Tampilkan postingan dengan label Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Tampilkan semua postingan
Tampilkan postingan dengan label Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Tampilkan semua postingan

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They will be remembered



Cartoon, 1911, artist unknown, from Cornell University's archives (School of Industrial and Labor Relations) 

Two years ago today, we commemorated the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Factory Fire, the worst industrial disaster in New York City's history, and one which galvanized ordinary New Yorkers, labor leaders, and policy makers at city, state, and federal levels to make significant changes in labor regulations, ensuring better worker safety and worker rights.  The fire was seen as particularly tragic because most of the dead were young immigrant women, many of them teenagers, and the deaths resulting from the fire could easily have been prevented.   
I often wonder, every year when watching the calling of the names of the dead from the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, waiting to hear the names of my two friends that died in the towers that day, how long this reading of the names is likely to continue, how long will it be relevant to those still alive, who will still be interested, 20 years from now, 50 years, 100 years.  I think we have an answer to these questions with the Triangle Fire commemorations. 

Events like 9/11 and the Triangle persist in everyday consciousness because of the sea change (for better or worse) in peoples' lives that they presaged. They will likely be remembered long after the survivors are gone. 

This year, as in the past, the New York City Fire Department rang the bell, once for each of the victims, at the site of the fire. 
 They also symbolically raised the fire ladders to the 6th floor of the building, which is the highest ladders could go in those days, and thus were several floors short of the fire on the 9th floor.  Many of the dead garment workers jumped from the windows to their deaths, since the factory owners had locked them in, the fire escapes were not built properly and collapsed, and the stairways were blocked. This is a short blurb about the FDNY tolling of the bells: http://www.silive.com/news/index.ssf/2013/03/102_years_later_fdny_remembers.html
And this year, as in the past, ordinary people are involved in the "chalking" project, chalking the names of the victims in front of the tenements where they were living at the time of their deaths, many of them on the Lower East Side.  This ephemeral public art project is open access, anyone can join and participate in the chalking.  http://streetpictures.org/chalk/
There is what promises to be an interesting talk by Kevin Baker at the Tenement Museum on Wednesday, March 27th, 2013,  about the Triangle Fire.  Kevin Baker, as some of you know who are avid historical fiction readers or NYC history buffs, authored a number of fabulous and award-winning books about Ole New York, such as Dreamland (turn-of-the-century Coney Island), Paradise Alley (the NYC Draft Riots/race riots during Civil War period), and Striver's Row (a young Malcolm X in WWII-era Harlem). 
Also, if you haven't seen them already, check out my blog posts about the Fire and the Chalking Project. 
Calling artists, designers, and architects: There is also a competition, sponsored by Remember the Triangle, for a design for a permanent memorial at the site of the fire.  You must register by March 29, 2013 on their website. Submission of design entries is in April.  http://rememberthetrianglefire.org/competition//about.html
Interactive map of important places related to the Triangle Fire.

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Remember the Triangle!


Detail from the mural “Victory of Light over Darkness,” by Ernest Fiene, 1944, depicting a scene from the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, March 25, 1911.  From the exhibit Art ~ Memory ~ Place: Commemorating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.   See below for more details on the mural.  

Today is the 100th Anniversary of the Triangle Factory Fire in Lower Manhattan, where workers lost their lives due to faulty and non-existent safety provisions and terrible working conditions.  The fire served to wake people up from their fantasy of the then-commonly-held notion that unbridled and unregulated capitalism would raise all boats, and be good for the workers as well as business owners.  The horrific fire resulted in important and far-reaching regulatory changes protecting workers in many trades other than just needlecrafts. 
Yesterday I visited New York University’s Grey Galleries to see an exhibit on the tragedy and its aftermath.  NYU currently owns the building where the fire took place, and it is now used for Biology and Chemistry teaching labs and classrooms.  Although these types of loft buildings were heralded at the time as the latest in modern worker environments - vast improvements over the then-typical sweat shop conditions in crowded tenement buildings of the Lower East Side - they were still far from having a high standard of occupational, health, and environmental protection. 
Here are some photos from the exhibit.  For more details about the fire, please see my previous post from February 26th, at http://geographer-notes.blogspot.com/2011/02/100-years-later-triangle-shirtwaist.html

Further detail of Victory of Light Over Darkness, above.
“Photodocumentation of the mural by Ernest Fiene 'History of the Needlecraft Industry,' Central High School of Needle Trades, (now High School of Fashion Industries), New York, 1938-1944.

Detail from 'Victory of Light over Darkness'
In the late 1930’s, the Needlecraft Education Commission, which had close ties to the ILGWU [International Ladies Garment Workers Union], commissioned Ernest Fiene – who had emigrated to the U.S. from Germany in 1912 at the age of 18 – to paint murals in the auditorium of the new Central High School of Needle Trades.  The first panel, 'Victory of Light over Darkness,’ culminated in this scene of the Triangle fire.  Although the vast majority of Triangle victims were young women, the fallen worker seen here, cradled by a female figure, is male.  The image evokes the Lamentation, which shows the dead Christ mourned by the Virgin Mary.  Standing at the right is Lillian Wald, founder of the Henry Street Settlement.  While Fiene’s mural was privately commissioned, it resembles – in is subject, style, male muscularity, and left-leaning politics – the government-sponsored WPA murals that he also painted.” (Text from the exhibit Art ~  Memory ~ Place) 


“Victor Joseph Gatto
Triangle Fire, March 25, 1911 (ca. 1944)
Oil on canvas
Museum of the City of New York

At the age of 18, Victor Gatto witnessed the Triangle fire from nearby Washington Square.  Three decades after, he produced this vivid painting, its bright colors in stark contrast to the black-and-white photographs from the time of the fire.  At the bottom, policemen restrain spectators while smoke and flames shoot out from the building’s windows, and firefighters with their pump engines direct water at the blaze.  Near the fire ladders, workers fall through the air; on the sidewalk in from of NYU’s Main Building (now home to the Grey Art Gallery) is a neatly arranged row of shrouded bodies.
A little-known artist from an Italian immigrant family, Victor Gatto worked as a steamfitter, plumber, and featherweight boxer before turning to painting in his forties.  He claimed that his new career was inspired by seeing the prices charged at an outdoor art exhibit in Washington Square.  As a member of the working class, Gatto likely identified with the fire’s victims and intended this painting as both memorial and cautionary tale.”  (Text from the exhibit Art ~ Memory ~ Place) 


“Former Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt at the 50th Anniversary commemoration at the site of the Triangle fire, March 25, 1961.
Photograph
International Ladies Garment Workers Union Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University

Just before the tragedy’s 50th anniversary, Leon Stein, editor of Justice, the ILGWU’s publication, began organizing a commemorative ceremony at the site of the fire. In conjunction with David Dubinsky, Stein planned an event in which elected officials, union representatives and supporters, New York University staff, and survivors and their families would come together in recognition of the fire’s significance.  During the ceremony, Dubinsky relayed a message of protest against the Albert-Folmer bill, which would have weakened enforcement of New York States fire protection legislation;  Frances Perkins gave an eyewitness account of the fires as seen from the street below; and Eleanor Roosevelt emphasized the need for vigilance on labor issues.”  (Text from the exhibit Art ~ Memory ~ Place)  [In 1911, Frances Perkins was a very young Columbia University graduate student who happened to be in Washington Square the day of the fire.  She was the first ever female cabinet member for a U.S. President.  FDR's choice of Frances as Secretary of Labor was probably partially due to her excellent service on the NYS Factory Investigating Commission that investigated worker safety problems after the Triangle fire, and promulgated 30 sets of new regulations.  As Secretary of Labor for 12 years under FDR, she was largely responsible for the U.S. adoption of social security, unemployment insurance, federal laws regulating child labor, and adoption of the federal minimum wage and overtime laws.  Frances Perkins called the day of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire “the day the New Deal began.” ]


Current art works commemorating the Triangle fire and the workers.  (from the exhibit Art ~ Memory ~ Place)










NYU’s Brown Building, formerly the Asch Building, where the Triangle Shirtwaist Company occupied the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors.  When I took this photo, the barricades were already up along Washington Place and Greene Street in anticipation of the 20,000 people expected to attend the March 25 commemorative events and solemnities, which are set to culminate in a lecture in the historic Great Hall of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science And Art.  The Great Hall is where Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglas, Mark Twain, Salman Rushdie, Norman Mailer, Barak Obama, Ulysses Grant, and many other luminaries of politics, science, and letters, have addressed New Yorkers in public forums for over 150 years.  As well, the Great Hall has been the scene of many public debates and rallies on worker's rights campaigns, voting rights for black men after the Civil War, the birth of the NAACP, women's sufferage movement, and the creation of the American Red Cross, to name but a few of the seminal happenings at the Great Hall since 1858). 


 
The National Historic Landmark plaque, from 1991, on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the fire.


All photos taken by the Map Monkey on a beautiful but cold NYC spring day, March 24, 2011. 

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100 Years Later: Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, March 25, 1911



The map (partial view) indicates the names and ages of all the known Triangle Fire victims.  It was created for the project CHALK, based on the list provided by David von Drehle in "Triangle: The Fire that Changed America," and updated based on the original research of Michael Hirsch and comments by family members. The fire symbol represents the location of the fire in the Asch Building. On the CHALK project website, the map is clickable on each person symbol for name, age, and address.  Many of the victims were teenagers.   

Plan of the 9th floor - The floor plan of the Asch Building’s 9th floor, on the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, in Greenwich Village, NYC, shows the layout of eight, long tables in relation to the cloak room, windows, fire escape, elevators, and stairs.  High ceilings included in the space-per-person calculations, allowed owners to employ 240 people in a relatively-small area resulting in the rapid transmission of illness among workers and leaving little space for moving safely through the room.  Artist unknown, ca. 1911, from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations Kheel Center collection. 

            March 25, 2011, is the 100th Anniversary of the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in lower Manhattan.  This totally preventable tragedy took the lives of some 146 people, mainly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, some hardly more than children, who died of smoke inhalation, burned to death, or jumped to their deaths from the 9th floor factory windows.  Despite the fact that the Asch Building was considered a new modern building with “fireproof” construction, there were many safety violations, illegal conditions, and construction shortcuts which decreased protections.  The women workers were locked into their floors – all exits were always locked during working hours so no one could leave without notifying the supervisors, a tactic designed to prevent stealing, and many of the windows were barred.  
            (NOTE: I’m posting this a month in advance of the actual anniversary so that readers can have the opportunity to see the exhibit about the Fire at New York University’s Grey Galleries, and also to watch the PBS special “Triangle Fire,” which will be broadcast on Monday February 28th.) 

Model of the 9th Floor, showing fire hazards, from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations Kheel Center collection.

1.) Locked door to the stair well.
2.) Rusty fire escape that collapsed.

3.) Cluttered work spaces.
4.) Short ladders only reached 6th floor.
5.) Not enough water pressure.
6.) Long wooden tables became obstacles.
7.) Wicker baskets full of scraps.
8.) Oily floors spread the fire quickly.
9.) Fire nets failed to catch jumpers.
10.) No sprinkler system, only pails of water.
11.) Flammable barrel of oil.
12.) Boxes crowding the exit.
13.) Lack of a required third staircase.

 The fire and consequent deaths were emblematic of the deep disregard business owners typically had for working people, especially working women, and how the pursuit of the profit motive dictated extremely unsafe working conditions in order to save money.  The fire did result in some good, however:  a number of important reform bills were passed to safeguard workers health and safety rights in New York State, and many of these building code and labor law reforms were later picked up on a national level under FDR’s New Deal legislation.  Garment workers unions (and unions in general) were also strengthened in the aftermath of the fire, and the general populace was extremely sympathetic to their aims.  The Fire was a watershed moment in labor history and progressive politics.  It literally transformed American political culture, and had a profound influence on the rest of the 20th century.  “Many of the people who made modern America - political leaders like Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Al Smith, Fiorello Laguardia, and Robert Wagner; social activists like Frances Perkins; and tradeunionists like Rose Schneiderman and Dave Dubinsky, were all directly or indirectly inspired by the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire,” (The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911: Tragedy and Meaning in Sweatshop New York, by Robert W. Whalen, 2001) http://www.gothamcenter.org/festival/2001/confpapers/whalen.pdf



Photo of the too-short ladders - Fire fighters arrived at the Asch Building soon after the alarm was sounded but ladders only reached the sixth floor and the high pressure pumps of the day could not raise the water pressure needed to extinguish the flames on the highest floors of the ten-story building. In this fireproof factory, 146 young men, women, and children lost their lives, and many others were seriously injured.  Fire escapes on the building were inadequate and flimsy, and collapsed under the weight of so many people trying to escape.  In any event, the fire escapes were not built to reach the ground, but stopped about 30 feet short of the street.  Photographer: unknown, March 25, 1911, from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations Kheel Center collection.




Editorial Cartoon - In an editorial cartoon, a man wearing clothing made of money leans against the factory door which is locked with a dollar sign key, while women die in smoke and flames on the other side of the door.  Artist name illegible, 1911, from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations Kheel Center collection.









Typical Working Conditions in a Sweatshop - Hand sewing was done by men and women facing a narrow bench, while men operated sewing machines at a long row of paired work stations. [The men standing around in the back watching the workers and doing nothing are supervisors.]  Some unethical subcontractors took advantage of newly-arrived immigrants forcing them to work long hours for the right to keep their job.  A standard 56-hour week might stretch to 70 hours without overtime pay.  Workers were often forced to supply their own needles and thread, and had to pay for the electricity used to run the sewing machines, and rent the chairs they sat in to work from the factory owners, (or have these charges deducted from their pay) thus assuring the owners of even more profits.  Pressing the clothes, usually by men, was done with irons powered by a tangle of gas lines, and since smoking was prevalent amongst the pressers, danger from fire was rampant. Both men and women workers suffered from working conditions, with eyestrain and backaches heading the list, as well as respiratory problems from breathing in fine textile fibers in unventilated spaces.  Photographer: Lewis Hine, ca. 1910, from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations Kheel Center collection.


What’s a “shirtwaist”? – A shirtwaist was a ladies’ blouse popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, modeled after mens’ shirts – it buttoned down the front and was roomier and allowed for more movement than the typical tight restrictive bodices of previous styles.  They were simple and “proper,” and women could even wear them without a jacket.  Shirtwaists became popular with working women and women bicyclists (which was a new invention at that time!), and denoted the increase in women’s freedom, independence, and mobility that had occurred.  It was ironic that the women and children fabricating these garments had in their own lives so little freedom.  Advertisement for Priscilla Company, 1906, via Library of Congress.

Unfortunately, the Triangle Company owners’ negligence was rewarded by the collection of a large windfall of fire insurance money, and an acquittal at their criminal trial for manslaughter.  They only had to pay out $75 for funeral costs for each of the victims whose families sued in a civil court action (and only 23 families of victims sued).  And as a sad coda to the whole story, in 1991, 25 workers in a chicken plant in North Carolina died when a fire broke out and they had been locked in the plant by their employers.  Walmart also is said to lock in their night-shift workers to prevent theft. And much of the clothing we wear is still made in sweatshop conditions, often by women and children who work in unsafe environments, both here in the US and abroad.  And if any of you are wondering what all the recent collective bargaining fuss is all about, it is a good idea to do a little research on the history of the labor movement, to see all the "ordinary" rights and protections that many workers (people) now have (both union and non-union workers, by the way) - that they only have because of unions. No, they're not perfect, and they do not cover everyone, but I hesitate to think where we would be without them.

Map of Asch Building location, from: Leon Stein's "The Triangle Fire" (Cornell Univ. Press, 1962)

NOTE:  On February 28th (this Monday) PBS is broadcasting Triangle Fire as part of their American Experience series. 








And every year, there is a "chalk tour" of the Lower East Side on the anniversary of the Fire, stopping at each one of the known victim's houses and writing her name and age in a triangle on the sidewalk in front.  If you would like to participate in this unusual mapping project, you can sign up at this website: http://streetpictures.org/chalk/
Ruth Sergel, an East Village artist, organized volunteers, including descendants of the victims, to spread out across the city to inscribe the names of the dead outside their former homes.
"As a New Yorker you grow up with this story," she said, "but to see it this way, connected to space, it's a hidden geography of the city."

 Photos from the Chalk Project from previous years.  Photos by Anthony Giacchino, one of the Chalk Project participants, who chalked the names of the victims from East Harlem. Flyers are also posted on the buildings that are "chalked" to notify current occupants what it is all about.  Giacchino has started a new Triangle Fire-related project called "Dead Letters," which involves mailing letters to each of the victims at the last known address to see what 146 returned letters looks like.






























Interactive Map of victims' addresses, from the Chalk Project site:

Some good websites for more information about the Triangle Fire and worker’s rights:

Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations website about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire:

For the upcoming events to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the fire, and NYU exhibit about the fire (the Triangle building site is now owned by NYU):

Art/Memory/Place: Commemorating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire:

NYU Grey Art Gallery Exhibition Jan 11-Mar 26, Art/Memory/Place: Commemorating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire


Short documentary about the Fire, with survivor recollections. 

PBS film about the Triangle Fire:

Interactive map of the Triangle Fire and important associated locations:

“Murder and Nothing Else but Murder,” account published in The New York Call, (a Socialist newspaper) March 27, 1911 http://www.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/history/usa/workers/triangle-fire/ch01.htm
East Harlem Preservation – interesting accounts of some of the records on the girls from East Harlem.


“Triangle: The Fire That Changed America,” David von Drehle, 2004, Grove Press.















I dedicate this posting to all the needlewomen, past and present, and especially to Maggie Barnacle, 1872-1973, my great-grandmother, who, as a child, sewed buttonholes on trousers in the sweatshops of New York City’s Lower East Side, and well into her 90’s could still sing old songs from the 1890’s like nobody’s business! (including remembering all the lyrics from all the many stanzas of “The Sidewalks of New York” and “The Bowery,” etc.).  East side, west side, all around the town…….

See follow-up post Remember the Triangle! at http://geographer-notes.blogspot.com/2011/03/remember-triangle.html
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