think the right word for my presence of mind is vanity.”
Others jumped or fell through the 2½-foot opening into the left elevator shaft. Sarah Friedman had seen the elevator slide away on its last descent. She grabbed the cable at the side of the shaft. “I slid all the way down and ended up on top of the car where I lost consciousness. One of my hands was burned by the friction. When I opened my eyes I was lying in the street—among the dead.”
One of the last to jump—and survive—was May Caliandro Levantini, a mother of three children. She tried to stop her fearful, relentless progress toward the elevator pit. Her hands scratched for a hold on the grating alongside the shaft opening.
But when she felt that the pressure behind her could no longer be resisted, she turned and leaped for a cable.
“I was on top of the elevator cage, face up,” she said. “I saw firemen going up the stairs with a hose. One of them called to me through the grill as he went up, ‘You are all right!’ I kept crying, ‘Look! Look!’ That’s all I could say. They couldn’t see what I could see way up there in the shaft.”
She could see others being pushed out into the shaft at the ninth floor. She rolled over toward the wall to be out of the line of their plunge.
Joseph Zito heard the bodies hit, felt his car shiver with each new impact. “A body struck the top of the elevator and bent the iron. A minute later another one hit.
“The screams from above were getting worse. I looked up and saw the whole shaft getting red with fire. I knew the poor girls up there were trapped. But my car wouldn’t work. It was jammed by the bodies.”
Then the car slipped down to the bottom of the shaft.
“It was horrible,” Zito added. “They kept coming down from the burning floors above. Some of their clothing was burning as they fell. I could see the streaks of fire coming down like flaming rockets.”
Now there was no exit. The flames roared louder, steadier. They poured up the Greene Street stairwell. They pushed out of all of the windows. They blew into the Washington Place elevator shaft. In the center of the shop, they billowed as a single deep layer of flame. And the door to the Washington Place staircase held fast and there life screamed to an end.
“I have never been able to forget that maybe I could have saved pretty Mary Levanthal,” cutter Joseph Granick says.
“Only a few minutes before the fire she came down to the eighth floor where I was cutting trimmings. She said to me, ‘Joe, I have a few girls coming in tomorrow. I need a few dozen cuffs.’
“I gave her five bundles of cuffs. Why didn’t I hold her back? Why didn’t I talk to her a little longer? Why didn’t I argue with her? If she had stayed only a few more minutes she would have escaped with us. But, no! She went back to the ninth floor to die.”
6. ESCAPE
For never to return here I believed.
— CANTO VIII :96
The city came running.
On the East Side, the old women heard the screams of the fire engines, distant and shifting like wild beasts dashing through the labyrinth of narrow streets. They threw their knitted shawls over their heads, wrung their hands, and ran.
The clang and screams of the engines converging from all sides on Washington Place made thousands pause. On nearby Fourteenth Street, Saturday afternoon crowds in front of the department stores and the Academy of Music at Irving Place heard the terrible sounds. In the tenement canyons south of Washington Square, and in the offices along lower Broadway the insistent engine whistles announced an unknown catastrophe.
Wherever they were in the streets, people looked skyward and knew the place of disaster. Faces turned toward the pillar of black smoke steadily rising in the sky. Thousands began to race the screaming engines toward the Asch building.
They came by Third Avenue elevated and by Fifth Avenue double-decker buses. In the more remote reaches of the East Side they boarded
Others jumped or fell through the 2½-foot opening into the left elevator shaft. Sarah Friedman had seen the elevator slide away on its last descent. She grabbed the cable at the side of the shaft. “I slid all the way down and ended up on top of the car where I lost consciousness. One of my hands was burned by the friction. When I opened my eyes I was lying in the street—among the dead.”
One of the last to jump—and survive—was May Caliandro Levantini, a mother of three children. She tried to stop her fearful, relentless progress toward the elevator pit. Her hands scratched for a hold on the grating alongside the shaft opening.
But when she felt that the pressure behind her could no longer be resisted, she turned and leaped for a cable.
“I was on top of the elevator cage, face up,” she said. “I saw firemen going up the stairs with a hose. One of them called to me through the grill as he went up, ‘You are all right!’ I kept crying, ‘Look! Look!’ That’s all I could say. They couldn’t see what I could see way up there in the shaft.”
She could see others being pushed out into the shaft at the ninth floor. She rolled over toward the wall to be out of the line of their plunge.
Joseph Zito heard the bodies hit, felt his car shiver with each new impact. “A body struck the top of the elevator and bent the iron. A minute later another one hit.
“The screams from above were getting worse. I looked up and saw the whole shaft getting red with fire. I knew the poor girls up there were trapped. But my car wouldn’t work. It was jammed by the bodies.”
Then the car slipped down to the bottom of the shaft.
“It was horrible,” Zito added. “They kept coming down from the burning floors above. Some of their clothing was burning as they fell. I could see the streaks of fire coming down like flaming rockets.”
Now there was no exit. The flames roared louder, steadier. They poured up the Greene Street stairwell. They pushed out of all of the windows. They blew into the Washington Place elevator shaft. In the center of the shop, they billowed as a single deep layer of flame. And the door to the Washington Place staircase held fast and there life screamed to an end.
“I have never been able to forget that maybe I could have saved pretty Mary Levanthal,” cutter Joseph Granick says.
“Only a few minutes before the fire she came down to the eighth floor where I was cutting trimmings. She said to me, ‘Joe, I have a few girls coming in tomorrow. I need a few dozen cuffs.’
“I gave her five bundles of cuffs. Why didn’t I hold her back? Why didn’t I talk to her a little longer? Why didn’t I argue with her? If she had stayed only a few more minutes she would have escaped with us. But, no! She went back to the ninth floor to die.”
6. ESCAPE
For never to return here I believed.
— CANTO VIII :96
The city came running.
On the East Side, the old women heard the screams of the fire engines, distant and shifting like wild beasts dashing through the labyrinth of narrow streets. They threw their knitted shawls over their heads, wrung their hands, and ran.
The clang and screams of the engines converging from all sides on Washington Place made thousands pause. On nearby Fourteenth Street, Saturday afternoon crowds in front of the department stores and the Academy of Music at Irving Place heard the terrible sounds. In the tenement canyons south of Washington Square, and in the offices along lower Broadway the insistent engine whistles announced an unknown catastrophe.
Wherever they were in the streets, people looked skyward and knew the place of disaster. Faces turned toward the pillar of black smoke steadily rising in the sky. Thousands began to race the screaming engines toward the Asch building.
They came by Third Avenue elevated and by Fifth Avenue double-decker buses. In the more remote reaches of the East Side they boarded
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