It was the afternoon of Saturday, March 25, 1911, when a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. One hundred and forty six people died, the overwhelming majority of them Italian and Jewish immigrant girls and women aged 14 to 43. The event galvanized labor workers and unions that demanded the right to better working conditions around the country, many of which are still in place more than a century later.
Today in New York City, a memorial has been unveiled at the site, which is known now as the Brown Building and is part of the NYU campus. It’s the result of an initiative begun in 2009 by the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, led by Mary Anne Trasciatti. “There are three plaques on the building right now that talk about the fire,” she explained on a Zoom prior to the unveiling of the memorial. “One explains that it’s landmarked. Stonewall was the first cultural landmark in New York City and this is the second. Another [plaque] says that it’s on the National Register of Historic Places, and then another talks briefly about the history of the fire and why it was important. But people walk right past them. I’ve been standing at the corner right in front of it with my husband and people have come up to us and asked, ‘Could you tell us where the Triangle Building is?’”
It was obvious something more was needed. And so, following the model established by the Vietnam Memorial Committee, Trasciatti and the coalition put together a committee of distinguished architects and scholars. It included Wendy Feuer, the assistant commissioner for urban design and art at the New York City Department of Transportation; Yama Karim, an architect at Studio Libeskind; the fashion designer Yeohlee Teng; and Deborah Berke, dean of architecture at Yale—among others. The members developed a call for proposals. “We were really moved by the response,” Trasciatti said. “It was like 180 entries from more than 30 countries around the world.” The committee eventually settled on the winning design by Uri Wegman and Richard Joon Yoo. It’s called Reframing the Sky.
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“It’s a steel ribbon that cascades down from the ninth floor of the building [where the fire began], and then it splits about 12 feet above the ground. And there are the names of all the people that died,” Trasciatti said. Along with their names are the ages of everyone on the day of the fire. They also included the birth names—as opposed to only the married names—of many of the young women. “We put their birth names along with their married names so people would see how many relatives worked there and died there at the fire,” Trasciatti added.
The historic text appears in English, Italian, and Yiddish to honor the majority of the languages spoken at the factory at the time, and includes first-hand accounts. One of these is from Frances Perkins, the first woman ever to serve in a presidential cabinet. “She was a young social worker hanging out in Washington Square Park with her friends, and when she heard the commotion she ran over and she was so moved by what she saw that she dedicated the rest of her life to the cause of working people,” Trasciatti explained. “She is responsible for much of the New Deal. She was quoted at the 50th anniversary of the fire as saying: ‘The New Deal began on March 25th 1911.’ So if you’re an older person collecting social security, you’re feeling the legacy of Triangle, because that is really what motivated Perkins. And she was a prime mover behind so many of the laws and the policies that now make life a little nicer for people who work hard in the US.”
The importance of the monument is two-fold. On a basic level, it marks the spot where a horrible event that changed the course of history took place. But it’s also a reminder of the importance of unions and the importance of fighting for workers’ rights, which is never ending. “Workers were dying on the job during Covid because workplaces weren’t safe. And even in the garment industry, you have the Model Alliance, you have the fashion industry organizing. We also have a really great partnership with Kalpona Akter, a Bangladeshi labor organizer. So more people are organizing here and around the world in many industries, and that’s why we’re building this memorial.” Trasciatti continued: “We want people to go there and be inspired. We want to say workers shouldn’t have to die for other working people to be safe, and we should all hold the government’s feet to the fire. We should unite with other workers. We see that happening with the Writer’s Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA, the strippers, the models. I mean, everybody’s organizing, and we want to be part of that. We want to say you can do it and it can change things.”