Names Carved Into Light and Metal: Triangle Fire Memorial Dedicated

White carnations are attached to the newly-dedicated Triangle Fire Memorial in NYC. Photos by Judith Sokoloff

By Steve Wishnia

“A hideous little bundle was slowly lowered from a window of what had been the ninth floor of the scab shop the Triangle Waist Company,” Carrie W. Allen wrote for the New York Call, a socialist newspaper, on March 28, 1911. “It swirled and flapped grotesquely in the wind as it made its lonely journey to the street. Spinning round and round, it kept up a goblin dance as it went down, down, down, and finally lay in eternal quiet upon the ground.”

Poet Janet Zandy intoned those words as an invocation to the dedication of the Triangle Fire Memorial on the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street Oct. 11. The memorial to the 146 workers killed in the 1911 blouse-factory blaze — many of them children — has been in the works for 12 years and includes a shelf of textured stainless steel running around the building at the top of the first floor with the victims’ names incised through it. When the sunlight hits it right, the names shine down onto a waist-high slanted sheet of black stoneglass, or onto shadows on the wall. Lizzie Adler, 24. Anna Altman, 16. Vincenza Bellotto, 15.

The stoneglass also has quotes from survivors etched into it. “The girls were running around with their hair burning” – Rose Indusky, sleeve setter. At the ceremony, long-stemmed white carnations were clipped to it about eight inches apart.

“As we accept the invitation to mourn, let us take up the challenge to organize,” Mary Anne Trasciatti, president of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, told the several hundred people assembled.

The Triangle company was one of the Manhattan garment factories that refused to recognize International Ladies Garment Workers Union Local 25 after the great strike of 1909, “the uprising of the 20,000.” When the fire broke out in a pile of fabric scraps, most of the exits were locked.

The Triangle Fire Memorial wraps around the building where 146 working women and children were killed in 1911.

The reason, Workers United Secretary-Treasurer Edgar Romney told the crowd, was “because in those days, union organizers went into factories, and the employers didn’t want that to happen.”

“Some things have not changed,” added Workers United President Lynne Fox, citing the resurgence of child labor among immigrant youth. Looking at those children’s faces, she said, is like “looking back in time.”

Workers United, which absorbed the ILGWU, also represents Starbucks workers who have organized unions. The company has largely refused to negotiate a contract.

Striking SAG-AFTRA members were prominent in the crowd, as were firefighters — Executive Inspector Ronald Kanterman said that the department’s fire-prevention unit was formed in 1912 in response to the fire. Women waved sticks with 1911-style high-collared blouses on them. A group of nail-salon workers held signs in the shape of a foot with purple-glitter toenails and a “Dar Una Voz a Los Trabajadores” (give the workers a voice) message, and another in the shape of a hand with “Beauty, Health, Dignity, Power, Workers” on each pink-nailed finger. Another contingent protested the city’s efforts to switch retired workers’ health coverage to Medicare Advantage.

Preserving the memory is important. Some victims’ relatives say their families didn’t talk about the fire very much.

“I was always told the stories growing up,” says William Isabella, 71, of Manhattan, whose great-aunts were Isabella Tortorelli, 17, and Maria Giuseppa “Josephine” Lauletta, 33. But he didn’t get many details. The main one he remembers is that his grandfather was too young to identify the bodies, so his great-uncle went.

Evie Jones Rich — 90 — and Michelle Keller [center] gather with other NYC municipal retirees pushing back against those attempting to privatize the health care of public sector workers in New York.

“I barely knew. It wasn’t talked about at all,” Catherine Taormina of Manhattan told Work-Bites. The one family story she remembers is gruesome: A woman jumped out of the window, a woman behind her grabbed her hair, “and she was scalped.”

As an adult, Taormina did her own research, and found out “that was my great-grand-aunt”: Catherine Uzzo, 22, of East Harlem.

She is a striking SAG-AFTRA member. “We think that Hollywood is all glitz and glamour, but the living wage is not there for the rank-and-file performers” such as extras and background actors, she says. “That’s what union rights are all about. We’re the most vulnerable.”

The unions who built the memorial included Ironworkers Local 580, which specializes in ornamental metalwork; Laborers Local 79; Local 1 of the Bricklayers and Allied Crafts; and Local 157 of the Carpenters.

During construction, according to the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, workers discovered they could not use anchors to attach the memorial to the building, because there was an empty space behind the bricks and therefore not enough support for its weight. The coalition wonders if the building’s fire escape, which sent a couple dozen workers to their deaths when it collapsed, might have been anchored to the bricks.

Suzanne Pred Bass of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition noted that there were guests there from Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Turkey, places where “workers are trapped in the same conditions our relatives were.”

Her great-aunt, 23-year-old Rose Weiner, was one of the 146 dead. A report on the family after the fire, she said, described Weiner’s mother as “distraught” and wanting to spend the $400 the young woman had saved on a tombstone for her.

“My great-grandmother’s vision of a monument to honor her daughter has finally been realized,” Pred Bass told the crowd.

Other speakers at the dedication included Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su, New York State Gov. Cathy Hochul, Vincent Alvarez of the New York City Central Labor Council, and Rebecca Damon, executive director of SAG-AFTRA’s New York local.