They were flesh and blood, as real as you and I. And then they were gone — incinerated in their ninth-floor death trap or smashed on the Greenwich Village pavement where they plunged. No publication even bothered to record all their names.
Now, New Yorkers and visitors to the city will be able to have their own glass-breaking moments at the site of the historic fire, which was the deadliest workplace disaster in city history until the day known as 9/11. The Triangle Fire Memorial, a project years in the making, will be dedicated on Wednesday at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street near Washington Square in the heart of Manhattan.
The 146 fire victims — most of them immigrant women from Italy and Eastern Europe — will be restored as actual names of actual people, at the very spot where they passed into history. Their names are cut into the flowing steel of the monument, which — when all the pieces are installed this winter — will stretch like ribbon to ninth-floor windows, then tumble back toward street level, where it will spread its arms to embrace the building where history happened. Light shining through the incised names will reflect on a polished surface, where they will appear as if glowing.
Americans learned to build high-rise buildings before they figured out entirely the dangers that height posed. Thus, an energetic young researcher named Frances Perkins had just begun a job looking into fire risks in factory lofts when she visited a friend for tea on March 25, 1911. Her visit was interrupted by the clanging of fire bells. Looking outside, she saw smoke rising from a nearby 10-story tower.
It was about 4:45 p.m. on a warm, bright Saturday. As the workday ended at the city’s busiest blouse factory, an ash or ember — probably from a cigarette — fell into a bin of cotton scraps, which exploded into flames. Quickly consuming the eighth floor, the fire spread rapidly to the ninth, where it trapped scores of workers.
Along with thousands of New Yorkers weary of winter and enjoying the day, Perkins came running to the scene just as dozens of trapped workers leaped and fell from the windows above.
For the shocked city, the question of fire danger was settled. New Yorkers also knew that the same factory that burned had also been the center of a great labor uprising of female workers. The energy of a young century — labor energy, feminist energy, progressive energy — poured into the frame of this catastrophe. Perkins switched gears to study the question of what to do about unsafe workplaces, and from there she studied the needs of American workers more generally. In 1933, she became the first woman to serve in a president’s Cabinet, as secretary of labor to Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The Triangle fire, she said, was “the day the New Deal was born.”
Yet 50 years passed before a little bronze plaque was placed on the side of the building where the fire had raged, thanks to the tireless efforts of author Leon Stein to keep the memory of the fire alive. Another 30 years went by before I passed the building and read the plaque. Intrigued, I unearthed Stein’s excellent book and decided there was room for another.
I found the historical record of the fire in appalling condition: virtually everything lost by negligent city bureaucracies. At the same time, the New York Times — an infinitely better newspaper than it had been a century earlier — was meticulously documenting the 9/11 catastrophe. In “Portraits of Grief,” the newspaper had committed to telling the story of every victim, ultimately more than 2,300 of them.
The Times’s project was so profound, so moving, that I felt … if not biographies, perhaps I could give the Triangle fire victims their names again. My effort to do so was crude, limited mostly to cross-referencing newspaper clippings from eye-ruining microfilm at the Library of Congress. But the partial list of names and home addresses published at the end of my book struck chords I never anticipated.
An artist, Ruth Sergel, organized a project she called “Chalk.” On the anniversary of the fire, volunteers visited every address on my list to write the name of the victim who had lived there, in chalk, on the sidewalk. Sergel’s chalkers merged into a planning committee for the 100th anniversary commemorations of the fire in 2011.
Among those artists and activists, the idea of a permanent memorial was born. “After the centennial, we realized it was now or never,” said Mary Anne Trasciatti, the director of labor studies at Hofstra University and president of the all-volunteer Triangle Fire Coalition. High on energy from the commemoration, they commissioned an international competition to design a monument. Nearly 180 artists applied from roughly 30 countries, with the winning design coming from Uri Wegman and Richard Joon Yoo.
Meanwhile, my list had come to the attention of a researcher and expert in genealogy named Michael Hirsch. He was moved, he once told me, by learning that a fire victim had lived on his block. He searched out her grave and found other graves of Triangle victims. At his own expense of money and effort, he restored neglected markers. Hirsch also pored through records; he telephoned descendants. And in a brilliant stroke of historical detective work, he put names to the fire’s last six victims, who for a century had worn the coroner’s designation “unidentified.”
Trasciatti’s group also kept plugging away, hunting for money to support the project and searching for permits through the notorious labyrinth of New York’s red tape. At one point, approval from the community board looked impossible. Neighbors worried the afternoon sun would flash from the steel monument into their eyes. They worried that crowds would obstruct the sidewalk.
Yet the power of the story and the passion of the tellers won them over. The board approved the monument by a vote of 38-1.
Trasciatti took a cheerful lesson from the seemingly endless effort. A foe is a friend waiting to be made. “When you cultivate relationships with the community, that’s how you get things done,” she told me. Her ace in the hole in winning approvals: “Who wants to be the person who says no to the Triangle Fire Memorial?”
With volunteers in Europe sending baptismal records from remote church archives to perfect Hirsch’s list of names and ages, with engineers working overtime to devise hardware to attach the monument to the frame of the old building, with fundraisers scrambling for the needed money, the memorial, at last, came together.
“It became irresistible,” Trasciatti said.
Indeed. History becomes irresistible when sympathy connects us with the past. People lost behind glass come back to life in our minds and hearts — and pull us into their stories.
We see ourselves in them. We draw strength from wraiths. We learn courage from ghosts.
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