Remembering a Great Tragedy: The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

The victims, workers in a clothing factory, were mostly women and girls, mostly immigrants at the time, the turn from the 19th century into the 20th century.

NYC
Choosing Not to Forget What Is Painful to Recall
By CLYDE HABERMAN
Published: March 25, 2010

On a street off Washington Square, a bell tolled 146 times on Thursday, once for each woman and man who died in the great fire there so very long ago. Dozens of schoolchildren read the names of the victims, one by one, then laid carnations upon a makeshift memorial. A fire truck raised its ladder in tribute but only so far — a reminder of a rescue effort that fell tragically short.

Everything was as it was supposed to be, 99 years to the day since a fire at the Triangle shirtwaist factory took the lives of 146 garment workers — most of them women, most of them Jewish and Italian immigrants, most of them heartbreakingly young.

The flames that engulfed the factory, on the top three floors of a building at Washington Place and Greene Street, was the most cataclysmic disaster to befall a New York workplace until Islamist fanatics turned airplanes into missiles in 2001. But even the attacks of Sept. 11 have not diminished Triangle’s central place in the consciousness of an oft-wounded city.

Like all rituals, Thursday’s remembrance of March 25, 1911, moved to a practiced rhythm. An anniversary ceremony has been held at that corner for years. Repetition, however, in no way stole from poignancy.

There were accounts of how the low-paid seamstresses who made ladies’ blouses — shirtwaists — were trapped in the blaze. How locked doors prevented many from fleeing to safety. How the firefighters’ tallest ladder reached only to the sixth floor, well below workers trying to stave off death two, three and four floors higher. How in desperation — does this sound familiar? — many jumped to their deaths.

There were speeches from labor leaders about how the disaster led to tougher safety regulations but also about how much remains undone. Locking in workers? Wal-Mart was found to have been doing that just a few years ago. Last month, in an echo of Triangle, 21 workers in Bangladesh died in a fire at a garment factory with locked exits.

And there was the mournful tolling of a firehouse bell, each ring accompanying a name, each name capturing a soul: Lizzie Adler, Rosina Cirrito, Yetta Goldstein, Gaetana Midolo, Simie Wisotsky and, every now and then, Unidentified Woman and Unidentified Man.

New York generally prefers the future tense. It is not always good at remembering.

Sept. 11 aside, anniversaries of disasters come and go with barely a nod. Until 9/11, none was deadlier than the 1904 burning of the General Slocum, a poorly equipped excursion steamboat that caught fire in Hell Gate’s waters. More than 1,000 people died, most of them women and children. Yet the anniversary, June 15, usually passes unnoticed.

Not so with the Triangle fire. If anything, the observances have been expanding and are likely to grow still more in 2011, the centennial year. Events on Thursday included programs at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village and Christ the King Regional High School in Middle Village, Queens.

The Queens event was led by Vincent Maltese, whose older brother, Serphin, is a former state senator. For them, the Triangle fire is personal. Their grandmother and her two daughters died. The girls were 18 and 14. “My grandfather never really talked about it, except once a year,” said Vincent Maltese, 76. “He’d get moody toward the end of March.”

Perhaps the fire endures in civic memory because it has clear constituencies. It is part of the Italian-American narrative and, arguably even more so, of Jewish-American history. But there is more to it, said David Von Drehle, the author of “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America.”

Triangle “speaks to large trends — the immigrant story, the progressive political story, the labor movement story and the women’s rights story,” Mr. Von Drehle said. “It’s illustrative of all those currents, which continue to be living issues in a way that steamboat safety is not.”

For similar reasons, Ruth Sergel, a filmmaker, organizes her own memorial. On the anniversary, she leads volunteers in a project called Chalk. They visit the places where each of the 146 victims lived, mostly in the East Village and on the Lower East Side. At those locations, on the pavement, they chalk in the names and ages of those who died.

“It’s the idea of making communal memory visible,” Ms. Sergel said, describing it as “a different kind of power.”

“It’s not permanent,” she said. “It washes away. But you know what? It’s going to come back next year.”