Finally, a Memorial to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire’s Victims

Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll look at plans for a memorial to one of the city’s worst tragedies, a deadly fire that led to changes in the workplace. We’ll also find out how much time a restaurateur who paid off politicians is going to spend in prison.

Mary Anne Trasciatti did not say the word “finally,” but her emotional energy made up for what went unsaid.

She was talking about a memorial for one of the nation’s worst industrial disasters, the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, in which 146 workers died. Now, after more than a decade of working to bring a memorial into being, Trasciatti and the group of labor advocates and victims’ descendants she works with have scheduled a dedication ceremony. The date is Oct. 11.

“In a city that calls itself a union town, it’s about time to have labor stories out there,” she said. “There’s nothing on the landscape that tells the stories of working people as working people.”

Trasciatti’s group, the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, has arranged to place steel panels on the facade of the building in Greenwich Village where the fire broke out. One set of panels will bear the 146 names. Another will carry a history of the tragedy — one that had enduring consequences for workers’ rights and organized labor’s power.

The design, chosen in a competition 10 years ago, is the work of Richard Joon Yoo and Uri Wegman. Yoo said in 2015 that what made the memorial unique was that it was “about the past, but also so much about the present.” Around the time of the contest, 112 workers died in a factory fire in Bangladesh where jeans, lingerie and sweaters were made for retailers like Walmart and Sears. Months later, the collapse of a clothing factory in the same country killed 1,100 workers.

Most victims of the Triangle fire were young immigrant women who clocked long hours — as many as 84 hours a week for as little as $7. They were all but locked in, literally: Stairway doors had been locked because the owners fretted that the women might steal material. One of the owners said later the annual loss per worker totaled “$10 or $15 or $12 or $8, something like that.”

The fire, and images of bodies on the sidewalk, shook the city in a profound way. “The social reformer Frances Perkins remembered the mood in New York afterwards as one of guilt, ‘as though we had all done something wrong,’” the writer and historian Kevin Baker noted in 2003.

Perkins was a witness: She had been having tea at a friend’s house on Washington Square, steps from the building at 29 Washington Place. The building is now owned by New York University. A spokesman for N.Y.U. said the school was “honored” to have worked with the coalition “to ensure that the memory of those who died more than a century ago — and the lessons learned from that tragedy — are never lost.”

For many, the connections are personal. Trasciatti, the director of the labor studies program at Hofstra University, is the daughter of a garment worker in Pennsylvania, who credited feeling safe at work to labor reforms spurred by the Triangle fire. Another person involved with the coalition, Suzanne Pred Bass, had two great-aunts who worked at Triangle. One, Katie Weiner, survived the fire. The other, Rosie, died.

“This has weighed on families for all these generations,” said Pred Bass. “The longing for recognition and the preservation of the history through a memorial has been a priority” — starting with her own great-grandmother, the mother of Katie and Rosie Weiner, Pred Bass said.

Katie was 16 or 17 and was “the last one to leave the ninth floor,” Pred Bass said. She had worked there for five months and had “probably been brought in by her sister.” She got out by jumping into the already-packed elevator and grabbing a cable that ran through the overloaded car.

“She sensed that the elevator wasn’t going to come back up” once it left the ninth floor, Pred Bass said. David Von Drehle, in his book “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America” (2003), wrote that “the falling car pulled her in. She landed on the heads of women so tightly packed they could not lift their arms to hold or help her. Her feet dangled through the door, banging violently on every landing.”

Pred Bass said her great-grandmother had wanted money she received as a settlement for Rosie’s death — “a pittance” — to go toward “a big monument in the cemetery.”

“From my perspective,” she said, the vision for a memorial “goes back to then.”

Weather

It’s a mostly sunny day near the high 90s. In the evening, prepare for possible showers and thunderstorms, which could be severe. Temperatures will be around the high 70s.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Aug. 15 (Feast of the Assumption).

The latest New York news

A Long Island restaurateur who paid off New York politicians was sentenced to four years in prison.

My colleague Karen Zraick writes that the sentence ended an episode that brought to light allegations of corruption that stretched from New York City to Long Island enclaves dominated by Republicans.

The restaurateur, Harendra Singh, pleaded guilty to bribing a former Nassau County executive, Edward Mangano. Singh also admitted trying to bribe Bill de Blasio when he was the mayor of New York. Singh said he wanted favorable treatment for a restaurant he ran in Long Island City, Queens. Federal and state prosecutors decided in 2017 not to bring charges against de Blasio over his handling of donors seeking favors from the city, but the issue remained a political liability during the rest of his time in City Hall and his brief, doomed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.

Singh testified in two trials against Mangano, a Republican who is now serving a 12-year prison sentence. The judge who presided over both of those trials, Judge Joan Azrack of the Eastern District of New York, sentenced Singh after calling him “a master of pay to play” but also crediting him with working with prosecutors to illuminate dark intersections of politics and business.

She said that the extent of Singh’s cooperation was “possibly unmatched by any defendant in a corruption investigation.”

Anthony La Pinta, a lawyer for Singh, said in court on Wednesday that if there were a Mount Rushmore of cooperators, Singh “would be front and center.” He also said that Singh had faced threats for his testimony.

La Pinta said later that he was disappointed by the sentence, which he asserted could have a chilling effect in cases in which people accused of crimes are considering assisting the government.

“It’s too long in light of the extent of his cooperation,” La Pinta said. Singh is to begin his sentence in January and must also pay restitution, though he has said he has no money and his home is in foreclosure.

METROPOLITAN diary

Parking proposal

Dear Diary:

It was fall 1980, and I was trying to find a parking spot on East 68th Street somewhere between York and Second Avenue.

Eventually, I found a spot that was good until the next day. Then, I saw a spot open up across the street, and it was good for two days.

I wanted that spot because I wanted to stay over with my sort-of boyfriend, who lived in the neighborhood.