Why Is It Called A Shirtwaist House

That July, another group of garment workers — over 60,000 cloakmakers, mostly men this time — went on strike. As the tensions escalated, both union and business leaders invited prominent Boston attorney Louis Brandeis to New York to help mediate the conflict. With Brandeis's nudging, the two sides signed the "Protocol of Peace" agreement that set minimum industry standards on wages, hours, piece-rates, and workplace safety and health. But the Protocol's weakness was that it was a voluntary agreement, not a government regulation, and not all manufacturers signed on.

Once again, one of the holdouts was the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Much of the public outrage fell on Triangle Shirtwaist owners Isaac Harris and Max Blanck. Harris and Blanck were called "the shirtwaist kings," operating the largest firm in the business. They sold their medium-quality popular garment to wholesalers for about $18 a dozen.

They ran their factory by hiring machine operators and allocating to each about six sewing machines from among the 240 machines on the ninth floor. The operators hired young girls and women, usually immigrants, who they would then instruct in the art of shirtwaist-making. The girls earned whatever the machine operator chose to pay them. Though workplace conditions were terrible in 1911, and on-the-job deaths not uncommon, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was uniquely horrific and captivating for the American public.

Worst of all, 58 others jumped to their deaths on the sidewalks below in desperation. Though outrage over the deaths spurred labor reforms, and fortified fire codes, workers' rights advocates today insist the fight is not over. On the street below, New Yorkers enjoying the spring weather realized something was wrong when puffs of smoke started to emerge from the building's upper floors. Bystanders rang the alarm bells in the street-level fire boxes. As fire engines rushed toward the building, human figures appeared in the windows.

Workers on the ninth floor had tried to use one of the staircases—only to find that the door was locked, a method that managers used to keep employees from taking unauthorized breaks. A few people managed to make it to the roof or the elevator and safety. With roots dating back to 1675, Cape Cod was a popular style for homes built in the 1930s. Typically one story (sometimes 1-1/2 stories), the Cape Cod style features a steep roofline, wood siding, multi-pane windows, and hardwood floors. Original Cape Cod-style homes were fairly small, and they often boast dormer windows for added space, light, and ventilation.

If you're in need of more space, an addition to your current Cape Cod house plans can go on the side or back depending on the site. Many original Cape Cod-style houses did not have a finished space upstairs, so you might find that the upstairs area is either incomplete or previously remodeled and can easily be changed to fit your needs. Tuesday is the 103rd anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a major turning point in American labor history. On March 25, 1911, 146 garment workers, most of them Jewish and Italian immigrant girls in their teens and twenties, perished after a fire broke out at the Triangle factory in New York City's Greenwich Village. Despite this business opposition, the public's response to the fire and to the 146 deaths led to landmark state regulations. On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory just before closing time on Saturday evening.

The Triangle Fire shook the residents of the Lower East Side, some of whom lost loved ones in the disaster and most of whom realized that they too were vulnerable as poor immigrant workers. The fire at the Triangle Waist Company was the deadliest workplace disaster in the history of New York, causing the deaths of 123 women and 23 men. This tragedy was used as a rallying cry to change unjust labor practices, such as the locking exits to minimize breaks for workers. Prior to the fire, unionization of garment workers was gaining traction and those members had already begun the push for better working conditions. Galvanized by the tragedy, protestors made some gains in creating first an independent body called the Factory Investigating Commission to investigate the conditions in factories and propose new legislation. Seen in the photo is one such protest that led to the investigation and new legislation.

The sign on the left reads, "Ladieswaist and Dressmakers Union Local 25 We Mourn Our Loss." The sign on the right of the photo reads, "We Mourn Our Loss - United Hebrew Trades of New York." The hallmarks of the style include a basically square, boxy design, two-and-one-half stories high, usually with four large, boxy rooms to a floor, a center dormer, and a large front porch with wide stairs. The boxy shape provides a maximum amount of interior room space, to use a small city lot to best advantage.

Other common features included a hipped roof, arched entries between common rooms, built-in cabinetry, and Craftsman-style woodwork. The term "shirtwaist," derived from "waist," the nineteenth-century term for what we would now call a blouse (in itself so-called because it bloused over the waistband as it was tucked into the skirt), was commonplace by the 1890s. However, the name as applied to sports dresses was not generally used until considerably later. Women's magazines from the 1930s and into the 1940s referred to it rather clumsily as "the button-downthe-front style" or, more vaguely, the "sports dress" even as they acknowledged that it had become a classic of American style.

However, a major article in Life on "Summer Sports Style" devoted two full pages showing 18 illustrations of various "classic shirtwaists," in all price points and in both day and evening wear. By so doing, perhaps they helped to codify the name that has stuck. Full-skirted versions following the New Look's dictates became the outfits of choice for the American housewife of the 1950s and early 1960s. Later in the century, in the late 1970s and 1980s, Geoffrey Beene and Bill Blass took it to a new and elegant high, introducing the classic shirtmaker in luxurious and unusual fabric combinations for evening wear. It continues to remain staple of American style in the twenty-first century, by now a conservative classic whose practicality and versatility make it a necessary part of many women's wardrobes.

Many sweatshop workers no doubt wore shirtwaists, for these practical, inexpensive, and unobtrusive garments were a boon to women in factories, offices, and those who would later be dubbed "pink collar" workers. Yet at the turn of the century, the well-to-do, imperiously handsome women immortalized by illustrator Charles Dana Gibson were often depicted wearing immaculate starched shirtwaists during vigorous walks or rounds of golf. The "Gibson girl" soon became such an American icon that she gave her name to styles of waists and the preferred high stand collars. As fashion evolved, shirtwaists gradually became more relaxed; by the 1910s the "middy blouse," modeled on the loose sailor-collared shirts of seamen, was especially popular with girls and for general sport and utility wear. Although they could be made at home and commercial patterns were widely available, shirtwaists, with their loose fit, were the first women's garment to be successfully mass-produced.

Ready-made waists could be purchased at incredibly low prices-as little as twenty-five cents from Sears, Roebuck and Company in 1897. The burgeoning apparel industry utilized economies of scale and power machinery, but cheap garments were also the result of sweatshop production by unskilled and often exploited labor. Workers could toil seventy hours a week for as little as thirty cents a day, frequently in egregious conditions. The shirtwaist dress got its name from how it combined a blouse top and a skirt bottom into one dress. Blouses, called shirtwaists for most of the early 20th century, were buttoned up the front for a style that was easy to put on. They used to button at the back but that required help from a servant or willing husband, a luxury fewer had after WW1.

Attaching the shirt top and skirt also made dresses easier to slip on and button up. The Triangle fire called attention to the sweatshop conditions that characterized the clothing industry and other light manufacturing operations in New York. The city's working class, the fledgling International Ladies Garment Workers Union , and middle class progressives responded in ways that began to change New York's industrial landscape and its clothing industry.

In the aftermath of the fire, Governor John A. Dix appointed a New York State Factory Commission that investigated sweatshop conditions and recommended a wide-ranging series of reforms. These included mandating fire safety practices, regulating working conditions, improving sanitary facilities, encouraging collective bargaining, and limiting the hours of work for women and children. Hundreds lined up in rows over sewing machines in their factory, working six days a week for minimal pay. Many were subcontractors instead of employees, giving them few rights. And Blanck and Harris were staunchly anti-union, using thugs to quash organizing activities at a time when sweatshop workers were picketing for a 52-hour week and better working conditions. Overworked and underpaid, garment workers struck Triangle in the fall of 1909.

Management responded by hiring prostitutes to "strike women" and thugs and plainclothes detectives "to hustle them off to court on flimsy pretexts," according to an article in Survey magazine. The strike soon spread to other shirtwaist manufacturers. By Christmas, 723 employees had been arrested, but the public largely sided with labor. After thirteen weeks, the strike ended with new contracts establishing a 52-hour maximum work week and wage increases of 12 to 15%. As the blaze became an inferno, terrified workers from the eighth floor began escaping down the stairwell. Two elevator operators made valiant, repeated trips to the factory floors, saving at least 150 people.

People on the tenth floor made it to the roof, where they were rescued by a class of NYU law students in the building next door who stretched ladders across to let them climb to safety. But their colleagues on the ninth floor did not know the fire had started until it arrived. The fire—likely sparked by a discarded cigarette—started on the eighth floor of the Asch Building, 23–29 Washington Place, just east of Washington Square Park. That floor and the two floors above were occupied by the Triangle Waist Company, a manufacturer of women's shirtwaists that employed approximately 500 people.

The flames, fed by copious cotton and paper waste, quickly spread upward to the top two floors of the building. Fire truck ladders were only able to reach six stories, and the building's overloaded fire escape collapsed. Many workers, trapped by doors that had been locked to prevent theft, leapt from windows to their deaths.

While not as universally worn, the feminine blouse adapted itself to almost every occasion through the mid-twentieth century. The haute couture ensembles of elegant matrons often featured blouses to match suit jacket linings, while college girls coordinated Peter-Pan collared permanent-press blouses with casual skirts or slacks. As more women joined the labor force-nearly a third of the American labor force was female by 1960-the blouse continued to be the workhorse of clerical workers, teachers, and those in service industries. In 1977 John T. Molloy in The Woman's Dress for Success Book (pp. 54, 55) famously advocated a "uniform" for the executive woman consisting of a skirted suit and blouse-but warned that removing the jacket would make her look like a secretary. He argued that since the blouse made a measurable difference in the psychological impact of the suit, it should not be selected for emotional or aesthetic reasons, but for its message. One of the many sweatshops in Manhattan churning out these popular garments was the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, which occupied the top three floors of a ten-story building and ensured maximum production by locking the exit doors.

When fire broke out on 25 March 1911, many of the 500 workers, mainly Jewish immigrants aged thirteen to twenty-three, were trapped; 146 women died in less than fifteen minutes. While this tragedy helped crystallize calls for reform, led by organizations such as the International Ladies Garment Workers Union founded in 1900, mass production continued to create victims as well as affordable clothing. The group is, by all accounts, getting close to their goal. But that it's taken this long in the first place remains a disappointing testament to how little the country has historically valued people like the victims. After World War II, many women stopped paying attention to fashion and style due to economic scarcity.

Clothing, in general, was meant to be practical instead of glamorous. That changed in 1947, when Christian Dior launched his "New Look," which was a feminine variation of a typical men's shirt and became an iconic dress that was popular around the world in the 1950s. It was initially called the shirtwaist, and it began with a skirt that was made fuller and flashier with a crinoline and was later discarded as women began prioritizing their comfort. While Blanck and Harris successfully escaped conviction in the Triangle manslaughter trial, their apparel kingdom crumbled.

These men were rightly vilified and hounded out of business. While the fire did prompt a few new laws, the limited enforcement brought about only a slightly better workplace. Better and increased regulation was an important result of the Triangle fire, but laws are not always enough.

Today, few realize the role that American consumerism played in the tragedy. At the turn of the century, a shopping revolution swept the nation as consumers flocked to downtown palace department stores, attracted by a wide selection of goods sold at inexpensive prices in luxurious environments. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory workers made ready-to-wear clothing, the shirtwaists that young women in offices and factories wanted to wear. Their labor, and low wages, made fashionable clothing affordable. The uncomfortable truth is consumer demand for cheap goods had pushed retailers to squeeze manufacturers, who in turn squeezed workers.

The Triangle Waist Company was not, however, a sweatshop by the standards of 1911. What is rarely told is Triangle was considered a modern factory for its time. It occupied about 27,000 square feet on three floors in a brightly lit, ten-year-old building, and employed about 500 workers. Triangle had modern, well-maintained equipment, including hundreds of belt-driven sewing machines mounted on long tables that ran from floor-mounted shafts. Workers—mostly immigrant women in their teens and 20s, attempting to flee—found jammed narrow staircases, locked exit doors, a fire escape that collapsed and utter confusion.

Many on the tenth floor, including Blanck and Harris, made it safely to the roof and then were helped to nearby buildings. The elevators were no longer available, the fire escape had collapsed, and the doors to the hallways were locked . Approximately 500 people, mostly immigrant women, worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company's factory in the Asch Building.

They worked long hours, six days a week, in cramped quarters and were paid low wages. Many of the workers were young, some only aged 13 or 14. Years before the Triangle fire, garment workers actively sought to improve their working conditions—including locked exits in high-rise buildings—that led to the deaths at Triangle.

In fall 1909, as factory owners pressed shirtwaist makers to work longer hours for less money, several hundred workers went on strike. Ironically, more than a century after the Triangle fire, we still hear much of the same rhetoric whenever reformers seek to use government to make businesses act more responsibly and protect consumers, workers and the environment. For example, the disasters that killed 29 miners at Upper Big Branch and eleven oil rig workers in the Gulf several years ago could have been avoided had lawmakers resisted lobbying by mine owners and BP to weaken safety regulations. Thumbing through my study of 1940s catalogs and 1940s vintage dresses, it is clear that the most popular style of day dress was the shirtwaist dress or just shirt dress. Because they look good on every body type and because of this the style has remained popular ever since the 1940s.

It is the classic dress of the 1940's, 1950s, 1960s, maybe not the 70s but back again in the 1980s and still common today. Incidentally, the strike did not bring unionization to the Triangle Shirtwaist Company; its workers had to return to the shop without a union contract . The Brown Building, formerly known as the Asch Building, was the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire on March 25, 1911.

One hundred and forty-six garment workers died in the blaze. It was the deadliest industrial disaster in New York City history. In its aftermath, outraged advocates demanded stronger workplace safety protections and better working conditions for those who toiled in the city's sweatshops. Common features of cottage style house plans include a warm, storybook character, steep roof pitches and cross gables, arched doors, casement windows with small panes, and brick, stone, or stucco siding.

Because the shirtwaist was primarily a working woman's blouse, it most commonly was manufactured as ready-to-wear clothing. One of the factories that produced this item was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. In 1911 this factory entered history books as a place of infamy when it burned down. Lacking any safety codes to protect workers, the disaster resulted in the deaths of 146 female workers.

The disaster led to a major upgrade in safety regulations for factory workers. The shirtwaist, now also called a blouse, proved remarkably accommodating in style and price. Suiting Everyone (Kidwell and Christman, p. 145) states, "For the first time in America, women dressed with a uniformity of look which blurred economic and social distinctions."