Last month marked the hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the Greenwich Village factory blaze that shaped the labor movement, ushered in building codes, and gave new direction to pre-New Deal politics, at the terrible cost of 146 lives. The victims were immigrant workers trapped behind locked factory doors, and some of those who didn’t choose to leap from ninth story windows were burned so badly that the bodies could not be identified. Seven unknown workers were buried beneath a monument in Bushwick’s Cemetery of the Evergreens, where, a century later, the names of the final six were engraved this week.
The identities of the last unnamed victims came to light through more than four years of research by historian Michael Hirsch, co-producer of an upcoming documentary on the Triangle fire for HBO. Hirsch hunted through the overlooked newspapers of immigrant communities – Il Giornale Italiano, the Jewish Daily Forward – to find reports of missing workers that never made it onto the official list of the dead. These led him to documents like the records of the Triangle funeral and family relief funds set up by the city’s labor unions and charities in the aftermath of the disaster. Hirsch managed to find the living descendants of several victims, who attended the ceremony marking the installation of a new headstone on Tuesday.
As the city’s busiest cemetery of the era, the Evergreens received victims of several historic disasters, including the Park Place restaurant explosion of 1891 and the General Slocum disaster of 1904. The Triangle burial was uniquely traumatic, however, bringing hundreds of mourners out to Bushwick on a rainy April day to grieve for people so invisible to society that it couldn’t even name them.
Unions overcame city trepidation over a mass spectacle and sponsored a lavish funeral procession, which swelled to more than 120,000 in Manhattan before the unidentified remains were loaded on the ferry for Brooklyn. The following year the Red Cross commissioned an austere grave marker from Evelyn Beatrice Longman, a respected sculptor whose work would soon after adorn the Lincoln Memorial. One of the seven unknown workers was identified by her family shortly after and moved to Calvary Cemetery, but the six others remained nameless.
On Tuesday, exactly one hundred years after the symbolic burial of New York’s exploited poor, a new ceremony honored these five women and one man in a different way: as Josephine Cammarata, Dora Evans, Max Florin, Maria Giuseppa Lauletti, Concetta Prestifilippo, and Fannie Rosen.
Resident cemetery Historian Danny Daddario described the service on a visit to the memorial two days later. Longman’s marble marker sits in a corner of the cemetery known as Memory Gardens, an area that has only filled in with headstones within the last few years. The Triangle memorial still stands alone, except for the new, smaller marker bearing the names of the six people buried below.
"We followed the 1911 ceremony as close as we could," he said. "The factory workers belonged to all different religions, so they had a rabbi, a Catholic priest, and a Presbyterian priest. Our Presbyterian priest couldn’t make it, but the other two were here and said prayers in English and Hebrew." Teacher Caroline Roswell brought four students from P.S. 229 in Bensonhurst to read testimony from young garment workers who survived the blaze, and following the original funeral, firefighters from the nearby Engine 252 brought their bell to ring six times for the victims. "But they had a call in the middle of it and we had to borrow the bell," Daddario said.
The day was another rainy one, and most of the ceremony was held in the nearby mausoleum.
Out of sight of Longman’s memorial and its new footnote, Daddario was still able to find tributes of a sort: after all, even a mausoleum is subject to building codes. "I pointed out the exit signs and said, ‘see, these are here because of Triangle.’ The fire really did leave its mark everywhere."
