This week in history features America’s (not quite) first bank robbery and the horrible disaster that sparked a worker safety revolution.
March 19, 1831
America’s first great bank robbery wasn’t actually America’s first. No one really knows what historian or reporter first claimed that the City Bank of New York robbery of 1831 was the nation’s first, but lazy journalists and even lazier historians rehashed the claim time and again.
In actuality, the dubious honor probably goes to the 1798 robbery of a bank in Philadelphia. Oddly enough, the 1798 robbery and the one that happened on this day in 1831 were both achieved using the same method: creating a duplicate key.
The story of America’s (not so) first bank robbery begins with two men: James Honeyman and William Murray.
Well-known thieves and ne’er-do-wells, Honeyman and Murray had spent their lives ripping people off. For all their rough edges, they had picked up a thing or two in their day.
Rather than try and break into the City Bank of New York by force, somehow the culprits had been able to make a wax impression of the key from the lock to the front door. Returning to the bank during the night of the 19th, Honeyman and Murray simply unlocked the front doors and sauntered inside.
For the next several hours, the men systematically packed sacks with roughly $245,000 in banknotes and coins. That was an enormous sum of money, roughly equivalent to $52 million today. Certainly the score of a lifetime.
They exited the bank just as easily as they entered it. No one was the wiser until the tellers returned to work the next day to find their vault and safety deposits ransacked.
By the time their dirty deed had been discovered, Honeyman and Murray were safely back in their hotel rooms, dividing the loot between themselves. Honeyman took his share in several trunks and rented a room at a nearby boarding house, where he sat on it for the next several days.
Meanwhile, rumor over the theft of so much money raced across the region, sped along by newspaper articles that advertised a reward in the several thousands of dollars. Everyone seemed completely flabbergasted as to who could have perpetrated such a crime.
Well, not everyone. Chief Constable Jacob Hays knew immediately that James Honeyman was behind the deed. Apparently, Honeyman was suspected of a theft of a Brooklyn store and several other misdeeds about the area. He was well known to say the least. However, when he went to search his home, Hays could find hide nor hair of Honeyman. The case might have dragged on from there had the landlord of the boarding house Honeyman was hiding out in not become suspicious of his new tenant and his several heavy traveling trunks.
On March 24, Honeyman took one of the trunks with him as he left the boardinghouse that morning, telling the landlord he would return for the others.
By now convinced that something was off about the man, the landlord contacted Chief Constable Hays, who came to the boardinghouse to investigate. Together with the landlord, Hays opened the trunks in the room and discovered most of the loot.
Lying in wait for the return of Honeyman, Hays apprehended the man when he returned to his room to retrieve the by now discovered trunks. A quick description of a man that routinely visited Honeyman at the boardinghouse convinced Hays that William Murray was his accomplice. Hays tracked Murray down in Philadelphia and returned him for trial.
In the end, the two men were convicted of the robbery and sentenced to five years in prison. Despite months of search, over $40,000 of the stolen money was never recovered.
While it was never really America’s first bank robbery, the story behind the robbery of March 19, 1831 certainly sounds like it ought to have been.
The vast sum of money stolen, the audacity of the thieves and the open-ended conclusion all make for the sort of story that reporters and historians just can’t ignore.
March 25, 1911
These days they are common features of all public spaces: fire extinguishers, exit signs, and fire alarms.
Like most innovations, however, events have to transpire that hit home the need for change before change itself is implemented.
Humanity is a dense pupil – we tend to take several harsh lessons before getting the point. One-hundred and six years ago to the day, the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. in New York City was the scene of one of these harsh lessons.
The Triangle factory was located in the top three floors of the Asch Building in Manhattan. Owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, it was a sweatshop, plain and simple. Working in cramped, low-lighted spaces, young women sat hunched over lines of sewing machines.
The building had three elevators, but only one of them was operational on the fateful day of March 25 and access to it was only available down a narrow corridor, the women having to walk single-file to get to it.
Fortunately, the elevators were not the only means of egress from the building, with two rickety stairways also available.
Unfortunately, the door to one of these stairways was locked to prevent stealing and the other only opened inward.
Despite knowing the danger of fire in the building (fires had broken out in the Asch building only nine years earlier), the owners never installed fire sprinklers.
Fate can only be chanced so many times before the inevitable happens. For the 600 workers toiling away in the Asch building on Saturday, March 25, the odds finally came up against them when a fire started in a rag bin.
It didn’t take long for the blaze to get out of control and panic to set in among the frightened – and trapped – workers.
The manager on the floor where the fire broke out attempted to extinguish the fire with a nearby hose – the only safety measure the building had. Like every other feature of the building, however, the hose was faulty and could not put the fire out.
Chaos ensued. The lone working elevator was only able to make a few trips up and down before the blaze became too intense.
By the time firefighters arrived on the scene, women were jumping to their deaths out of windows to escape the fate of burning alive. They were far better off than the unfortunates who were caught in the stairway with the locked door.
The horror was over in just 18 minutes, but the death toll was staggering. In all, 49 people had burned to death or been suffocated by the smoke, 36 lay dead in the elevator shaft and 58 bent and scattered on the streets below.
That day 145 people died because the owners of the building placed the safety of people below that of profit.
The horror of the fire galvanized the nation and reintroduced the issue of worker safety into the public debate. In the state of New York, the Sullivan-Hoey Fire Prevention Law passed that October and required owners to install fire sprinklers inside factories.
One-hundred and forty-five lives is a steep price to pay for a lesson in the need for safety regulations. It is a far higher price when we consider that corners continued to be cut.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 was not the end to the problem, but it was the beginning of recognizing we had one in the first place.
Antone Pierucci is the former curator of the Lake County Museum and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.