Hey everybody,

I couldn’t let the 100^th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire go unnoticed.  It was one hundred years ago today that a fire in the factory of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company took the lives of 146 workers.  Most of these were young Italian and Jewish immigrant women who had passed through Ellis Island in recent years.  These women, teenage girls in some cases, lived in nearby Little Italy and Lower East Side and worked a six-day schedule making ladies’ shirtwaists for about $10 per week.  The cause of death in many cases was not burning but asphyxiation and, tragically, trauma caused by victims leaping to their death to avoid the intense heat.  Mayor Bloomberg and other dignitaries were on hand at what was then the Asch and is today the Brown Building at 29 Washington Place in Greenwich Village.  There were also descendants of the Triangle victims present to pay their respects to their grandparents and great-grandparents.

More lives would have been saved if the factory owners had not violated regulations by locking various doors and putting heavy equipment in front of others.  The Fire Department responded quickly to the emergency but the factory was situated on the top floors, too high for the fire ladders.  It was at this time, in a scene similar to 9/11 ninety years later, that onlookers saw dozens of victims jumping to their deaths.  It was the costliest workplace mishap in New York City’s history and a quarter million New Yorkers looked on a few days later when 100,000 individuals marched in the memorial service.  The public nature of the tragedy led to an outcry that spurred new employee safety regulations.

Unfortunately I was unable to attend, but the Gotham Center for New York City History held a number of events this week analyzing and commemorating the event.  This past Monday PBS’s American Experience aired Triangle Fire, which they will certainly air again.  Home Box Office (HBO) is airing a documentary, Triangle: Remembering the Fire, through April.  Check your listings.



Courtesy:  Jleon, Wikimedia Commons

I’m surprised this hasn’t gotten more attention than it has, but Tuesday is the 200^th anniversary of the Commissioner’s Plan.  Many people over the centuries have derided the scheme that organized Manhattan into geometrically precise streets and avenues as soulless and cold.  I couldn’t disagree more.  It’s hard to imagine New York City becoming the de facto capital of the world without it.  Until the grid most New Yorkers were clustered below Houston Street in a confused maze of streets and lanes.  The Grid Plan facilitated transportation and trade, divided real estate into more easily salable parcels, and opened what were once woods and empty fields to residential and commercial development.  The numbering system on the streets (1^st Street, 2^nd Street, etc.) was—and is—especially helpful to immigrants who otherwise could not have read the street names.  The numbers tell the story.  There were only 100,000 New Yorkers in 1811; a century later there were 4.4 million; today there are approximately 8.2 million souls drawn to New York’s intellectual, financial, and cultural allure.

Mayor DeWitt Clinton created the Commission in 1807 and after four years of diligent work its plan was approved on March 22, 1811.  Clinton had served as a U.S. senator at the turn of the century and clearly had been inspired by Pierre L’Enfant’s layout of the nation’s new capital.  If he had only done the Grid Plan, DeWitt Clinton’s place in history would have been ensured.  Yet it was just the first of his important projects.  Later as governor he helped build the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825 and linked New York City and State to the mid West via that Great Lake.  One of the most awe inspiring things about Manhattan is looking up and seeing the avenues stretching like canyons for miles on end.  It always surprises me how little one hears about DeWitt Clinton and his design for the city.  I think many New Yorkers assume the city has always just been here as it is today.  In a way it is oddly fitting that so few have taken the time to notice the bicentennial.  As the saying goes, “If you want to see the man’s legacy, just look around you.”