See You in the Streets: Art, Action, and Remembering the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
194
See You in the Streets: Art, Action, and Remembering the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
194eBook
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Overview
In 1911, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City took the lives of 146 workers, most of them young immigrant women and girls. Their deaths galvanized a movement for social and economic justice then, but today’s laborers continue to battle dire working conditions. How can we bring the lessons of the Triangle fire back into practice today? For artist Ruth Sergel, the answer was to fuse art, activism, and collective memory to create a large-scale public commemoration that invites broad participation and incites civic engagement. See You in the Streets showcases her work.
It all began modestly in 2004 with Chalk, an invitation to all New Yorkers to remember the 146 victims of the fire by inscribing their names and ages in chalk in front of their former homes. This project inspired Sergel to found the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, a broad alliance of artists and activists, universities and unions—more than 250 partners nationwide—to mark the 2011 centennial of the infamous blaze. Putting the coalition together and figuring what to do and how to do it were not easy. This book provides a lively account of the unexpected partnerships, false steps, joyous collective actions, and sustainability of such large public works. Much more than an object lesson from the past, See You in the Streets offers an exuberant perspective on building a social art practice and doing public history through argument and agitation, creativity and celebration with an engaged public.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609384180 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2016 |
| Series: | Humanities and Public Life |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 194 |
| File size: | 31 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
See You in the Streets
Art, Action, and Remembering the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
By Ruth Sergel
University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2016 University of Iowa PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-417-3
CHAPTER 1
THE FIRE
The "Triangle" company ... With blood this name will be written in the history of the American workers' movement, and with feeling will this history recall the names of the strikers of this shop — of the crusaders.
— Jewish Daily Forward, January 10, 1910
Growing up in 1970s lower Manhattan, I first learned of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire from the pages of a book. I was stunned by the story of the workers, most of them girls just slightly older than myself, Jewish like me, who raced to get out of the burning factory only to find the exit locked by rapacious owners more concerned with profit than human lives. Leon Stein's The Triangle Fire vividly brought to life the story of a great injustice. It was through his pen that the voices of survivors and witnesses were passed down to me. For many years this is how I remembered the story of the Triangle Fire.
The Triangle Waist Company was located in the top three floors of the Asch building, just one block east of Washington Square Park, at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place. By the standards of the day it was quite modern. Instead of farming out work to individual sweatshops, the company set up a central facility within which independent contractors hired and paid small clusters of workers. The eighth and ninth floors housed the manufacturing while the tenth floor was for management and shipping. In this way the Triangle owners were both physically and contractually one step removed from engaging with their employees.
Each day hundreds of garment workers were densely packed within long rows of machinery. These immigrant sisters and brothers, neighbors and friends were connected through an intricate web of relationships. Most of them were young women and girls from the Jewish and Italian-American families in the surrounding neighborhoods. They worked long backbreaking hours together but also had the advantage of all the new world had to offer.
While the factory was required to have a certain amount of square footage per worker, this was commonly achieved by high ceilings rather than actual floor space. There were two sets of stairs — one on the Washington Place side, the other on Greene Street. A fire escape on an inside court ended inexplicably over a skylight to the basement. There were passenger and freight elevators. At closing each day the workers would line up to pass through a narrow partition at the Greene Street side exit to have their bags checked, part of a larger system of social control. The doors on the Washington Place side of the floor were regularly locked, ostensibly to prevent stealing but also to conveniently keep out unannounced inspectors or union organizers.
Despite several previous fires, the bosses of the Triangle Waist Company had no difficulty in securing insurance for well over the actual value of the goods and equipment in their factory. When the insurance inspector visited the Triangle factory, he noted several points of concern. The long rows of sewing machines created narrow aisles that were cluttered by seating and wicker baskets of fabric. Machine oil soaked the wood. Highly combustible light cotton fabric scraps were collected in bins built into the base of the cutters tables. Uneasy, the inspector recommended that the company schedule fire drills. A fire safety expert duly contacted the owners to set up the exercise. Despite the regularity of garment factory fires, including in their own facilities, the Triangle owners never responded.
On March 25, 1911, several hundred workers were crowded into the Triangle Waist Company. On the eighth floor a fire broke out and spread with alarming speed. Because no fire drills had been conducted, no one knew what to do. Precious time was lost as people made well-meant but tragically misguided efforts to contain the situation. A call to the tenth floor alerted the owners, and all but one on the executive level survived. On the eighth floor, seeing the start of the fire, most of the workers had the advantage of a few extra moments that made it possible for them to escape. Many opted for their usual exit and pushed through the narrow passage and down the Greene Street staircase. Others ran for the Washington Place exit but found it locked. After a moment of panic, the key was found, and the door opened a path to safety. A few knew about or found the fire escape. They quickly climbed down and reentered on a lower floor. Behind them the narrow walkway clogged with fleeing workers, as more and more desperate Triangle employees pushed out. Suddenly the fire escape twisted and gave way, dropping them to their death.
The hundreds of workers on the ninth floor had no warning. The fire had spread below, then seemingly in an instant engulfed them in flames. Survivors described a chaotic scene. With so many family members working together, some naturally sought their loved ones, even as the possibilities for finding a route to safety rapidly diminished. Sisters Rose and Katie Weiner never found each other. We don't know if Caterina Maltese was with her two daughters, known as Sara and Lucy, or if sixteen-year-old Annie Miller turned back to try to save her sister-in-law. Some escaped through the Greene Street exit. Others raced for the Washington Place door only to find it locked. Many later testified to their growing desperation while they tried but were unable to open the door. As the wall of flames and smoke drew closer they were trapped. No survivor from the ninth floor escaped by the Washington Place side.
The elevators provided a slim possibility of rescue. Terrified workers rushed into the small cars. The operators Joey Zito and Gaspar Mortillalo bravely returned to the floor again and again, but they were no match for the speed of the fire. When the elevators could no longer make the climb, workers jumped or fell down the shaft in a last desperate attempt to escape the flames. A barrel of oil stored by the Greene Street door exploded. Soon the fire inexorably pushed the remaining workers toward the windows.
From the street, witnesses saw the first worker come out the window. The sight was so disorienting that there was a moment of confusion. It seemed it was only fabric being tossed out to be saved, until a rush of air revealed a pair of legs just before the Triangle worker smashed into the sidewalk. Framed within each window, intimate scenes of the workers' final moments played out. Girls holding hands as they leapt together, a man helping his friends over the ledge before going himself. A reporter described the horrifying sound as each person crashed into and sometimes through the pavement. The crowd on the street grew. Some grabbed horse blankets to try to catch the workers, but the force of the falling bodies only sent the would-be rescuers somersaulting. Hope surged when the fire truck arrived and the ladder uncoiled up toward the building until it came to rest at the sixth floor, well below the fire. The fire ladders of the day could go no higher. A few of the Triangle workers made desperate attempts to leap for the ladder, but the distance was too great, and they fell to the street. Witnesses watched helplessly as now not individuals but groups of workers tumbled out the windows, many already in flames. One locked door — and in fewer than twenty minutes, 146 workers lay dead or dying.
The anguish and outrage that leapt off each page of Leon Stein's book seemed a perfect mirror to the world I was growing up in. It was a heady time of active civic engagement. My family took me along to anti-war and civil rights demonstrations. Art was everywhere: in galleries, in the streets and in our home. Dinner table discussions revolved around creativity, politics, and relationships. I was intently listening to the adult conversations, trying to discern the unspoken rules that govern human interaction. Photography, poetry, and music all seethed with an immediacy fueled by love and politics.
What was for my parents a rebellion seemed to us, their children, the normal way of things. My mother was increasingly involved in the women's movement. The political was intimately entwined with the personal as the adults around me were experimenting with sexuality, drugs, and consciousness. It seemed that day by day, year by year we were forcefully moving forward. I fully believed that I was growing up into a society just on the brink of social justice and equality.
People seemed to take for granted a sense of personal responsibility for the actions of their government. I understood that one of the lessons of the Holocaust was the cost of complicity. I was taught to judge harshly those who had simply "kept the trains running" while conveniently not noticing they were heading for Auschwitz. It seemed that if people only knew about injustice, then it would necessarily be put right. If the United States was wrongly engaged in Vietnam or failing on civil rights, then we as individuals were culpable. Surrounded by protest and creative direct action and sometimes violence, it was clear that to be a moral citizen we had an obligation to speak out, stand up, and be counted.
From the vantage point of my middle years, the view is quite different. As I came of age, Reagan was elected president; and what seemed like an inexorable march forward began, inexplicably to me, to quickly slide backward. Civil rights, reproductive rights, even simple compassion seemed to recede into a fog of greedy individualism. Despite the efforts of many deeply committed individuals, the overall tide was pushing back. I was living in one age but seeing and thinking from another. What I had thought was inevitable progress had been only a moment of a much larger and more complex engagement.
Professionally I began working in the film industry as a proud union member of IATSE 600 (Cinematographers Guild). Camera is great because you're always at the center of the action on set. Its fascinating to see how a production with dozens, if not hundreds, of people can work in a modular but efficient fashion. Each department works independently but for a common vision led by the director. How that works (or doesn't) on any given film is endlessly compelling.
As I began to make my own films, I kept returning to Leon Stein's book, but every idea I had for a film about the fire sank into sentimentality. It was too easy to go cheap and emotionally manipulative. There was something deeper in the story that I could not yet reach.
Many artists had created works in response to Triangle. Just days after the fire the Jewish Daily Forward printed Morris Rosenfeld's brilliant and brutal poem on its front page. At least two Yiddish songs commemorating the fire were quickly in circulation. In 1940 artist Ernest Fiene, hired by the WPA, painted a three-panel mural. In 1950 the ILGWU commissioned the academy-award-winning film, With These Hands, which depicted the Triangle Fire and contrasted contemporary working conditions. The Triangle Fire can be found in the poems of Chris Llewellyn and Robert Pinsky and in novels by Kevin Baker, Katherine Weber, and now Alice Hoffman. The play The Triangle Fire Project uses historical texts as dialogue. There are many children and young adult books, including Al Marrin's Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy. The story was included in a segment of Ric Burns's epic New York TV series.
I began to sporadically attend the annual union commemoration of the Triangle Fire. Each year the dignitaries sit on the dais in the shadow of the Brown (formerly Asch) Building. The structure, which was fireproof, looms overhead. In the street there is a ladder truck from the fire department. Usually there are not a lot of people but still a respectable showing. Union members, city schoolchildren, neighborhood folks, and a few relatives of the Triangle dead are in the street. A tenderness always underlies the ceremony — a sense that despite everything, here we all are. The politicians make their boilerplate speeches, but the workers and labor organizers always spark the crowd. Calling out current labor struggles, those on the front line are our most direct link to the legacy of the fire.
Each year the story of the Triangle Fire is recounted. As the fire truck raises its ladder up the side of the building, the crowd is suddenly hushed as we watch the ladder rise up and up, then tip, bounce, and lightly come to rest at the sixth floor. We witness the gap to the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors where the Triangle Factory burned. The sensation is visceral as one can't help but imagine standing in the window, the fire behind, the pavement below. Often I would run into Vincent Maltese, who lost both of his aunts and a grandmother in the fire. In those early days, he had pieced together a xeroxed collection of articles and remembrances that he would generously share with anyone who expressed an interest.
At the end of the ceremony, schoolchildren line up along side of the building. They step up to the microphone, read the name of one of the Triangle dead, and place a flower on the pavement where the bodies once lay. The fire bell is rung, and the next child comes forward. Through the retelling of the story, the fire truck with its ladder, the children reciting the names, there is a sense of ritual. This is how we remember our own.
The annual union commemoration at the site began in earnest around the fiftieth anniversary of the fire. The ILGWU, which had sought to organize the Triangle Waist Company, held a large ceremony that was attended by Triangle survivors, Frances Perkins, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Dave Dubinsky, president of the ILGWU. It was around this time that Leon Stein, editor of ILGWU's Justice, began to doggedly seek out the testimonies of survivors and witnesses. His sense of outrage vibrates off every page of the brutal tale as he passionately evokes the stories of the young workers.
Today, the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at Cornell University's ILR School is the home for the archives of the ILGWU and Leon Stein. Paging through Stein's correspondence, one can trace the tender thread as one survivor led him to the next. There is a touching humility as they honor his questions by being as specific and clear as possible. Sometimes the survivor had never spoken about the fire until Stein sought out the story. Others have questions of their own. A woman who survived but lost her sister and is searching for more relatives. An adoptee who thinks her birth mother may have died in the conflagration. There are charts and lists, retyped again and again, covered in handwritten notes. Sifting through the delicate onionskin papers, one gets a sense of the magnitude of the task. If it were not for Stein's intrepid dedication to preserving the workers' stories, the history of the fire would have remained impersonal and murky. His commitment and the honor he gave to the survivors by insisting that their testimony mattered resulted in a passionate and deeply felt work. It is on his shoulders that the rest of us stand.
Growing up with Stein's book planted the seed, but it would be many years before I would have the tools to make the work. Only in retrospect do I understand that there were other skills I needed to develop before I was ready to create a piece that would fully share the sense of sorrow and defiance that the story held for me. When I did, it turned out not to be a film at all but a public action taking us into the streets.
CHAPTER 2CHALK
We found them. You could find them by the flowers of mourning nailed to the doors of tenements. You could find them by the wailing in the streets of relatives and friends gathered for the funerals. But sometimes you climbed floor after floor up an old tenement, went down the long, dark hall, knocked on the door and after it was opened found them sitting there — a father and his children or an old mother who had lost her daughter — sitting there silent, crushed.
— Rose Schneiderman, quoted in Stein, The Triangle Fire
Each year on the March 25 anniversary of the Triangle Fire, someone steps outside her home into the streets of New York. She might cross the Lower East Side or head uptown to East Harlem or the Bronx. Perhaps she pushes out to Brownsville or to the small buildings in the West Village. Arriving at the home of one of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire dead, she bends to the pavement and with thick sidewalk chalk inscribes a name:
Civia Eisenberg
17 years old
Lived at 14 East 1st Street
Died March 25, 1911
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
She posts a flier nearby to share the story of the fire, then moves on to another home, another name. Across the city more people are moving into the streets. Each of the 146 names will be remembered. Building after building, block after block, the human cost of the Triangle fire is marked across a city.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from See You in the Streets by Ruth Sergel. Copyright © 2016 University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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