Tragedy Helped Bring the Labor Movement Forward

Remembering an American tragedy
The 146 lives lost in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire - mostly women and girls - helped bring the labor movement forward

The charred interior of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York, March 25, 1911. The building - which had no sprinklers, only one fire escape, and locked doors - was a deathtrap for 146 workers. (Cornell Univ./Kheel Center)

March 20, 2011 - To walk by it now, it's just another building off New York City's Washington Square, part of the Greenwich Village campus of New York University. But from the ashes of a fire that once consumed its top floors, history was made. Michelle Miller offers this remembrance:


It was late in the afternoon on a beautiful spring Saturday - March 25, 1911 - 4:40 p.m., to be exact.

It was nearly quitting time at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York's Greenwich Village, where 500 workers, mostly young Italian and Jewish women and girls, got ready to collect their pay, and go home.

Someone dropped a match, or a cigarette ... and within minutes the factory, which occupied the top three floors of a 10-story building, became an inferno. {continued}