Honoring the Dead 100 Years Later: The Triangle Factory Tragedy

This date has significance, as today marks the centennial of the day a group of 146 garment workers -- most of them young women, the youngest of whom was 14 -- perished in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. The factory was near Washington Square, which, coincidentally, was also the first place I called home, when my parents brought me to their apartment at 2 Washington Square Village, Apartment 8-H, the day after I was born.

Those girls and women must have gone to work that day as they did on any other. Maybe they walked; maybe they rode the trolley. Perhaps it was warm for late March, promising Spring, or rainy, or chilly. They probably thought nothing of it, as they made their way into the building and up the elevator to the ninth floor.

Who knows what the morning was like for those girls and women? They were the hardest-working of the working poor -- Jewish and Italian mostly, many of whom had recently arrived in America, hoping for something better. If not better for themselves, then they hoped for a better life for their children, real or imagined in the future.

There are some good oral histories from that infamous day one hundred years ago -- most notably in Howard Zinn's seminal A People's History of the United States, as well as in the library of the American Social History Project in New York City.

The reason I know about the ASHP, which some may think of as somewhat obscure, I admit, is because I had the good fortune to work with one of the best Social Studies teachers/historians in David Silberberg.

David and I worked together at Satellite Academy High School from 1992 to 2004. He still teaches Social Studies there -- the only one left from that Dream Team of a teaching staff from the late-1980's and early nineties. (Happily, I can say they've brought on great teachers consistently since then, and there have been many new Dream Teams in the intervening years.)

We talked about team teaching quite a bit, as David and I shared an office in that wonderful, run-down building across from the Tweed Courthouse. The American Social History Project had developed a powerful interdisciplinary curriculum that was meant to be taught by a Social Studies and English teacher together, so that students would learn about events through first-hand oral histories, while developing their writing and literacy skills. It was perfect, and I loved every minute of teaching that class.

In addition to examining the stories from that horrible incident, David and I worked with our students to understand images, like the one above. Television obviously hadn't been invented yet, but photography had, and the images of all those girls and women falling, jumping from the ninth floor to their deaths, became a rallying cry for the labor movement. Management had apparently blocked off and locked doors to prevent workers from stealing scraps of fabric. They had also chosen to forgo fire drills, because, they said, it hampered productivity.

I thank people like Howard Zinn and David Silberberg who keep telling the story. Organizations like the American Social History Project and HBO, who produced an excellent and heartbreaking documentary about the fire deserve our collective gratitude, as well.

Falling Shoes

I don't often think about 9/11. It's not that I've blocked it out, or anything as dramatic as that. It's been nearly ten years, and in the spirit of survival and not giving in, I have moved on. It's my strong belief that the collective souls of those thousands of innocents whose lives were so recklessly taken on that day would not wish us to dwell on the devastation, but, rather they'd want us to forge ahead and continue on, and in the process, we avenge their deaths by living our lives.

Occasionally, however, I do remember. I remember the way my student, Sean Lawrence, came into my classroom on the third floor of Satellite Academy on West 30th Street and said in a curious monotone, "I'm not sure, but I think I just saw a plane crash into the World Trade Center." He had caught a glimpse of that first impact, just as he was crossing Sixth Avenue, heading to school.

I recall the silence of a New York City with no cars driving past, and no planes flying overhead. It was eerie, and we, the inhabitants making our way to our homes that day, walked past each other like shadows, strangely making eye contact (not our usual way), as if to wordlessly reassure one another.

I remember the way we all shifted to the north-facing windows of the F-train, as we emerged in Brooklyn, and seeing, for the first time, the giant plume of smoke that would linger and stink for days. A teenage boy saying, "Oh my God, it's true. It's really true."

Weeks later, as we healed, I was in a bar with some friends, who introduced me to a woman I'd never met. "I was there," she said. I didn't have to ask her where. Or when. I just knew by the look in her eyes.

"There's one thing I'll never forget," she said. "The shoes."

"Shoes?"

"They just kept falling. Shoes. Women's shoes, men's boots, children's sneakers. They were raining down from the burning building."

She told me she'd heard from a scientist friend that the physics behind the falling shoes was similar to when a pedestrian is hit by a speeding car and one sees a pair of shoes standing in the exact spot where the victim once stood. Imagine that impact, times a hundred. Times a thousand.

The woman passed this image on to me, and although I'm thankful for not having been there that day, it's this second-hand image that occasionally wakes me up at night, as I consider what it must have been like to have been in those shoes on that sunny fall morning nearly ten years ago. There are other, more violent images I've seen associated with 9/11; the footage of people choosing to jump from 100 stories, rather than be burned to death, a photograph taken by my brother-in-law, one of the first responders, of something that had once been a human being -- but it's these falling shoes that I'll never forget and that will forever remind me of horrific tragedy and a loss that changed our world forever.