Triangle Shirtwaist Fire: Past, Personal, Current

When I was in 7th grade (either fall 1971 or spring 1972), I took a book out of my middle school's library about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire after learning about it in social studies class. I don't know if I read the book or not; probably not. But I do know that I lost the book and never returned it to the library, and hid the fact in shame the rest of the year.

It's weird how memory works; I don't remember what happened with the situation. I think maybe my teacher (a rotund man who was probably in his early 40s at the time but who I thought was really old because he was balding and graying) finally said something to me about it near the end of the year. Maybe my parents paid for the book? I'm not sure. I think I am creating those memories out of whole cloth as I write this.

All of that is part of my connection to the tragic fire, the immigrant women killed, the history of union organizing, and even the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, who used to run so many ads on television and radio when I was growing up that we all knew their song. The fact that my dress-maker grandmother was a union member in her much smaller upstate New York city also made it all the more real for me, I think.

In 2005, Daughter Number Three-Point-One and I visited the site of the fire while we were on a trip to New York City. The building still stands today, though the floors where the fire took place are eight to 10 stories up, so from the street it's mostly a matter of looking at plaques commemorating it.

Why did this come to my mind today particularly? It's not because it's an anniversary of the fire, which took place on March 25, 1911. It's because Elizabeth Warren is speaking tomorrow in Washington Square Park, just a half-block from the fire site, and her campaign has written some of the publicity to tie into the fire's history. Worker safety, public safety, water safety — all the types of safety that are being destroyed each day by our current administration — make the fire relevant in new ways.

And tomorrow is my birthday, which connected my personal history on this topic with Warren's speaking plans, at least in my head. So happy birthday, and I still remember you, people who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, even though I never did find that book.


Photo from the Wikimedia Commons, first published on the front page of the New York World on March 26, 1911. Photographer unknown.