Shortly after KC Wagner saw Roots, a televised miniseries based on Alex Haley’s 1976 book documenting his family’s experience with slavery, she asked her grandmother, Lillie Rosner Grabel (1901-1986), to write a family account of her own.
Grabel agreed, and created a handwritten family history that briefly mentioned the deaths of two of her childhood neighbors, eighteen-year-old Mary and twenty-two-year-old Lena, both of whom died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire on March 25, 1911.
Public domain
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on fire, March 25, 1911.
“My grandmother came to the U.S. as a nine-year-old child and began working in a children’s apparel factory when she was fourteen,” Wagner told The Progressive. “She often talked about the dignity of work and about leveraging worker power,” but this was the first time that she referenced the fire and its impact on her.
Wagner was stunned by the revelation and notes that it not only motivated her to learn more about the fire, but to advocate for social justice more broadly—including more than thirty years of working to prevent sexual harassment and eliminate gender bias and bullying in the workplace. In addition, as part of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, she participated in the creation of a 300-foot cloth Collective Ribbon that was later etched onto steel to form part of a permanent memorial to the 146 New York City factory workers who were killed by the fast-moving flames.
Mary Anne Trasciatti, president of the coalition, told The Progressive that the memorial is one of a handful of monuments honoring U.S. workers and is the only one to include text in three languages—English, Italian, and Yiddish—the tongues spoken by the largely female immigrant workforce employed by Isaac Harris and Max Blanck.
By all accounts, working conditions at the factory were deplorable.
Public domain
The interior of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory following the deadly fire.
In Talking to the Girls:Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, edited by Edvige Giunta andTrasciatti, writers describe the poor conditions faced by the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory workers. They noted that workers earned $6 total, for a seventy-two-hour work week and that health and safety were given short shrift. In fact, on the day of the fire, water buckets were empty; two of the building’s four elevators were out of service; and at least one exit door was locked. Faulty and ill-maintained fire escapes buckled under the weight of workers who were desperate to flee, causing many to jump to their deaths from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors.
Ironically, at the time of the fire, the workers had been trying to win union representation. Some of them had participated in the eleven-week New York shirtwaist industry general strike, dubbed the Uprising of the 20,000 two years earlier—a story that was covered by La Follette’s Weekly, the precursor of The Progressive—but had not yet succeeded in winning union recognition.
Cover of La Follette's Weekly Magazine, Volume 2, Number 16, April 23, 1910.
The toll of the fire was enormous. Twenty-three men and 123 women, ages fourteen to forty-three, perished in the blaze.
But how best to remember them?
Several years before the fire’s centennial, a group of historians, labor activists, and descendants of the victims came together to plan how to mark the upcoming anniversary.
Over time, creating a permanent memorial to the dead became their mission. But the task proved more difficult than they expected.
Not only did the coalition have to raise $2.9 million to build the monument—money that eventually came from the state of New York, individual donors, and various foundations, but they also had to get approval from the City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission and Community Board to alter the early twentieth-century neo-Renaissance structure of the building that housed the factory.
Trasciatti reports that the efforts took more than a decade of dogged persistence.
“In many ways the design is low tech and simple,” she says. “We knew that we wanted to include names and ages so that the deceased were not an undifferentiated mass. We wanted it to tell the story of the fire and we wanted it to be at the exact site of the tragedy, which is now part of New York University.”
These requirements fit into the vision of Richard Joon Yoo and Uri Wegman, whose design was chosen in a competitive process that drew more than 180 submissions. Yoo told The Progressive that they wanted to create something that would project “meaning and memory onto the built environment.”
Both were on display when the memorial opened on October 11.
Lynne Fox, president of Workers United, reminded the hundreds of spectators gathered at the outdoor dedication ceremony that while the installation of the monument represents an important victory, the fire would not have happened had the factory owners been less miserly and more open to negotiating with their workers over wages and shop conditions. The door of the factory was locked to keep organizers from Local 25 of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union [ILGWU] from coming onto the factory floor, she said.
The resultant devastation, she continued, represents a confluence of concerns: for worker rights, immigrant rights, health and safety protections, women’s rights, and the ability to organize, issues that remain as relevant and intertwined today as they were in 1911. Similarly, resistance and backlash against unions is still very prevalent today.
Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve as Secretary of Labor (under President Franklin Roosevelt) had been an eye-witness to the fire and credited the loss of life she witnessed on that March day with raising her consciousness and pushing her to support the National Labor Relations Act and other pro-worker legislation.
At the memorial ceremony, speaker after speaker addressed the virulent opposition to unionization that continues today—by Amazon, Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, SAG-AFTRA, and many academic institutions—efforts that continue to stymie worker mobilization. As Fox noted, labor protections are currently being eroded as greed continues to endanger workers. “Child labor is back for many immigrant youth. It’s like looking back in time and it is unconscionable. Our past informs our present and our present informs our future,” she said.
From the office of Governor Kathy Hochul
Governor Kathy Hochul delivers remarks at the Triangle Fire memorial dedication in New York City, October 11, 2023.
Other speakers—including Acting U.S. Labor Secretary Julie Su, New York State Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul—stressed that in the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, state governments issued a mandate for workplace sprinkler systems and other health and safety protections.
Trasciatti believes that the memorial will aid and inspire labor organizing in the present.
“The memorial tells the story of the fire,” she told The Progressive, “It tells us that we have to mourn and then move into the future and organize to make a world in which preventable disasters don’t happen and every human being is treated with the dignity they deserve.”
More information about the various commemorative events and exhibits can be found online at laborarts.org/triangle.