around the uft
Remembering the Triangle Waist Company fire
Apr 24, 2008 8:25 PM
Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta (left) and UFT Manhattan Borough Representative Robert Astrowsky watch as children lay flowers at a wreath honoring the victims.
It’s been 97 years since the Triangle Waist Company fire, but the smoke has yet to clear.
That tragic event, during which 146 poor immigrant garment workers burned to death or died jumping from windows because management — as an efficiency measure — deliberately locked escape routes, was commemorated on March 20 outside the surviving building at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street in Greenwich Village.
The March 25, 1911, disaster jolted the conscience of the country and helped spur a working-class movement.
“It was one of the ugliest days in our city’s history and it is one that could have been prevented,” UFT Manhattan Borough Representative Robert Astrowsky said at the remembrance. “It is about the plight of exploited workers. Doors were locked so that the workers couldn’t sneak past their bosses to get a break. Safety violations were not a problem to the company owners who had friends in government, the courts and the police.”
Astrowsky noted that in 1909 there had been a 13-week strike at Triangle, led by a young woman named Clara Lemlich. “She challenged the bosses, the scabs and the hired thugs, and got left in the streets bloody with broken ribs for her trouble,” Astrowsky said.
Eventually 25,000 more garment workers joined her struggle.
Students from schools in the area listen to the proceedings.
New York City Comptroller William Thompson Jr. urged vigilance.
“We can never rest or relax,” Thompson said. “We must never let down our guard because it is our duty to protect our workers, many of whom are today, as they were in 1911, immigrants.”
The New York City Labor Choir filled the air with rousing union songs that brought back the fervor and pride of the early days of labor activism.
The commemoration was attended by hundreds, including students who reside and go to school in the Lowwer East Side, which was once the home of many of the young women who perished in the fire.
Closing the ceremony, firefighters raised the ladder of their truck to the highest point that firefighters could reach in 1911, which was two floors below where workers were trapped. Then a fire officer tolled a bell 146 times, once in memory of each victim.
As the bell sounded each time, a student from one of the neighborhood schools read the name of a victim and laid a flower in her memory.
