Family members of the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire attend the unveiling of the memorial.
Photo by Gabriele Holtermann
In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire made history as the deadliest industrial disaster in the city’s history, killing 146 workers and setting safety standards still followed by the Big Apple. One hundred and twelve years later, the Triangle Fire Coalition on Oct. 11 unveiled the long-awaited permanent memorial at the site of one of New York City’s most calamitous blazes.
The memorial, over ten years in the making, is installed on the facade of the Brown Building at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place in Greenwich Village. The Brown Building housed the factory, where on March 24, 1911, a cigarette tossed carelessly into a fabric scrap bin sealed the horrific fate of the sweatshop’s workers — most of them young immigrant women.
Designed by Uri Wegman and Richard Joon Yoo, the memorial is a textured, stainless steel “ribbon” hung 12 feet above the sidewalk, on the building’s southern and eastern facades. The names and ages of the 146 victims are cut into the ribbon and mirrored in a dark reflective panel as if written in the sky. Testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses are etched as a single line of text along the lower edge of the reflective panel.
The fire’s victims did not stand a chance to escape the fast-moving inferno, as a door to one of the building’s staircases was padlocked — and the other was already engulfed in flames. Water buckets, commonly used for extinguishing fires in factories, were empty, and the fire department couldn’t extinguish the blaze because their ladders only reached the sixth floor.
The tragedy catalyzed America’s labor movement, leading to stronger workplace safety regulations, fairer wages, and the implementation of the Bureau of Fire Prevention. Elected officials and union representatives said Wednesday that the memorial served as a reminder…
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