there just as they started to jump. . . . They came down in twos and threes, jumping together in a kind of desperate hope. The life nets were broken. The firemen kept shouting for them not to jump. But they had no choice; the flames were right behind them.

--Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor under Franklin D. Roosevelt and eyewitness to

Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire of 1911

What 104-year- old Bessie Cohen still remembers is the running.

“Everybody was running, trying to get out,” said Cohen, the last survivor of the 1911 New York City factory fire that killed at least 146 garment workers. “And there was this beautiful little girl, my friend, Dora. I remember her face before she jumped.”

It was 85 years ago, on March 25, 1911, that flames ripped through the 10-story Triangle Shirtwaist Co. factory on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The tragedy of the blaze triggered adoption of some of the first labor laws guarding worker safety in New York and other states.

On Monday morning, representatives of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) and about 20 residents of the Jewish Home for the Aging gathered in the cafeteria to honor Cohen for her courage in escaping what labor activists call the nation’s worst factory fire.

Cohen was a 19-year-old Jewish immigrant from Russia who had been in the United States only three years when she started working at the factory for $3 a week. Back then she was Bessie Gabrilowich, one of the many immigrants, mainly Jews from Eastern Europe and Italians from Southern Europe, who made up the garment industry’s labor force.

It was 4:30 in the afternoon and Cohen had just come off a nine-hour shift at her sewing machine when smoke began to fill the room. A man told her, “Bessie, it’s a fire.” She became scared and nervous.

She remembers a group of women crying and pounding on the doors of an elevator shaft. The door to the main stairway was locked, so Cohen ran toward the freight elevator stairs.

“Someone told me to go and I left those girls crying. They were standing, and I started to go down,” Cohen told The Times in a past interview.

Although her hearing is almost gone and Parkinson’s disease brings on a tremble now and then, visions of the Triangle fire remain etched in her memory. Age makes public speaking a challenge, so Cohen’s son, Jack Kosslyn of West Hollywood, spoke Monday about the fire on his mother’s behalf.

“When the fire started, panic broke out in the place. Mom grabbed her hat and ran down eight flights of stairs to get out alive,” said Kosslyn, a member of several unions, including the Longshoremen’s Union and the Screen Actors Guild.

Kosslyn said his mother still has nightmares of her friend, 15-year-old Dora Wolfovitch, who plunged to her death from the burning factory. Cohen had been urging Dora, who earned only $2.50 a week, to ask for a 50-cent raise. On that Saturday, she had finally decided to talk to the boss.

After the fire, Cohen was overwhelmed with visits to the morgue to identify the hundreds of bodies from the fire. A few months later she took a job at a grocery store in Harlem. She married in 1916 and moved to Connecticut. In 1941, she decided to head west for California and settled in Boyle Heights.

At the Triangle fire, according to some reports, exits were sealed to keep the seamstresses from stealing. Others said factory doors were locked to keep the workers from striking. Only two years earlier at Triangle, in 1909, 600 garment workers went on strike and were beaten by policemen outside the factory. They returned to work with no union and no changes.

Eighty-one years later, Kosslyn said, his mother watched television with horror when 25 people died trapped inside a North Carolina chicken processing plant.

Today, union leaders said, Cohen lives on as a reminder of the immigrants who still labor in unsafe conditions and are treated unjustly in sweatshops nationwide.

“Walking through the streets of downtown Los Angeles, I know this could happen again,” said Christina Vazquez, educational director for UNITE. “Only this time the victims would look like me.”

Steve Nutter, regional director of UNITE, said that although close to a century has passed since the fire, violations of health and safety regulations continue in the garment industry.

“Just as we did not appreciate the hard work and sweat that immigrants did then, we still don’t appreciate them now. Many things have not changed. People’s lives are still threatened in garment factories every day,” he said.

The 85th anniversary of the sweatshop tragedy was also recognized by the U.S. Labor Department, which announced an initiative to raise public awareness of current garment industry sweatshop abuses.

Under the program, the department will provide consumers its “Fashion Trendsetters” list--a roster of “good guy” retailers and apparel manufacturers judged to be taking steps to avoid buying merchandise from law-breaking contractors. The department also will provide a “clues for consumers” list of questions that shoppers can ask retailers to try to find out if their merchandise was made in sweatshops.

Kosslyn said his mother, who worked as a nurse in Boyle Heights for 37 years, now gets around in the Reseda nursing home with the help of a walker, but retains the quick short steps that saved her life that terrible day in 1911.

She remains independent, and interested in labor and Israeli issues. She fought her way out of a mugging in 1979, and had colon cancer surgery earlier this year.

“Yes, she is a survivor,” said Kosslyn.