Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

The Triangle shirtwaist factory fire in 1911 claimed 146 lives, mostly young immigrant workers at the factory, on Washington Place and Greene Street in Manhattan, where exits were locked or blocked. (The building still stands and now houses New York University classrooms.) The legacy of the tragedy is reflected in tougher fire codes, the ascent of organized labor, and the beginnings of the New Deal.

Most of the victims were unglorified (a monument to the six recently identified was erected at the Cemetery of the Evergreens on the border of Brooklyn and Queens), but the Triangle fire propelled other individuals to greater prominence.Among them was Max D. Steuer, the premier defense lawyer of his day, who defended the factory owners. He gingerly asked a young garment worker to repeat her word-for-word eyewitness testimony, suggesting that it might have been rehearsed and memorized. On the fourth account, he interrupted her:

"Katie, have you not forgotten a word?"

"Yes, sit," she replied, smiling. "I left out one word."

"Well, tell the story again and put the word in, Steuer said.

She did. The two owners were acquitted.

Rose Schneiderman, the eldest daughter of a tailor, was the conscience of the labor movement. Her message at an April 2, 1911, memorial service for the Triangle fire victims at the Metropolitan Opera House riveted the public. "I would be a traitor to those poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship," she declared. “Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.”

Anne Morgan, the youngest daughter of the financier J. Pierpont Morgan, was another transformative figure, instrumental in recruiting socialites to the cause of working women. (She was also a pioneer in transforming the hangout of the Dead End Kids into Sutton Place; her town house is now home to the United Nations secretary-general.)

Two Democratic clubhouse politicians from Manhattan, Assemblyman Alfred E. Smith and Senator Robert F. Wagner, led a Factory Investigation Commission, which expanded its mandate to include child labor, minimum wages, and sanitary conditions. Smith represented the Lower East Side, where many Triangle victims lived. He was a Tammany Hall stalwart, and to give credit where it is due, elevating worker safety to the state agenda would have required the approval of the local Democratic leader, Timothy D. Sullivan, known as Big Tim, and Charles F. Murphy, the sagacious boss of Tammany Hall. They valued the lives of their constituents as well as their votes. Smith was elected governor in 1918 and was the unsuccessful Democratic nominee for president in 1928.

Frances Perkins, commission member, was a thirty-year-old Boston-born social worker who would become Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of labor. She was visiting a friend on the opposite side of Washington Square Park that Saturday, March 25, 1911, when they heard sirens and screams and rushed to the scene. Perkins, the executive secretary of the National Consumers League and a lobbyist for the fire-inspired Committee on Safety, galvanized New York's officials. "The Triangle fire was a torch that lighted up the whole industrial scene," Perkins said. She would describe the Triangle fire as "the day the New Deal began."

A monument to eight unidentified victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, March 25, 1911. The inscription states "In sympathy and sorrow, citizens of New York raise this monument over the graves of unidentified women and children who with one hundred and thirty-nine others perished by fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Washington Place March 25, 1911"

As the result of an initiative begun in 2009 by the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, led by Mary Anne Trasciatti. To replace the three panels that existed with a memorial to the fire, 180 entries were submitted from more than 30 countries. The committee consisted of Wendy Feuer, the assistant commissioner for urban design and art at the New York City Department of Transportation; Yama Karim, an architect at Studio Libeskind; the fashion designer Yeohlee Teng; and Deborah Berke, dean of architecture at Yale, among others eventually settled on the winning design by Uri Wegman and Richard Joon Yoo. It’s called 'Reframing the Sky' at the Brown Building, which is a part of the NYU campus.

A steel ribbon cascades down from the ninth floor of the building [where the fire began], and then it splits about 12 feet above the ground. By listing both the names and ages (on the day of the fire) of those who perished, along with their birth names, it offers a personal connection to the tragedy. Visitors are able to see how many relatives worked there and died there at the fire.