Tragedy Led to Critical Reforms in Greenwich Village and the East Village

On February 20, 1883, a fire broke out at the school affiliated with the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer. Located on East 4th Street between Avenues A and B, the Romanesque Revival-style Catholic school building was erected directly behind the main sanctuary in 1851-52. By the early 1880s, more than 900 children had enrolled, and lessons were taught in both English and German, in this area of the neighborhood that was at the time known as “Little Germany,” or Kleindeutchland.

On that fateful winter day in 1883, what started as a small fire in a storage cupboard led to tragedy. Devastatingly, it was not the fire itself that resulted in the death of sixteen young students and serious injuries for at least eight others. Reacting to the smoke and fire, in their panicked rush to exit the building a group of children were blocked by a too-narrow stairwell, which led to a crush of bodies unable to escape the building. Sixteen school girls tragically died.

The newspaper articles about the fire are heartbreaking. A particularly jarring account with the headline “SACRIFICED IN A PANIC” recounts how “the little ones [were] thrown in a pile over a broken railing.”

The article describes the nine large school rooms that comprised the four-story building, including one on the first floor, two on the second floor, and three each on the third and fourth floors. On the day of the horrific event, all of the rooms were filled with school girls ages 4-15, except for two upstairs rooms that were occupied by boys ranging in age from 5 to 12 or 13. The fire was first noticed by an officer of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who happened to be passing by the school via cable car when he observed smoke pouring from a second-story window. He quickly exited the car and ran to a nearby public fire alarm box to sound the alarm… but he was too late.

Though the fire had not yet spread, the mass panic the smoke caused had already taken hold. Only a few minutes lapsed between the sounding of the alarm and the arrival of firefighters and police to the scene, and “the flames had made no headway to speak of, and the firemen had no trouble in mastering them at once.” But several classrooms-full of the youngest girls had already begun rushing the stairwell, and their teachers were unable to stop them. That the fire was so easily contained made this avoidable tragedy all the more devastating.

Further investigation revealed that the exit passageway used by the children was no more than 3’6” wide, and that the staircase railings were composed of thin pine boards fastened to the stairs with nails, without any substantial bracing. These feeble partitions “gave way to the pressure of the densely packed and struggling mass of humanity, and scores of the little ones were hurled head foremost down into the side passageway,” leading to the calamitous outcome.

This unbelievably sad accident prompted a series of critical fire safety reforms. Another account indicated that the school had previously never held any fire drills, and several teachers expressed that though the Department of Buildings claimed that the school had been inspected and deemed “safe” within the last two years, no inspectors had ever been observed surveying the building.

In addition to stricter requirements surrounding inspections and fire drills for New York City school buildings, the incident spurred the implementation of fire safety reforms such as first-time requirements for fire escapes, wider stairwells, and unlocked doors and doors that open outward for fire escape routes at schools citywide. Such requirements remain in effect to this day.

Infamously, nearly 30 years later, another tragic fire-related incident occurred, at a devastatingly much larger scale. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which took place at the Asch (now Brown) Building at 23–29 Washington Place at Greene Street just east of Washington Square, was a seminal moment in local and national history. In just fifteen minutes, 146 people were killed, almost all of whom were female immigrant workers who lived nearby. Much like the Most Holy Redeemer fire years prior, these horrible deaths were preventable, as employees were locked inside the factory, and there were no regulations in place to ensure safe egress during fires or other emergencies. You can read more about the history and implications of this fateful event via our previous blogs on the topic.

Multiple far-reaching reforms around labor, building, and fire codes, as well as increased activism by and for women, immigrants, and children followed in the wake of the Most Holy Redeemer and Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fires. These two horrific, preventable tragedies incited significant change for our neighborhoods and our city, and it is important to reflect and shed light on these stories to continue to learn from our past.