New York Times, March 21, 2011, Monday

New York Times

March 21, 2011, Monday

New York Times

Remembering the Triangle Fire, 100 Years Later
By JOSEPH BERGER

In the arts and academia, on television and on a Greenwich Village street, the 146 victims of the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire will be remembered over the next few weeks in an outpouring of events marking the centennial of the workplace tragedy.

The events, which started last month — roughly 100 in New York City and another 100 elsewhere in the nation — seem on a scale unmatched in New York since the nation’s bicentennial in 1976 or the Statue of Liberty’s 100th birthday party in 1986. And those were celebrations. This commemoration will have a more mournful, reflective tone.

“It’s amazing, the passion that has come out for this,” said Sherry Kane, a spokesman for Workers United, the union that today represents garment workers. “I think it speaks to people because it’s about immigrant issues, women’s issues, workers’ issues, so it’s all these communities and it feels very important to them.”

The lineup of events planned around the anniversary on March 25 include documentary films, art exhibits, plays, dance recitals, a requiem, a soliloquy, a slide show, an oratorio and lectures and panel discussions.

Eric Michael Johnson
for The New York Times

A replica shirtwaist in the style of the day, sewn by Alexandria Hoffman as part of an exhibition commemorating the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire.Ruth Sergel, founder of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, which is coordinating the events, said she thought the ardent interest derived from a “zeitgeist where people are deeply discontented with the way things are.”

“When you look at the history and you see people dropping their petty differences and coming together for positive change in the wake of the fire, we want to replicate that,” she said.

The climax of the commemorations will be a March 25 memorial service outside the building on Washington Place and Greene Street in Greenwich Village where the Triangle shirtwaist factory was situated. The building, which was fireproof — though its contents were not — still stands; it is now New York University’s Brown Building of Science.

The ceremony will begin with a procession of people holding bamboo poles draped with the blouses that were part of the shirtwaist style, each emblazoned with the name of one victim. Speakers will include the United States secretary of labor, Hilda L. Solis; Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg; the actor Danny Glover; and Suzanne Pred Bass, the grandniece of Rosie Weiner, a young woman killed in the blaze.

As there has been in years past, victims’ names will be read by descendants and schoolchildren, with each name punctuated by the tolling of a fire bell. Firefighters will raise a ladder to the sixth floor of the building to demonstrate that rescuers in those years were not able to reach those trapped on the eighth and ninth floors.

Some other highlights:

HBO’s documentary “Triangle: Remembering the Fire” will be shown March 21 and for several nights afterward. A PBS documentary on Triangle was shown on Feb. 28 on the series “American Experience” and is viewable online.

In its March 25 issue, The Forward will publish translations of articles that its Yiddish-only predecessor ran in the days after the fire, as well as editorials by its fabled editor at the time, Abraham Cahan.

Between March 23 and March 27, the composer Elizabeth Swados will join with the writer Cecilia Rubino and the poet Paula Finn to stage a dramatic oratorio about the fire at Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square South, a few blocks from the fire site.

On Saturday at Manhattan’s Church of the Incarnation, the Manhattan Choral Ensemble were to perform Maurice Duruflé’s “Requiem” for organ and strings and new works that were created by the composers George Andoniadis, Victoria Bond, Ricardo Llorca and Martha Sullivan around Jonathan Fink’s poems about the fire.

Universities are seizing upon the anniversary as a teaching moment. New York University’s Grey Art Gallery has been exhibiting historic and contemporary photographs, artifacts, art and books that document the calamity, a show that will run through July 9, except for the period between March 27 and April 11. City University’s Graduate Center will hold an all-day scholarly conference on March 24 evaluating the historical significance and legacy of the fire.

And Cornell University’s Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, a leading repository about the fire, has beefed up its Web site with new information about each of the victims as well as eyewitness accounts, transcripts and photographs.

There will also be Triangle-related events in San Francisco, Washington, Minneapolis and other cities. In Chester, Pa., in a work titled “Soliloquy for a Seamstress,” LuLu LoLo, a performance artist, will portray a young seamstress who unfolds her dreams and dissatisfaction to her younger sister moments before both perish in the fire.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

City Room will be observing the anniversary of the Triangle fire next week in a series of posts and multimedia presentations.