“It’s 100 years after the Triangle fire, but some of the exact same factors were at work,” he said. “It’s appalling. It’s like you can have the Holocaust happen all over again, and zero lessons were learned.”

When a fire broke out at the Triangle factory on March 25, 1911, numerous factors — beyond the flammability of the cloth — turned it into a calamity. The Fire Department’s tallest ladders reached only six floors, while the factory’s nearly 500 employees worked on the eighth, ninth and 10th floors. The managers of the factory had locked a ninth-floor door to one of the two staircases and were slow to notify workers on the ninth floor about the fire, which began on the eighth floor. The fire escape was so poorly constructed that it collapsed and crashed to the ground when it filled with workers. The factory did not conduct fire drills and was not equipped with overhead sprinklers, which some other factories had already started installing.

The Triangle fire prompted a wave of safety reforms: New York began requiring automatic sprinklers in tall buildings and fire drills at large workplaces.

Frances Perkins, who was then the leader of the New York office of the National Consumers League and who later became the state labor commissioner and the federal labor secretary under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, witnessed the fire and the workers jumping. She had been having tea at a friend’s townhouse on Washington Square.

The disaster and the images of dozens of bodies on the sidewalk outside the factory scarred the city’s psyche. Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers marched down Fifth Avenue to honor the dead.