“We heard an explosion, through the shattering glass

We looked up at the Asch building

A bundle of cloth came flying out the window

On the way down it opened up in the wind

It was a girl, it was girl.”

(From the Fire)

Today is May Day, “el Dia del Trabajo,” a day in which work and workers are honored around the globe. Today in particular, five weeks after the hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, we remember the 146 immigrant workers, most Jewish and Italian girls, who died trying to escape flames that roared through the upper floors of the Asch building, a garment factory near Washington Square. Trapped behind locked doors, many never had the chance to escape. Others jumped out the windows, some hand-in-hand, their hair and clothes aflame.

Saturday, March 25, 1911 was a clear, early spring day. Crowds of New Yorkers strolled in Washington Square and on the streets of the lower East Side. Suddenly at 4:45, many looked up and saw smoke billowing from a ten story building on Green Street and Washington Place. Hundreds rushed to the scene. One observer said he thought the factory owner was trying to save his best cloth by throwing bundles of fabric from the ninth floor. He and so many others realized in horror that they were seeing not bundles of cloth falling from the windows but girls — girls in flame, girls who were landing in broken heaps on the sidewalk in front of them. The fire which lasted less than half an hour, made these invisible immigrant workers suddenly starkly visible.  Photographs of the mangled bodies were printed in the morning newspapers but still thousands came to view the open coffins lined up in rows on ‘Misery Lane,’ the makeshift morgue set up on the peer at 26^th Street.  Some were family and friends desperately searching for missing loved ones but most wanted to just see the dead with their own eyes. Ocular proof.

New Yorkers felt that they knew these shirtwaist makers. They were the girls who dared to strike, the girls dared to stand up for themselves by standing in the streets through the bitter winter of 1909/1910 to advocate for better working conditions. Everyone in the city felt implicated and responsible for these preventable deaths at Triangle. One in ten New Yorkers lined the streets of Manhattan to watch the procession of the horse drawn caskets with the last unknown victims on a rainy April morning.

There are so many tragedies, so many workers die everyday, why remember this one event from 100 years ago? We remember the tragedy at Triangle because it directly followed the Uprising of the 20,000, the first significant strike by women in history. Many of the girls who died at Triangle were the same teenagers who took to the streets of Manhattan. They had the same simple demands as workers in Chicago who filled Haymarket Square in 1886 on May Day, calling for a 52 hour work week and decent wages. And both of these viral, impromptu strikes continue to be echoed in the current uprising by young people in the Middle East, young people who have nothing to lose, who simply know they have the human right to seek equity and justice.  We remember Triangle because the people of the City of New York, many of whom saw the tragedy unfold in front of their own eyes, said this can never happen again here, and they passed laws in the state legislature, which created real labor and health and safety reforms. Public outrage over the event galvanized the progressive movement and women’s suffrage, and went on to instigate many of the most important reforms of the New Deal. There’s so much inherent injustice that we all know needs to change, and we need to keep examining moments when the gears of history actually shift. What’s inherent in the story of Triangle is that every individual human life is more important than anything we can produce. It’s a story that needs to be told again and again, and one that every generation encounters in its own way.

In honor of the centennial of Triangle, I had the privilege of creating a new performance piece called, FROM THE FIRE, with the wonderful composer, Elizabeth Swados, the poet, Paula Finn, and set designer, Bonnie Roche. A century later, workers continue to face perilous conditions in an unregulated global market place, and our hope was not to romanticize the tragedy but to again honor and celebrate the lives of these very ordinary, working women and men who instigated so much change. The piece, which performed at Judson Church in March and will be featured today on WNET Channel 13’s Sunday Arts Program at noon. (It can also be seen online here.) And it will travel to the Edinburgh Fringe Theater Festival in August, though we’ve been asked, ‘Why Scotland? This should go to Wisconsin!’

For more information see trianglefromthefire.com