<P> The building has been designated a National Historic Landmark and a New York City landmark . </P> <P> The Triangle Waist Company factory occupied the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the 10 - story Asch Building on the northwest corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, just east of Washington Square Park, in the Greenwich Village area of New York City . Under the ownership of Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, the factory produced women's blouses, known as "shirtwaists ." The factory normally employed about 500 workers, mostly young immigrant women, who worked nine hours a day on weekdays plus seven hours on Saturdays, earning for their 52 hours of work between $7 and $12 a week, the equivalent of $171 to $293 a week in 2016 currency, or $3.20 to $5.50 per hour . </P> <P> As the workday was ending on the afternoon of Saturday, March 25, 1911, a fire flared up at approximately 4: 40 PM in a scrap bin under one of the cutter's tables at the northeast corner of the eighth floor . The first fire alarm was sent at 4: 45 PM by a passerby on Washington Place who saw smoke coming from the eighth floor . Both owners of the factory were in attendance and had invited their children to the factory on that afternoon . The Fire Marshal concluded that the likely cause of the fire was the disposal of an unextinguished match or cigarette butt in the scrap bin, which held two months' worth of accumulated cuttings by the time of the fire . Beneath the table in the wooden bin were hundreds of pounds of scraps which were left over from the several thousand shirtwaists that had been cut at that table . The scraps piled up from the last time the bin was emptied, coupled with the hanging fabrics that surrounded it; the steel trim was the only thing that was not highly flammable . Although smoking was banned in the factory, cutters were known to sneak cigarettes, exhaling the smoke through their lapels to avoid detection . A New York Times article suggested that the fire may have been started by the engines running the sewing machines . A series of articles in Collier's noted a pattern of arson among certain sectors of the garment industry whenever their particular product fell out of fashion or had excess inventory in order to collect insurance . The Insurance Monitor, a leading industry journal, observed that shirtwaists had recently fallen out of fashion, and that insurance for manufacturers of them was "fairly saturated with moral hazard ." Although Blanck and Harris were known for having had four previous suspicious fires at their companies, arson was not suspected in this case . </P> <Table> <Tr> <Td> </Td> <Td> "The Washington Place Fire" An eyewitness account 00: 08: 09 </Td> </Tr> <Tr> <Td_colspan="2"> Problems playing this file? See media help . </Td> </Tr> </Table>

What caused the fire in the triangle shirtwaist factory