A year after the tragic Triangle shirtwaist factory fire in 1911, sculptor Evelyn Beatrice Longman created a memorial, commissioned by the City of New York, to the seven female victims whose remains could not be identified. The city installed the sculpture with little public attention in the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn. This memorial wasn’t mentioned in the press, according to an article on Longman’s work by Ellen Wiley Todd in American Art magazine, nor was it ever noted in Longman’s records.

Contrast that with this week, the 100^th anniversary of the March 25, 1911 factory fire that killed 146 people, mostly young girls and women from Jewish and Italian immigrant families. Throughout the anniversary on Friday, the weekend, and the spring, at least 100 commemorative artistic, educational, and civic events, from plays to musical performances to exhibits and public art, will mark the Triangle fire anniversary in New York and elsewhere. One commemoration, the Chalk project, will bring a moving remembrance of the Triangle’s victims directly to the streets and to those who walk by, as it has done for the past seven years.

Such a public outpouring was not always the case during the past century. Since 1911, New York City has witnessed a wide range of responses to the Triangle tragedy. Though the horror of New York’s largest workplace disaster before 9/11 and the investigations immediately afterward inspired thousands of workers to join together in union activism and prompted major government action to better protect workers and improve factory conditions, the public commemorations of the Triangle fire were spotty until 50 years ago. True, painters such as Victor Gatto memorialized the fire, after having witnessed it at the age of 18, in a 1944 painting that shows flames licking out from the building while a crowd watches from the street. Such expressions are different than public events, however, and in the early years some feared that too much notice paid to this fire would only incite unrest.

The long-time gaps of silence in the public honoring of the fire’s victims, however, changed dramatically in 1961, as an exhibit, “Art | Memory | Place: Commemorating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire,” at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, details. At the 50^th anniversary commemoration in 1961 in front of the Brown Building (formerly the Asch Building), which housed the factory, former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was a featured speaker. The International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) sponsored the event. Survivors of the fire, firefighters, and Frances Perkins, ex-Secretary of Labor under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had witnessed the fire as a young woman, were among those gathered.

Annual commemorations have continued in New York each year in the half-century since then. (Part 1 of this Mindfulwalker.com series explores a walking experience of the illuminating Grey Art Gallery exhibit, which delves into the tragic day of the fire, the immediate aftermath and consequences, and the various forms of collective memory of the fire.) This year’s official commemoration, again sponsored by Workers United (formerly the ILGWU), will begin Friday at 11 a.m., with music and a procession, followed by speakers and a memorial ceremony during which children will read the names of the fire’s victims and place flowers at the original site, on the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street in Manhattan. It is expected to draw thousands of people. [Read more →]

“Rose Mehl – 15 years old.” The words jump out from the flip side of a business card on which they are imprinted. Rose was a Jewish girl who lived on East 7^th Street in New York, and she had a job as a factory worker. Her name and age are printed on the back of a card of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition.

On March 25, 1911, Rose Mehl went to work at the Triangle shirtwaist factory, which was located on the top three floors of the Asch Building at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street in Manhattan. She never went home that day. Near closing time on that Saturday, a fire broke out, spread rapidly, and ravaged the factory in a very short time.

The blaze killed 146 people, mostly young girls and women from Jewish and Italian immigrant families. (Of 146 victims, 129 were women and girls.) They had worked long days of as many as 14 hours for just a couple or few dollars. Rose Mehl was one of those who died. What was she thinking toward the end of that workday? Were her thoughts happy ones? Did she look forward to going home? These are my thoughts as I see her name on a card commemorating the fire 100 years later.

To read the victims’ names and ages and to see where they lived and where they had come from is to enter a different world, at least a world that contrasts with what is prevalent today in the neighborhood situated around where the factory was. They were factory employees toiling in dangerous, often-brutal conditions for low wages. They were mostly in their teens to early 20s. They perished in New York City’s largest workplace disaster before 9/11. Today, if one stands outside the building where the fire occurred (now New York University’s Brown Building), you can hear the laughter and chatter of young girls and women who are now university students, passing by, often tapping their smartphones. For the most part, they live in a different world now.

During March – on the occasion of the 100^th anniversary – and in the next several months, the city, NYU, and community groups plan to remember and honor the victims and survivors, and to focus on the Triangle fire in a variety of artistic, civic, and educational events. A key remembrance and examination, on view until early July, is an illuminating, unforgettable exhibit at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, entitled “Art | Memory | Place: Commemorating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.” The exhibit, which is co-curated by NYU professors Marci Reaven and Lucy Oakley in collaboration with graduate students in NYU’s Programs in Museum Studies and Public History, is located in the gallery’s lower (basement) level. It’s quite moving to take in the exhibit and then walk around the block, so close by, to view the floors that housed the factory.

The Triangle shirtwaist factory was located in the top three floors of this structure, then known as the Asch Building (now New York University’s Brown Building), in New York’s Greenwich Village.

The Grey Gallery exhibit is a well-researched, evocative telling of the fire’s history and its continuing impact, from the days prior, to the day of the fire and the immediate aftermath, and finally through what has occurred in the decades since then. It chronicles the event through photographs that show the factory’s gutted interior, family members identifying the dead, and funeral processions; newspaper articles and political cartoons; artwork; artifacts such as shirtwaists; and other objects. [Read more →]