In September 1909, Clara Lemlich, a young woman from Ukraine, stood up in front of a crowded auditorium in New York City’s Cooper Union. After listening to lengthy speeches by union leaders who urged caution, Lemlich said that the poor pay and unsafe working conditions could go on no longer, and she called for a…
Scattered among 16 cemeteries around New York they came to rest, the 146 people whose lives were violently cut short 100 years ago in one of the nation’s worst industrial disasters — the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. A few years ago, I set out to see if I could learn who these people were in…
It was a family reunion of sorts — just 100 years after the fact. As soon as the march and speeches were over, and the names of all 146 victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire had been read aloud, family members of those who died and those who survived the March 25, 1911, blaze…
U. S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis said she did not hesitate a minute when she was asked last year to be a keynote speaker at today’s 100th anniversary commemoration of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Solis reminded the thousands of people packed into the blocks near Washington Square that the fire in the overcrowded…
On a recent late-winter afternoon, the workers’ center on the second floor of a nondescript office building in New York City’s Chinatown was full and busy. Everyone had just eaten lunch; warm soup was welcome after picketing in the cold outside an offending restaurant, Saigon Grill on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In the rear of…
Along the broad boulevards and dignified streets of the largely liberal, Jewish Upper West Side, sweatshops don’t seem to be sprouting. From Riverside Park to Lincoln Center, from Harry’s Shoes to Zabar’s, the neighborhood appears to be a civilized place where the days of residents, working folk and visitors unspool in familiar, reassuring rhythms. To…
Garment industry sweatshops are hardly a thing of the past in New York City: They are a feature of commerce today. The New York State Department of Labor has found it necessary to maintain particular vigilance for several decades, founding the Apparel Industry Task Force in 1987 to monitor the city’s largest manufacturing sector. Today,…
Watch a video tour of where the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire took place 100 years ago. Chris Connor, a retired New York City fire marshal, discusses what went wrong on March 25, 1911, and the enduring legacy of the deadly fire: Produced by Gabrielle Birkner Edited by Nate Lavey
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