Monday, December 15, 2008
Saturday, December 6, 2008
The World of Jacob Riis
When Jacob A. Riis, a police reporter in New York, began his personal campaign to expose the misery of the underprivileged living in the crime-infested slums of the lower East side, he soon found that the printed word was not sufficiently convincing, and so he turned to photography by flashlight.
Because it burned instantaneously - in a flash - it was an improvement over the magnesium flare, with its several seconds duration, which O'Sullivan had used in the Comstock Lode mines. Riis succeeded in its use; the blinding flash reveals with pitiless detail the sordid interiors, but deals almost tenderly with the faces of those whose lot it was to live within them.
In 1888 the New York Sun published twelve drawings from his photographs with an article headlined "Flashes from the Slums" and told how "a mysterious party has lately been startling the town o' nights. Somnolent policemen on the street, denizens of the dives in their dens, tramps and bummers in their so-called lodgings, and all the people of the wild and wonderful variety of New York night life have in their turn marvelled at and been frightened by the phenomenon." What they saw was three or four figures in the gloom, a ghostly tripod, some weird and uncanny movements, the blinding flash, and then they heard the patter of retreating footsteps and the mysterious visitors were gone before they could collect their scattered thoughts and try to find out what it was all about.
The intruders were Riis, two amateur photographers, Henry G. Piffard and Richard Hoe Lawrence (members, be it noted, of the Society of Amateur Photographers of New York), and Dr. John T. Nagle of the Health Board. Their purpose, Riis stated, was to make a collection of views for lantern slides to show "as no mere description could, the misery and vice that he had noticed in his ten years of experience ... and suggest the direction in which good might be done."
The result was that the photographic work of Jacob Riis was overlooked until 1947, when Alexander Alland, himself a photographer, made excellent enlargements from the original glass negatives that the Museum of the City of New York, through his efforts, had acquired. The exhibition held by the Museum, and the subsequent publication of some of the best of the prints in U,S. Camera 1948, revealed Riis as a photographer of importance.
Yet even from Hell's Kitchen had I not long before been driven forth with my camera by a band of angry women, who pelted me with brickbats and stones on my retreat, shouting at me never to come back.... The children know generally what they want and they go for it by the shortest cut. I found that out, whether I had flowers to give or pictures to take. . . Their determination to be "took" the moment the camera hove into sight, in the most striking pose they could hastily devise, was always the most formidable bar to success I met."
Because it burned instantaneously - in a flash - it was an improvement over the magnesium flare, with its several seconds duration, which O'Sullivan had used in the Comstock Lode mines. Riis succeeded in its use; the blinding flash reveals with pitiless detail the sordid interiors, but deals almost tenderly with the faces of those whose lot it was to live within them.
He was always sympathetic to people, whether he was photographing street Arabs stealing in the street from a handcart, or the inhabitants of the alley known as Bandits' Roost peering unself consciously at the camera from doorways and stoops and windows. The importance of these photographs lies in their power not only to inform, but to move us. They are at once interpretations and records; although they are no longer topical, they contain qualities that will last as long as man is concerned with his brother.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Growth of Industry: Seleted Topics
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory FireBefore the Fire:
A Description of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and Fire
Like many other factories in the beginning of the twentieth century, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was a loft factory. This means that the factory was not in a separate building, but in the top three floors of an office building. The Triangle Factory was on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of a building called the Asch Building. The factory produced shirtwaists, a woman's blouse. Shirtwaists were in great demand for the growing number of women office workers during that time, and the Triangle Factory was one of the most successful garment factories in New York City. It employed one thousand workers, mostly immigrant women who knew little or no English. They worked long hours in hazardous and unhealthful conditions for very low wages.
Workers were crowded elbow-to-elbow and back-to-back at rows of tables. Pieces of fabric were scattered on the floor or stored tightly in bins. Cutting machines ran on gasoline. Smoking was not allowed, but workers often smoked while the bosses looked the other way. Water barrels with buckets for putting out fires were not always full. There was one rotting fire hose, attached to a rusted valve.
There was only one exit from the workroom and it was down a hall so narrow that people had to walk one by one. There were four elevators but only was working. The stairway was as narrow as the hall. There were two doors leading from the building; one was closed or locked from the outside and the other opened inward.
The Fire Starts
On March 25, 1911, the day of the fire, the offices below the factory were closed for the weekend. About half of the workers were in the factory on that Saturday. The fire spread too quickly to be extinguished by the small water supply and the fire hose did not work. In the rush to get down the narrow hall and stairways to the doors, people were trampled. Some tried to break through the locked door. Others rushed to the other door and were crushed as they tried to pull it inward to open it. As people crowded into the elevator, others tried to ride down on the tops of the cars, hanging on the cables. Soon there were so many bodies in the shafts that the one working elevator could no longer be used. Women, girls, and men trapped in the workroom threw themselves out of the windows and fell to their death on the street. Others tried to use the fire escape, but it was too weak to hold so many people and soon melted in the heat.
Firefighters from Engine Companies 72 and 33 were first on the scene. Once they arrived, they had several problems. The ladders only reached to between the sixth and seventh floors. Water from the hoses only reached to the seventh floor. The nets and blankets that the firefighters spread to catch the jumping workers tore and the people crashed through to die on the street.
The number of people who died was 146, including 13 men. Nineteen bodies were found against the locked door. Twenty-five bodies were found in the cloakroom. Some bodies were so badly charred that they could not be identified, even as to sex. Sixty-two jumped nine stories to their deaths. The bodies were taken to the Bellevue Morgue or lined up along the Green Street for parents and family member to come and identify their lost loved ones.
Stories of Survivors, Witnesses and Rescuers
1. Max Rother, a tailor, was on the Washington Place side of the building on the eighth floor when he heard the cry of "fire" coming from the Greene Street side of the loft. Hanging over the heads of the sewers at the machines in the room was a line of clothes in flames. With the manager, Max Burnstein, he tried to put the fire out with pails of water. While doing this, the rope on which the clothes were hung burned in half and the burning clothes fell over their heads. Soon the room was in flames. Rother ran for the stairs on the Greene Street side of the building and escaped. He does not know what happened to Burnstein, the manager.
2. Cecilia Walker, 20 years old, who lives at 29 Stanton Street, slid down the cable at the Washington Place elevator and escaped with burned hands and body bruises. She was on the eighth floor of the building when the fire started. Running over to the elevator shaft she rang for the car, but it did not come. As she passed the sixth floor sliding on the cable she became unconscious, she said, and does not know what happened until she reached St. Vincent's Hospital, where she is now. "A girl and I," she told the doctors at the hospital, "were on the eighth floor, and when I ran for the elevator shaft my girl friend started for the window on the Washington Street side. I looked around to call her but she had gone."
3. Benjamin Levy of 995 Freeman Street, the Bronx, one of the first men to arrive at the burning building, says that it was ten minutes after the fire started before the first fire engine arrived. Mr. Levy is the junior member of the firm of 1. Levy & Son wholesale clothing manufactures just around the corner, at 3 and 5 Waverley Place.
"I was upstairs in our work-room," said he, "when one of the employees who happened to be looking out of the window cried that there was a fire around the corner. I rushed downstairs, and when I reached the sidewalk the girls were already jumping from the windows. None of them moved after they struck the sidewalk. Several men ran up with a net, which they got somewhere, and I seized one side of it to help them hold it.
"It was about ten feet square and we managed to catch about fifteen girls. I don't believe we saved over one or two however. The fall was so great that they bounced to the sidewalk after striking the net. Bodies were falling all around us, and two or three of the men with me were knocked down. The girls just leaped wildly out of the windows and turned over and over before reaching the sidewalk.
"I only saw one man jump. All the rest were girls. They stood on the windowsills tearing their hair out in the handfuls and then they jumped. One girl held back after all the rest and clung to the window casing until the flames from the window below crept up to her and set her clothing on fire. Then she jumped far over the net and was killed instantly, like all the rest."
One of the policemen who were checking up on the bodies as they were being shipped to the Morgue told of one heap of bodies in which a girl was found still alive when the others were taken off her. She died before an ambulance doctor could reach her.
4. Samuel Levine, a machine operator on the ninth floor, who lives at 1982 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, told this story when he had recovered from his injuries at the New York Hospital: "I was at work when I heard the shout of 'Fire!' The girls on the floor dropped everything and rushed wildly around, some in the direction of windows and others toward the elevator door. I saw the elevator go down past our floor once. It was crowded to the limit and no one could have got on. It did not stop. Not another trip was made.
"There were flames all around in no time. Three girls, I think from the floor below, came rushing past me. Their clothes were on fire. I grabbed the fire pails and tried to pour the water on them, but they did not stop. They ran screaming toward the windows. I knew there was no hope there, so I stayed where I was, hoping that the elevator would come up again.
"I finally smashed open the doors to the elevator. I guess I must have done it with my hands. I reached out and grabbed the cables, wrapped my legs around them, and started to slide down. I can remember getting to the sixth floor. While on my way down, as slow as I could let myself drop, the bodies of six girls went falling past me. One of them struck me and I fell to the top of the elevator. I fell on the dead body of a girl. My back hit the beam that runs across the top of the car.
"Finally I heard the firemen cutting their way into the elevator shaft, and they came and let us out. I think others were taken out alive with me."
5. M. Samillson of the firm of Samilson & Co., on the second floor of the building, was standing at one of the windows of his office just after the fire was discovered, In the next few minutes, he said, he saw several bodies shoot past the window from above, most of the girls. When the firemen reached him at nearly 6 o'clock, he was still standing there horrified. He says he could not tear himself away.
Few of the girls that fell from the windows on the ninth floor, it was learned, jumped of their own accord. They were pushed forward by the frightened crowd in the room behind them.
6. One of the bookkeepers, Morris Lewine, said he was on the top floor. He threw the books into a safe when the cry of fire was raised. He then made his way to the roof, followed by two girls. He found a ladder and made his way with one of the girls to the roof of the next building. He did not know what became of the second girl.
7. Thomas Gregory, an elevator man, who works at 103 Bleecker Street, said he was going home when he came to the fire. He says he ran into the building and made three trips in the elevator, taking down about fifteen persons at each trip. He said he left the hallways of the upper floors crowded with frenzied men and women, who fought to get into the elevator and clawed his face and neck. After the third trip the machinery broke down, he said. He said there were two elevators when he went into the building. One was on the ground floor, and one was on one of the upper floors. He saw no operator.
8. A man who said he was Samuel Tauber and that he had been employed as a foreman in the Triangle Company shops told about a fire on the eighth floor which happened two years ago. He said that on this occasion the motor, which supplies power for the two hundred sewing and cutting machines on that floor, had emitted a flame, which set fire to some cuttings nearby. He said that this fire had not been serious, but that it had thrown the girls working there into a panic. Tauber said that he believed yesterday's fire might have been caused in the same way.
9. Frank Fingerman, employed by the firm of M. S. Work & Co., in Washington Place East, turned in a fire alarm from a Broadway box when he heard the cries of the women in the factory building.
"I saw as I ran," he said, "a boy and a girl standing together at a Greene Street window. He was holding her, and she seemed to be trying to jump. They were still there when I came back from the firebox. As the smoke began to come out of the window above them the boy let the girl go, and she jumped. He followed her before she struck the ground.
"Four more came out of the same window immediately. The crowds were jamming our own door until I could not pass out and the street was packed right up to the fire trucks."
10. Frederick Newman, the New York University law student who with Charles P. Kramer, had charge of the rescue party of the New York University students up on the roof of their institution, said this after the work was done:
"We were in the library of the building in the top floor when we noticed a gust of smoke coming from the building across the courtyard. Sparks drifted in at the open library window and as we jumped from our seats we saw the girls workers crowding at the windows. We saw a man leap out and then the girls began to follow him."
11. 0. S. Smith, another student, was on his way from the Astor Place Subway station to the law library when he first caught sight of the fire. "I was stopped by police at Waverley Place and Greene Street," he said. "Across the street we could see the bodies of five women. As I looked I saw an arm raised and I knew that one of the women was alive. I called out to a policeman standing near. His only answer was, 'Get back there and mind your own business.' I pointed out the woman to him and told him something ought to be done, as the water was pouring down upon her. He didn't understand me, perhaps for nothing was done."
12. Alfred K. Schwach, a student, saw girls rushing to the rear factory windows, their hair on fire, to pause at the window for a moment and then jump out. "I saw four men," he said, "who tried to catch the girls. They seized horse blanket from a truck horse in Waverley Place and held it out. It gave way like paper as the girls struck it."
13. Pauline Grossman, 18 years old, who was injured by leaping from a window of the factory as the fire was growing on the eighth floor, says three male employees of the factory made a human chain of their bodies and swung across a narrow alleyway to the building fronting in Greene Street. She declares a number of person's passed across the men's bodies and escaped from the burning building by entering a window of the building opposite.
"As the people crossing upon the human bridge crowded more and more over the men's bodies the weight upon the body of the center man became too great and his back was broken. She said he fell to the passageway below and the other two men lost their holds upon the windowsills and fell. Persons who were crossing upon the human bridge dropped with them to the passageway."
14. Celia Saltz was working at her sewing machine when the fire started. She raced to the door and the force of the crowd pushed her into the elevator as soon as the doors opened. She said, "I even forgot that I had a younger sister working with me ... I began to scream for my sister. I had lost her, I had lost my sister." Celia fainted in the elevator but woke up on the floor of the store across the street. I opened my eyes and I saw my sister bending over me. I began to cry. I couldn't help it. My sister, Minnie, was only fourteen."
Adapted from MuseumNetwork. com
15. Pauline Cuoio Pepe was a nineteen-year-old sewing machine worker at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. "It was all nice young Jewish girls who were engaged to be married. You should see the diamonds and everything. Those were the ones who threw themselves from the window. What the hell did they close the door for? What did they think we were going to steal? What are we gonna do, steal a shirtwaist? Who the heck wanted a shirtwaist?" asked Pepe. " We never went out the front door. We always went one by one out the back. There was a man there searching, because the people were afraid we would take something, so that door was always locked.
A Description of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and Fire
Like many other factories in the beginning of the twentieth century, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was a loft factory. This means that the factory was not in a separate building, but in the top three floors of an office building. The Triangle Factory was on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of a building called the Asch Building. The factory produced shirtwaists, a woman's blouse. Shirtwaists were in great demand for the growing number of women office workers during that time, and the Triangle Factory was one of the most successful garment factories in New York City. It employed one thousand workers, mostly immigrant women who knew little or no English. They worked long hours in hazardous and unhealthful conditions for very low wages.
Workers were crowded elbow-to-elbow and back-to-back at rows of tables. Pieces of fabric were scattered on the floor or stored tightly in bins. Cutting machines ran on gasoline. Smoking was not allowed, but workers often smoked while the bosses looked the other way. Water barrels with buckets for putting out fires were not always full. There was one rotting fire hose, attached to a rusted valve.
There was only one exit from the workroom and it was down a hall so narrow that people had to walk one by one. There were four elevators but only was working. The stairway was as narrow as the hall. There were two doors leading from the building; one was closed or locked from the outside and the other opened inward.
The Fire Starts
On March 25, 1911, the day of the fire, the offices below the factory were closed for the weekend. About half of the workers were in the factory on that Saturday. The fire spread too quickly to be extinguished by the small water supply and the fire hose did not work. In the rush to get down the narrow hall and stairways to the doors, people were trampled. Some tried to break through the locked door. Others rushed to the other door and were crushed as they tried to pull it inward to open it. As people crowded into the elevator, others tried to ride down on the tops of the cars, hanging on the cables. Soon there were so many bodies in the shafts that the one working elevator could no longer be used. Women, girls, and men trapped in the workroom threw themselves out of the windows and fell to their death on the street. Others tried to use the fire escape, but it was too weak to hold so many people and soon melted in the heat.
Firefighters from Engine Companies 72 and 33 were first on the scene. Once they arrived, they had several problems. The ladders only reached to between the sixth and seventh floors. Water from the hoses only reached to the seventh floor. The nets and blankets that the firefighters spread to catch the jumping workers tore and the people crashed through to die on the street.
The number of people who died was 146, including 13 men. Nineteen bodies were found against the locked door. Twenty-five bodies were found in the cloakroom. Some bodies were so badly charred that they could not be identified, even as to sex. Sixty-two jumped nine stories to their deaths. The bodies were taken to the Bellevue Morgue or lined up along the Green Street for parents and family member to come and identify their lost loved ones.
Stories of Survivors, Witnesses and Rescuers
1. Max Rother, a tailor, was on the Washington Place side of the building on the eighth floor when he heard the cry of "fire" coming from the Greene Street side of the loft. Hanging over the heads of the sewers at the machines in the room was a line of clothes in flames. With the manager, Max Burnstein, he tried to put the fire out with pails of water. While doing this, the rope on which the clothes were hung burned in half and the burning clothes fell over their heads. Soon the room was in flames. Rother ran for the stairs on the Greene Street side of the building and escaped. He does not know what happened to Burnstein, the manager.
2. Cecilia Walker, 20 years old, who lives at 29 Stanton Street, slid down the cable at the Washington Place elevator and escaped with burned hands and body bruises. She was on the eighth floor of the building when the fire started. Running over to the elevator shaft she rang for the car, but it did not come. As she passed the sixth floor sliding on the cable she became unconscious, she said, and does not know what happened until she reached St. Vincent's Hospital, where she is now. "A girl and I," she told the doctors at the hospital, "were on the eighth floor, and when I ran for the elevator shaft my girl friend started for the window on the Washington Street side. I looked around to call her but she had gone."
3. Benjamin Levy of 995 Freeman Street, the Bronx, one of the first men to arrive at the burning building, says that it was ten minutes after the fire started before the first fire engine arrived. Mr. Levy is the junior member of the firm of 1. Levy & Son wholesale clothing manufactures just around the corner, at 3 and 5 Waverley Place.
"I was upstairs in our work-room," said he, "when one of the employees who happened to be looking out of the window cried that there was a fire around the corner. I rushed downstairs, and when I reached the sidewalk the girls were already jumping from the windows. None of them moved after they struck the sidewalk. Several men ran up with a net, which they got somewhere, and I seized one side of it to help them hold it.
"It was about ten feet square and we managed to catch about fifteen girls. I don't believe we saved over one or two however. The fall was so great that they bounced to the sidewalk after striking the net. Bodies were falling all around us, and two or three of the men with me were knocked down. The girls just leaped wildly out of the windows and turned over and over before reaching the sidewalk.
"I only saw one man jump. All the rest were girls. They stood on the windowsills tearing their hair out in the handfuls and then they jumped. One girl held back after all the rest and clung to the window casing until the flames from the window below crept up to her and set her clothing on fire. Then she jumped far over the net and was killed instantly, like all the rest."
One of the policemen who were checking up on the bodies as they were being shipped to the Morgue told of one heap of bodies in which a girl was found still alive when the others were taken off her. She died before an ambulance doctor could reach her.
4. Samuel Levine, a machine operator on the ninth floor, who lives at 1982 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, told this story when he had recovered from his injuries at the New York Hospital: "I was at work when I heard the shout of 'Fire!' The girls on the floor dropped everything and rushed wildly around, some in the direction of windows and others toward the elevator door. I saw the elevator go down past our floor once. It was crowded to the limit and no one could have got on. It did not stop. Not another trip was made.
"There were flames all around in no time. Three girls, I think from the floor below, came rushing past me. Their clothes were on fire. I grabbed the fire pails and tried to pour the water on them, but they did not stop. They ran screaming toward the windows. I knew there was no hope there, so I stayed where I was, hoping that the elevator would come up again.
"I finally smashed open the doors to the elevator. I guess I must have done it with my hands. I reached out and grabbed the cables, wrapped my legs around them, and started to slide down. I can remember getting to the sixth floor. While on my way down, as slow as I could let myself drop, the bodies of six girls went falling past me. One of them struck me and I fell to the top of the elevator. I fell on the dead body of a girl. My back hit the beam that runs across the top of the car.
"Finally I heard the firemen cutting their way into the elevator shaft, and they came and let us out. I think others were taken out alive with me."
5. M. Samillson of the firm of Samilson & Co., on the second floor of the building, was standing at one of the windows of his office just after the fire was discovered, In the next few minutes, he said, he saw several bodies shoot past the window from above, most of the girls. When the firemen reached him at nearly 6 o'clock, he was still standing there horrified. He says he could not tear himself away.
Few of the girls that fell from the windows on the ninth floor, it was learned, jumped of their own accord. They were pushed forward by the frightened crowd in the room behind them.
6. One of the bookkeepers, Morris Lewine, said he was on the top floor. He threw the books into a safe when the cry of fire was raised. He then made his way to the roof, followed by two girls. He found a ladder and made his way with one of the girls to the roof of the next building. He did not know what became of the second girl.
7. Thomas Gregory, an elevator man, who works at 103 Bleecker Street, said he was going home when he came to the fire. He says he ran into the building and made three trips in the elevator, taking down about fifteen persons at each trip. He said he left the hallways of the upper floors crowded with frenzied men and women, who fought to get into the elevator and clawed his face and neck. After the third trip the machinery broke down, he said. He said there were two elevators when he went into the building. One was on the ground floor, and one was on one of the upper floors. He saw no operator.
8. A man who said he was Samuel Tauber and that he had been employed as a foreman in the Triangle Company shops told about a fire on the eighth floor which happened two years ago. He said that on this occasion the motor, which supplies power for the two hundred sewing and cutting machines on that floor, had emitted a flame, which set fire to some cuttings nearby. He said that this fire had not been serious, but that it had thrown the girls working there into a panic. Tauber said that he believed yesterday's fire might have been caused in the same way.
9. Frank Fingerman, employed by the firm of M. S. Work & Co., in Washington Place East, turned in a fire alarm from a Broadway box when he heard the cries of the women in the factory building.
"I saw as I ran," he said, "a boy and a girl standing together at a Greene Street window. He was holding her, and she seemed to be trying to jump. They were still there when I came back from the firebox. As the smoke began to come out of the window above them the boy let the girl go, and she jumped. He followed her before she struck the ground.
"Four more came out of the same window immediately. The crowds were jamming our own door until I could not pass out and the street was packed right up to the fire trucks."
10. Frederick Newman, the New York University law student who with Charles P. Kramer, had charge of the rescue party of the New York University students up on the roof of their institution, said this after the work was done:
"We were in the library of the building in the top floor when we noticed a gust of smoke coming from the building across the courtyard. Sparks drifted in at the open library window and as we jumped from our seats we saw the girls workers crowding at the windows. We saw a man leap out and then the girls began to follow him."
11. 0. S. Smith, another student, was on his way from the Astor Place Subway station to the law library when he first caught sight of the fire. "I was stopped by police at Waverley Place and Greene Street," he said. "Across the street we could see the bodies of five women. As I looked I saw an arm raised and I knew that one of the women was alive. I called out to a policeman standing near. His only answer was, 'Get back there and mind your own business.' I pointed out the woman to him and told him something ought to be done, as the water was pouring down upon her. He didn't understand me, perhaps for nothing was done."
12. Alfred K. Schwach, a student, saw girls rushing to the rear factory windows, their hair on fire, to pause at the window for a moment and then jump out. "I saw four men," he said, "who tried to catch the girls. They seized horse blanket from a truck horse in Waverley Place and held it out. It gave way like paper as the girls struck it."
13. Pauline Grossman, 18 years old, who was injured by leaping from a window of the factory as the fire was growing on the eighth floor, says three male employees of the factory made a human chain of their bodies and swung across a narrow alleyway to the building fronting in Greene Street. She declares a number of person's passed across the men's bodies and escaped from the burning building by entering a window of the building opposite.
"As the people crossing upon the human bridge crowded more and more over the men's bodies the weight upon the body of the center man became too great and his back was broken. She said he fell to the passageway below and the other two men lost their holds upon the windowsills and fell. Persons who were crossing upon the human bridge dropped with them to the passageway."
14. Celia Saltz was working at her sewing machine when the fire started. She raced to the door and the force of the crowd pushed her into the elevator as soon as the doors opened. She said, "I even forgot that I had a younger sister working with me ... I began to scream for my sister. I had lost her, I had lost my sister." Celia fainted in the elevator but woke up on the floor of the store across the street. I opened my eyes and I saw my sister bending over me. I began to cry. I couldn't help it. My sister, Minnie, was only fourteen."
Adapted from MuseumNetwork. com
15. Pauline Cuoio Pepe was a nineteen-year-old sewing machine worker at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. "It was all nice young Jewish girls who were engaged to be married. You should see the diamonds and everything. Those were the ones who threw themselves from the window. What the hell did they close the door for? What did they think we were going to steal? What are we gonna do, steal a shirtwaist? Who the heck wanted a shirtwaist?" asked Pepe. " We never went out the front door. We always went one by one out the back. There was a man there searching, because the people were afraid we would take something, so that door was always locked.
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