NYT: Two Remembrances of One Deadly Day in 1911

[Omaha Steve]

http://tv.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/arts/television/28triangle.html

Watch the PBS documentary here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/triangle/

By MIKE HALE
Published: February 27, 2011

As demonstrations in support of Wisconsin’s public-employee unions proliferate, PBS can pat itself on the back for scheduling the documentary “Triangle Fire” on Monday night — more than three weeks before the 100th anniversary of the New York garment-factory blaze it details, which figures so strongly in the imagination of the American labor movement.


Brown Brothers

Women at their sewing machines at the Triangle factory in Greenwich Village, where a fire on March 25, 1911, killed 146 people, many of whom jumped to their deaths.


HBO can only hope that unions are still in the news when its documentary, “Triangle: Remembering the Fire,” is shown, more appropriately, on March 21, four days before the anniversary.

The two documentaries cover a lot of the same ground — and use a lot of the same archival photographs — in telling the horrifying story of the fire at the Triangle shirtwaist factory that killed 146 people in a matter of minutes. Most of them were women or girls, and most died after jumping from the eighth and ninth floors of the building that housed the factory.

The narrators, Michael Murphy (PBS) and Tovah Feldshuh (HBO), supply the sad, heroic and outrageous details of the disaster: the exit door kept locked to prevent theft; the ladders that reached only the sixth floor; the elevator operator who kept returning, through the flames, to the ninth floor, until his car was halted by the weight of the bodies that had fallen into the shaft and onto its roof.

But it’s the images of corpses stacked on the Greenwich Village sidewalks where they fell, as a crowd of thousands helplessly watched, that get to you, as dreadful now as they were a century ago, when they inspired a wave of workplace reform in New York State. The parallel to 9/11 is inescapable; it’s made explicit in the HBO film, in the observations of a fireman who was at the World Trade Center and whose grandfather was on the sidewalk outside the Triangle factory.

FULL story at link.

[Cassandra]

1. Tovah Feldshuh was in a film about the fire.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080048/
I thought it was good. It gave an intense feeling of being there and what they might have gone through trying to get out.

[Cassandra]

2. Found this on jwa.org

"Fires were common in the garment industry, in part because, due to insurance policies, they provided a way for owners to get rid of excess inventory and keep pace with changing fashions without suffering a financial loss. By 1911, there had already been numerous small fires at the Triangle factory."

"The conflagration was over within half an hour. By 5:15 p.m., the fire was out on all three floors. The fire itself did not last long but its impact would be felt for decades. Many New Yorkers witnessed the horrific event firsthand, including Frances Perkins, F.D.R's future Secretary of Labor (and the first woman to hold such a position), who was having tea nearby. She would later say that what she saw that day marked the beginning of her career as a labor reformer."

[Voice for Peace]

3. this is available to watch streaming on Netflix

dvd not yet available but you can watch online
(if you're a Netflix unlimited subscriber)

[Voice for Peace]

4. looks like it's also available to watch online on PBS

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/triangle/