Memorializing Triangle
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What a great project to give the Triangle Fire victims a proper memorial.
The memorial would include several long steel panels running along the building’s facade. One horizontal panel would be 13 feet high and have 146 names stenciled into the steel; below it would be a shiny, shin-high panel that would reflect the names from the stenciled panel above. The bottom panel would contain a narrative history of the fire, and a vertical panel would extend to the ninth floor.
New York University now owns the former factory building, at 29 Washington Place, and uses it mainly for its biology and chemistry laboratories. The university is backing the memorial.
The Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition sponsored a design competition in 2013 and selected a proposal by Richard Joon Yoo, an architectural designer, and Uri Wegman, a professor of architecture at Cooper Union. The winner of the competition was awarded $5,000, which was donated by the faculty union at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
“What makes this memorial unique is it’s about the past, but also so much about the present,” said Mr. Yoo, who noted that around the time of the competition in 2013, 112 workers died in a factory fire in Bangladesh and then over 1,100 died in a factory collapse there.
“It’s 100 years after the Triangle fire, but some of the exact same factors were at work,” he said. “It’s appalling. It’s like you can have the Holocaust happen all over again, and zero lessons were learned.”
Lessons were learned. And then corporations managed to escape those lessons by sending those jobs abroad to recreate the Triangle Fire in other nations. But hey, it’s OK for Bangladesh to have lower workplace standards. Someday maybe they can have a cool memorial to their tragedies too!
Right now, the Asch Building just has a couple of small plaques. People make pilgrimages there. I’ve been there a few times. It’s a powerful place and will be more so once it is finally memorialized in a proper way. The U.S. actually puts a lot of resources into official remembrances of its past, primarily through the National Park Service. Yet our labor struggles are not part of the battles for American freedom that get remembered. The new Pullman National Historic Site will help remedy that a little bit. Private action can help too and this project is commendable.