When Samantha, 14, discusses the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 in her 8th-grade class at IS 190 in the Bronx, she has a new point of reference: the Happy Land Social Club fire of 1990, which occurred not far from her school in the Crotona Park neighborhood.

The tragedy hit close to home for many students and staff members at IS 190. “My mother talked about Happy Land, and how she and my father and grandfather had friends who died there,” says Samantha.

For special education teacher Maribeth Whitehouse, the Happy Land fire has helped make the remote Triangle fire more accessible to her students. “The relationship between the two tragedies is strong,” says Whitehouse. “Both affected immigrant communities, and both involved locked doors.”

The Happy Land fire, which killed 87 people, mostly Honduran immigrants, was set deliberately by a man seeking revenge on a woman who rejected him. The Triangle Factory fire was an accident triggered by unsafe work practices, killing 147 people, mostly immigrant women from Eastern Europe and Italy. That factory fire galvanized the labor movement and led to landmark legislation. Both tragedies occurred on March 25, 79 years apart.

This year, Whitehouse’s class drew a chalk tribute on the sidewalk near the Bronx home of one of the Triangle victims, Sarah Cooper. The class also created a tri-board tribute with the names of the Happy Land victims that will be temporarily placed near the city’s official monument to that tragedy.

Paraprofessional Migdalia Aponte says she can see the recognition in the students’ faces when IS 190 educators talk about Happy Land. “They’re hearing about it from people they know, and we pass that block with the monument every day,” Aponte says. “It’s history in their own neighborhood.”

Whitehouse’s approach is just one of the many ways that New York City public school teachers have found to teach the Triangle fire to their students.

In Carolyn Roswell’s 5th-grade class at PS 229 in Woodside, Queens, students did online research and wrote opinion essays about how the factory owners treated their workers and the fire and safety laws that emerged from the ashes.

The class also looked at editorial cartoons from 1911. “We discussed the images, such as the drawing of a safety inspector with the face of a skull,” says Roswell. She took her class, dressed in period clothing, to this year’s Triangle commemoration in the Village [see story on page 12].

Michael Freydin at Halsey JHS 157 in Rego Park, Queens, had his 8th-graders, donning old hats and shawls, re-enact the sweatshop that was the Triangle factory.

“In class I had them make shirtwaists out of paper and created a sweatshop with paper dolls, showing an assembly line,” says Freydin. “I’m screaming at them, ‘Work faster or you’re fired!’”

Freydin capped the exercise by calling up an image of fire on his laptop computer. The class discussed how they felt working in the sweatshop and then having to flee the fire.

Freydin has his students who are English language learners propose what should be written on a historical marker for the building where the fire took place and still stands.

“How do you boil down the essence of an event and reach your audience emotionally in not more than 27 words?” says Freydin, describing the challenge he posed for his students.

There are a number of hooks for teaching the Triangle fire, according to Rozella Clyde, a special projects coordinator for the Association of Teachers of Social Studies/UFT.

“Teachers can use the fire to teach their students about labor unions, progressivism and women’s rights, but also the idea of government responsibility,” Clyde says. “The conditions that led to the 1911 catastrophe have parallels today in unregulated sweatshops and unsafe working conditions, and in the right-to-works laws being introduced in Wisconsin and elsewhere.”