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| A Unionized Garment Shop by Ralph Fasanella. |
O Girls Girls! Teenage immigrants
Tell me where did you go in the
fire?
(Tessie! Caterina! Antonietta!
Somebody tell me)
I jumped to the street
Where my bones and concrete meet.
The sewer my blood runs through.
The 106th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire will be remembered with a multi-genre program March 24 at New York Univerity's Casa Italiana. The address is 24 West 12th Street, New York City, 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.
The program will
include a performance by Vito Marcantonio Forum (VMF) founding member LuLu LoLo Pascale of
an excerpt from her play, “Soliloquy for a Seamstress: The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.”
The VMF recently affiliated with the coalition and other members will also participate in the event.
The VMF recently affiliated with the coalition and other members will also participate in the event.
Costanzo Quatriglio's documentary, “Triangle,” will also be screened. It tells the story of a similar event that led to workplace deaths in present-day Italy.
Professor Mary Anne Trasciatti, chair, Remember the
Triangle Fire Coalition, will present an update on the effort to establish a permanent memorial.
Vito Marcantonio would have been nine
years old in 1911 and, in all likelihood, painfully
aware of the fire.
Although the inferno happened downtown,
and Marcantonio's Little Italy was found uptown on the shores of the
East River, the event sent shockwaves through immigrant communities.
In her 2010 essay, “Chalking Back Through Time” author Elissa Sampson proposed that,
“This still salient loss took place in less than 20 minutes, 146
people died, overwhelmingly young women. Many jumped from the locked
ninth floor after the elevator failed due to the weight of those
escaping the eighth floor. The tenth floor mainly made it out to the
roof.”
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| Marc's Congressional investigation. Her three sons died from silicosis. |
The only compensation ever dispensed
with was $75 to the families of 23 victims.
Among the tragedy's more enduring
legacies, Sampson noted, “The Triangle Fire for Jews and Italians
marked the entrenchment of labor politics since the sweatshops
remained critical to their economic sustenance.”
Marcantonio's politics both supported
and drew support from those newly emboldened unions; were forged
in that environment. He was a kind of last line of defense in the
battles that would ensue to liquidate that power: the anti-communist
purges and passage of the Taft-Hartley Act.
His role as a spokesperson for
workplace issues, and workplace safety in particular, extended well
beyond his East Harlem bailiwick. A trip to West Virginia early in
his congressional career spurred Marc to conduct a House
investigation into the silicosis epidemic that was laying thousands
low there.
Today, Sampson wrote of the Triangle fire, “[T]his tragic
event is now seen again as pivotal in interpreting the city's labor,
industrial and immigrant history and in having brought New Yorkers
together to meet the most urgent social justice challenge of their
times.”
The
program, sponsors say, is intended to, “keep alive the memory of
what happened in 1911 and of its significance for the history of the
U.S. labor movement. Art also reminds contemporary audiences of the
symbolic and political value of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
in generating a discourse about workers' rights"The Gand dignity, and
about illegal situations of the exploitation o
"The Goodfather (A Novel): The Rising Fall of the Marvelous Marcantonio," can be purchased here: MARC LIVES!f labor in the U.S. and
abroad.”
