Opinion | At last, the 146 ghosts of the Triangle Fire are being immortalized

By David Von Drehle
Deputy opinion editor and columnist
October 9, 2023 at 5:45 a.m. EDT

The challenge when writing history is to break the glass that separates us from the past. To connect somehow with those who lived before us and turn them back into people — not flat abstractions in funny clothes.

The glass-breaking moment for me, when I set out long ago to write a history of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire — the 1911 industrial disaster that shaped the politics of New York and later the entire nation — came when I learned that some of the victims, moments from death yet cheerfully unawares, were singing at the end of their workday. “Every Little Movement,” a hit Broadway show tune, was their equivalent of the latest from Taylor Swift. Some joke or passing remark or reference to a boyfriend had reminded one of them of the lyrics, and when she launched in, others joined her, as happy humans often do.



They were flesh and blood, as real as you and I. And then they were gone — incinerated in their ninth-floor death trap or smashed on the Greenwich Village pavement where they plunged. No publication even bothered to record all their names. ... Now, New Yorkers and visitors to the city will be able to have their own glass-breaking moments at the site of the historic fire, which was the deadliest workplace disaster in city history until the day known as 9/11. The Triangle Fire Memorial, a project years in the making, will be dedicated on Wednesday at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street near Washington Square in the heart of Manhattan.

The 146 fire victims — most of them immigrant women from Italy and Eastern Europe — will be restored as actual names of actual people, at the very spot where they passed into history. Their names are cut into the flowing steel of the monument, which — when all the pieces are installed this winter — will stretch like ribbon to ninth-floor windows, then tumble back toward street level, where it will spread its arms to embrace the building where history happened. Light shining through the incised names will reflect on a polished surface, where they will appear as if glowing.



A rendering of the Triangle Fire Memorial, set to be unveiled on Wednesday in New York. (Uri Wegman and Richard Joon Yoo)

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To the left, firefighters work to douse the flames at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in 1911. To the right, people walk past a building in the same location a day before the 100th anniversary of the fire in March 2011. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Mario Tama/Getty Images)

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Opinion by David Von Drehle
David Von Drehle is a deputy opinion editor for The Post and writes a weekly column. He was previously an editor-at-large for Time Magazine, and is the author of four books, including “Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year” and “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America.” Twitter https://twitter.com/DavidVonDrehle