They started coming out the windows at a quarter to five on a bright, sunny spring afternoon. Large bundles of fabric, tossed from a ninth-story window in New York’s Greenwich Village. There was the sound of a muffled explosion and breaking glass, and the smell of smoke. Then the dark dress goods falling and landing with a heavy thud on the paving stones below.

“He’s trying to save the best cloth,” one observer said knowingly, sure he was watching a garment factory owner trying to salvage his stock.

Then someone noticed they weren’t bundles of cloth at all, but young women. The screams started, the crowds came running, and the fire engines and police wagons raced up. But there was little any of them could do.

In the span of 15 minutes on March 25, 1911, a fire at the Triangle shirtwaist factory killed 146 people, making it one of the deadliest disasters in New York City history. The vast majority of the dead were young women, or girls. Many of them were recent immigrants, or the children of immigrants, trying to eke out a living as best they could in New York’s rag trade.

They died when a fire escape collapsed. They died smashed against doors their bosses had locked, afraid the women might steal a few pennies worth of leftover cloth. They died leaping in desperation down elevator shafts, after the cars they knew were not coming back. They died with their dresses on fire, jumping from those ninth-story windows.