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The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of March 25, 1911, is one of the most terrible workplace disasters in the history of the United States, a tragedy that helped to inspire the organized labor movement. Friday marks 100 years since the fire that took dozens of lives and changed the face of American labor.

146 New York City garment workers - primarily young immigrant women - died that day. Most of the victims were Italian-American or Jewish women, and several were newly-arrived on America's shores.

When the fire broke out, the workers had no way out of the building. The fire escape had collapsed, the elevator stopped working after a few trips, and the doors had been locked to prevent theft. Desperate women jumped from the eight and ninth floor of the 10-story building, plummeting to their deaths in the street below.

Pauline Pepe was one of the fortunate few who survived the fire. In a recording kept in the archives of the Kheel Center at Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, she describes seeing bodies in the streets and the building engulfed in flames.

"We were all crying," she remembers. "My God, I was cold. I had no coat on or nothing (...) How those girls did it — I don't know how they had the courage to throw themselves down. I couldn't do it."

Approximately 400,000 New Yorkers attended the funeral procession in 1911, despite the pouring rain.

Until recently, there were still some unidentified victims of the fire. This year, researcher Michael Hirsch identified the last six Triangle fire victims by digging through old newspapers and public records.

Church bells will ring Friday afternoon at the hour the fire broke out, and for the first time ever the names of all of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire victims will be read aloud, outside the building where those 146 workers died 100 years ago.

Source: NPR.org