Bessie Cohen; Last Survivor of Infamous N.Y. Garment Factory Fire
Bessie Cohen, the last survivor of New York’s infamous garment district fire at Triangle Shirtwaist Co. almost 88 years ago, has died. She was 107.
Cohen died Sunday in Reseda, the Los Angeles office of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) announced Monday.
For the record:
12:00 a.m. Feb. 24, 1999 For the Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday February 24, 1999 Home Edition Part A Page 12 Metro Desk 2 inches; 44 words Type of Material: Correction
Last fire survivor--An obituary for Bessie Cohen in Tuesday’s editions of The Times incorrectly stated that she was the last survivor of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire in New York City. Rose Rosenfeld Freedman, 105, of Beverly Hills also survived the tragic blaze that triggered reforms in worker safety laws.
The former seamstress, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease and limited hearing, was honored three years ago by UNITE and the Jewish Home for the Aging in Reseda on the 85th anniversary of the March 25, 1911, tragedy.
The historic fire in the 10-story garment factory on Manhattan’s Lower East Side killed at least 146 workers and prompted some of the first worker safety laws in the country.
Reports of the Triangle fire claimed that exits to the building were sealed either to keep seamstresses from stealing or to prevent union organizers from entering the building to foster a strike. Whatever the reason, many workers were trapped and died.
Completing a nine-hour shift that March afternoon in New York, Cohen ran down eight flights of stairs to escape. Bessie Gabrilowich (later Cohen) was 19, a Jewish immigrant from Russia who had been in the United States only three years, earning $3 a week.
She went on to work in a grocery store, marry, move to Connecticut and in 1941 to Los Angeles, where she settled in Boyle Heights.
But she lived all her life with nightmares of the fire--of trips to the morgue to identify co-workers’ bodies and particularly of her friend’s facial expression before she leaped to her death.
“Everybody was running, trying to get out,” Cohen told The Times in 1996. “And there was this beautiful little girl, my friend, Dora. I remember her face before she jumped.”
Dora Wolfovitch was 15, earning $2.50 a week, and had just decided to take Cohen’s advice to ask for a raise when she died in the fire.
UNITE considered Cohen and the long-ago Triangle fire symbols of safety problems in the garment industry that the union says continue today.
Cohen is survived by her son, Jack Kosslyn, of West Hollywood.
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