Triangle Fire: The Building Survives

The onetime Asch Building, whose top three floors were occupied by the Triangle Waist Company, is now the Brown Building of Science, where New York University students and scientists occupy laboratories devoted to biology and chemistry. The only hint of its role in one of America’s worst — and most indelible — industrial disasters can be found on two street-level bronze plaques on its facade, one put up by the National Register of Historic Places.

The ninth floor, where two out of three of the 146 died and from where about 50 people plunged to their deaths, is today N.Y.U.’s Center for Developmental Genetics, where researchers are studying such matters as the development of the double-chambered heart in sea squirts.

“We think that it’s fitting that where all these sad things happened, we’re studying the genes involved in illnesses like heart disease,” said Gloria M. Coruzzi, chairwoman of the department of biology, as she showed a visitor around.

The haunted floor, its contents and occupants consumed by the fire, has been gutted and renovated at least twice, and all that is left to offer a sense of what it looked like on March 25, 1911 are the tall windows and the round supporting columns.

Instead of rows of sewing machines, there are rooms and cubicles filled with test tubes, centrifuges and aquatic tanks. Instead of 250 seamstresses and cutters crowded on a floor, there are a handful of professors, postdoctoral fellows and researchers.

“Every now and then you think about it,” Karin Kiontke, a postdoctoral fellow in biology, said of the Triangle fire.

The gray stone 10-story building on the northwest corner of Washington Place and Greene Street was a skyscraper of its time. Built in 1910 in a neo-Renaissance style, it is decorated with such old-fashioned touches as terra cotta trim and fleurs-de-lis moldings.

Most of the nation’s dresses, blouses, hats, feather adornments and other ready-made clothing were then being produced in New York, and the industry employed over 80,000 people. To take advantage of the growing work force of immigrants who were settling in the nearby tenements of the Lower East Side and East Village, factory loft buildings rose east and south of Washington Square.

“All the buildings on Washington Place, on Washington Square East, on Third Street were garment factories,” said Michael Nash, head of N.Y.U.’s Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. “Most of these buildings date from 1890 to 1916.”

The factories erased much of what was a posh pocket of downtown Manhattan, with the Asch Building itself erected on the site of the town house where the writer Henry James was born in 1843, according to Joyce Gold, an adjunct professor of New York history at N.Y.U. who gives tours of the neighborhood.

Triangle, which moved into the Asch Building one year after it opened, was regarded as a model of clean efficiency compared with the sweatshops inside tenement apartments that had been commonplace, Mr. Nash said. Triangle’s building was fireproof, had freight elevators, tall ceilings and windows that flooded the lofts with daylight.

“Triangle had the reputation of being the most modern of all the factories,” he said.

As the garment industry followed the subway lines and department stores uptown, N.Y.U., which had its law school next door to Asch, began gobbling up the lofts, eventually usurping the footprint of the garment industry. The university acquired the Asch Building in 1929. Still, as recently as 15 years ago garments were produced in the neighborhood.

Today, students with ear buds and book bags, who dominate the neighborhood the way immigrant blouse, dress and hat workers once did, hurry by the building. Most are oblivious to its history.

“I know there were lives lost in that factory, that people had to jump,” said Dominique Williams, 19, an N.Y.U. sophomore smoking a cigarette near the building and listening to her iPod. “I think about it sometimes. I guess it’s like all of New York. It has a lot of history and you can’t really escape, and our place of learning is in that place.”