On This Day in History March 25

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

March 25 is the 84th day of the year (85th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 281 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in history, two tragic fires occurred in New York City. In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire claimed 146 lives and 79 years later, in 1990, the Happy Land fire killed 87 people, the most deadly fire in the city since 1911.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city of New York and resulted in the fourth highest loss of life from an industrial accident in U.S. history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, who either died from the fire or jumped to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent immigrant Jewish women aged sixteen to twenty-three. Many of the workers could not escape the burning building because the managers had locked the doors to the stairwells and exits. People jumped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers.

The factory was located in the Asch Building, at 29 Washington Place, now known as the Brown Building, which has been designated a National Historic Landmark and a New York City landmark.

Fire

The Triangle Waist Company factory occupied the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the Asch Building on the northwest corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, just to the east of Washington Square Park, in the Greenwich Village area of New York City. Under the ownership of Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, the factory produced women’s blouses, known as “shirtwaists.” The factory normally employed about 500 workers, mostly young immigrant women, who worked nine hours a day on weekdays plus seven hours on Saturdays.

As the workday was ending on the afternoon of Saturday, March 25, 1911, a fire flared up at approximately 4:45 PM in a scrap bin under one of the cutter’s tables at the northeast corner of the eighth floor. Both owners of the factory were in attendance and had invited their children to the factory on that afternoon. The Fire Marshal concluded that the likely cause of the fire was the disposal of an unextinguished match or cigarette butt in the scrap bin, which held two months’ worth of accumulated cuttings by the time of the fire. Although smoking was banned in the factory, cutters were known to sneak cigarettes, exhaling the smoke through their lapels to avoid detection. A New York Times article suggested that the fire may have been started by the engines running the sewing machines, while The Insurance Monitor, a leading industry journal, suggested that the epidemic of fires among shirtwaist manufacturers was “fairly saturated with moral hazard.” No one suggested arson.

A bookkeeper on the eighth floor was able to warn employees on the tenth floor via telephone, but there was no audible alarm and no way to contact staff on the ninth floor. According to survivor Yetta Lubitz, the first warning of the fire on the ninth floor arrived at the same time as the fire itself. Although the floor had a number of exits – two freight elevators, a fire escape, and stairways down to Greene Street and Washington Place – flames prevented workers from descending the Greene Street stairway, and the door to the Washington Place stairway was locked to prevent theft. The foreman who held the stairway door key had already escaped by another route. Dozens of employees escaped the fire by going up the Greene Street stairway to the roof. Other survivors were able to jam themselves into the elevators while they continued to operate.

Within three minutes, the Greene Street stairway became unusable in both directions. Terrified employees crowded onto the single exterior fire escape, a flimsy and poorly-anchored iron structure which may have been broken before the fire. It soon twisted and collapsed from the heat and overload, spilling victims nearly 100 feet (30 m) to their deaths on the concrete pavement below. Elevator operators Joseph Zito and Gaspar Mortillalo saved many lives by traveling three times up to the ninth floor for passengers, but Mortillalo was eventually forced to give up when the rails of his elevator buckled under the heat. Some victims pried the elevator doors open and jumped down the empty shaft. The weight of these bodies made it impossible for Zito to make another attempt.

The remainder waited until smoke and fire overcame them. The fire department arrived quickly but was unable to stop the flames, as there were no ladders available that could reach beyond the sixth floor. The fallen bodies and falling victims also made it difficult for the fire department to approach the building.

The Happy Land fire was an arson fire which killed 87 people trapped in an unlicensed social club called “Happy Land” (at 1959 Southern Boulevard) in the West Farms section of The Bronx, New York, on March 25, 1990. Most of the victims were ethnic Hondurans celebrating Carnival. Unemployed Cuban refugee Julio Gonzalez, whose former girlfriend was employed at the club, was arrested shortly after and ultimately convicted of arson and murder.

The Incident

Before the blaze, Happy Land was ordered closed for building code violations in November 1988. Violations included no fire exits, alarms or sprinkler system. No follow-up by the fire department was documented.

The evening of the fire, Gonzalez had argued with his former girlfriend, Lydia Feliciano, a coat check girl at the club, urging her to quit. She claimed that she had had enough of him and wanted nothing to do with him anymore. Gonzalez tried to fight back into the club but was ejected by the bouncer. He was heard to scream drunken threats in the process. Gonzalez was enraged, not just because of losing Lydia, but also because he had recently lost his job at a lamp factory, was impoverished, and had virtually no companions. Gonzalez returned to the establishment with a plastic container of gasoline which he found on the ground and had filled at a gas station. He spread the fuel on the only staircase into the club. Two matches were then used to ignite the gasoline.

The fire exits had been blocked to prevent people from entering without paying the cover charge. In the panic that ensued, a few people escaped by breaking a metal gate over one door.

Gonzalez then returned home, took off his gasoline-soaked clothes and fell asleep. He was arrested the following afternoon after authorities interviewed Lydia Feliciano and learned of the previous night’s argument. Once advised of his rights, he admitted to starting the blaze. A psychological examination found him to be not responsible due to mental illness or defect; but the jury, after deliberation, found him to be criminally responsible.

Found guilty on August 19, 1991, of 87 counts of arson and 87 counts of murder, Gonzalez was charged with 174 counts of murder- two for each victim he was sentence maximum of 25 years. It was the most substantial prison term ever imposed in the state of New York. He will be eligible for parole in March 2015.

The building that housed Happy Land club was managed in part by Jay Weiss, at the time the husband of actress Kathleen Turner. The New Yorker quoted Turner saying that “the fire was unfortunate but could have happened at a McDonald’s.” The building’s owner, Alex DiLorenzo, and leaseholders Weiss and Morris Jaffe, were found not criminally responsible, since they had tried to close the club and evict the tenant.

 421 – Venice, Italy is born at twelve o’clock noon, according to legend.

1199 – Richard I is wounded by a crossbow bolt while fighting France, leading to his death on April 6.

1306 – Robert the Bruce becomes King of Scotland.

1409 – The Council of Pisa opens.

1584 – Sir Walter Raleigh is granted a patent to colonize Virginia.

1634 – The first settlers arrive in Maryland.

1655 – Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is discovered by Christiaan Huygens.

1802 – The Treaty of Amiens is signed as a “Definitive Treaty of Peace” between France and the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

1807 – The Slave Trade Act becomes law, abolishing the slave trade in the British Empire.

1807 – The Swansea and Mumbles Railway, then known as the Oystermouth Railway, becomes the first passenger carrying railway in the world.

1811 – Percy Bysshe Shelley is expelled from the University of Oxford for publishing the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism.

1821 – (Julian Calendar) Greece revolts against the Ottoman Empire, beginning the Greek War of Independence.

1865 – American Civil War: In Virginia, Confederate forces temporarily capture Fort Stedman from the Union.

1894 – Coxey’s Army, the first significant American protest march, departs Massillon, Ohio for Washington D.C.

1911 – In New York City, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire kills 146 garment workers.

1917 – The Georgian Orthodox Church restores its autocephaly abolished by Imperial Russia in 1811.

1918 – The Belarusian People’s Republic is established.

1924 – On the anniversary of Greek Independence, Alexandros Papanastasiou proclaims the Second Hellenic Republic.

1931 – The Scottsboro Boys are arrested in Alabama and charged with rape.

1941 – The Kingdom of Yugoslavia joins the Axis powers with the signing of the Tripartite Pact.

1943 – Start of the American amphibious landings in the Phillipines a turning point in the Pacific War.

1947 – An explosion in a coal mine in Centralia, Illinois kills 111.

1948 – The first successful tornado forecast predicts that a tornado will strike Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma.

1949 – The extensive deportation campaign known as March deportation is conducted in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to force collectivisation by way of terror. The Soviet authorities deport more than 92,000 people from the Baltics to remote areas of the Soviet Union.

1957 – United States Customs seizes copies of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” on the grounds of obscenity.

1957 – The European Economic Community is established (West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg).

1958 – Canada’s Avro Arrow makes its first flight.

1965 – Civil rights activists led by Martin Luther King, Jr. successfully complete their 4-day 50-mile march from Selma to the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama.

1969 – During their honeymoon, John Lennon and Yoko Ono hold their first Bed-In for Peace at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel (until March 31).

1971 – Bangladesh Liberation War: Beginning of Operation Searchlight by the Pakistani Armed Forces against East Pakistani civilians.

1971 – The Army of the Republic of Vietnam abandon an attempt to cut off the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos.

1975 – Faisal of Saudi Arabia is shot and killed by a mentally ill nephew.

1979 – The first fully functional space shuttle orbiter, Columbia, is delivered to the John F. Kennedy Space Center to be prepared for its first launch.

1988 – The Candle demonstration in Bratislava is the first mass demonstration of the 1980s against the communist regime in Czechoslovakia.

1990 – The Happy Land fire was an arson fire that kills 87 people trapped inside an illegal nightclub in the New York City borough of The Bronx.

1992 – Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev returns to Earth after a 10-month stay aboard the Mir space station.

1995 – WikiWikiWeb, the world’s first wiki, and part of the Portland Pattern Repository, is made public by Ward Cunningham.

1996 – An 81-day-long standoff between the anti-government group Montana Freemen and law enforcement near Jordan, Montana, begins.

1996 – The European Union’s Veterinarian Committee bans the export of British beef and its by-products as a result of mad cow disease (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy).

2006 – Capitol Hill massacre: A gunman kills six people before taking his own life at a party in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.

2006 – Protesters demanding a new election in Belarus, following the rigged Belarusian presidential election, 2006, clash with riot police. Opposition leader Aleksander Kozulin is among several protesters arrested.

Holidays and observances

   * Anniversary of the Arengo and the Feast of the Militants (San Marino)

   * Christian Feast Day:

         o Alfwold

         o Barontius and Desiderius

         o Dismas, the “Good Thief”

         o Humbert of Maroilles

         o 25 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)

   * Earliest day on which Seward’s Day can fall, while March 31 is the latest; celebrated on the last Monday in March. (Alaska)

   * Day (Belarus)

   * Hilaria (Roman Empire)

   * Revolution Day in Greece, celebrating the symbolic outbreak of the War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire in 1821.

   * Maryland Day (Maryland)

   * Mother’s Day (Slovenia)

   * for Human Rights Day (Slovakia)

   * Tolkien Reading Day

   * The Annunciation (some churches move the observance if March 25 falls on a Sunday or during Holy Week) (Christianity), and its related observances:

         o Historic start of the new year (Lady Day) in England, Wales, Ireland, and the future United States until the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar in 1752. (The year 1751 began on 25 March; the year 1752 began on 1 January.) It is one of the four Quarter days in Ireland and England.

         o Varfrudagen or Vaffeldagen, “Waffle Day” (Sweden)