Photos courtesy of E. Jay Sims
On Sunday, Bowery resident E. Jay Sims hung a large shirtwaist dress on the top-floor fire escape at 306 Bowery.
She mounted the dress, from a performance art piece that she did at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1984, here this week on the Bowery at First Street in honor of Women's History Month ... and in memory of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, whose 110th anniversary is tomorrow.
The fire killed 146 garment workers — mostly young women, many of whom lived on the Lower East Side.
Sims, a longtime visual arts teacher, also dedicated this memorial to her grandmother, Rose Kruger, a Hungarian immigrant/seamstress who arrived in New York in 1913 and used her sewing skills to raise her family in America.
Weather permitting, the dress will be up through the weekend...
13 comments:
The sidewalk chalk memorials will show up over night tonight all over town, at the victims addresses.
I like this - visually powerful.
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If you have a chance, visit it at night, when the light shining through the bottom of the dress makes it look like it's on fire.
I FELT the spirits of these women as I looked up at the billowing, ghostly white fabric.
A wonderful memorial to such a tragic event in NYC history.
It stopped me in my tracks. So wonderful to come upon.
Thank you, E. Jay Sims, for this stunning remembrance of a seminal moment in NYC/American history. For years, as "franceonisland" poignantly said, "I felt the spirits of these women" whenever I walked passed the sight of the tragic fire.
My great grandfather witnessed the fire. When my mom was young, he would tell her, in a mix of Polish, Yiddish, Russian, some English, about the girls jumping and how horrible it was. My mom thought she misunderstood him until she learned about the fire in high school.
I mark this anniversary every year. We should never forget. Capitalism will be happy to reduce workers to this condition again if we're not vigilant.
We admire the person who mark the sidewalks all over town every year, for many years, with names and ages of each victim, by where they lived. This is a truly amazing story.
You can read about this extraordinary story here:
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/08/31/the-triangle-shirtwaist-memorialist/
These women, most of them in the prime of their youth, fully deserve this remembrance by ALL of us every year.
It's important to honor their memory and to remind everyone what greedy business owners are willing to do to their employees if they are not stopped - both then and NOW.
My grandmother was a proud union seamstress in St. Louis's garment district. She would occasionally take me to her union hall, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, when we went downtown. And she told me many times of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Thank you for sharing this post.
we shouldNEVER FORGET the horror of the triangle shirtwaist fire - horrors which continue to the present day. ........and the absolute need for unions today!
my parents were union organizers for the garment workers in the 1940's & later - met on a picket line.
I continue by being a social activist.
thank you ms. sims!!
------bowery neighbor
I wrote a letter to my landlord two years ago about how wrongheaded it is to make the janitors who wash the sidewalks in front of my building every morning to just for one day leave the chalk inscriptions in front of the building.
Yetta Fichtenhultz lived in my building in 1911, and died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
The janitors speak very, very little English and are just doing their job, possibly in fear of being deported if they screw up. However, in whatever way the management got them to thoroughly wash everything every day, they could communicate to the men that for just this one day they should leave the chalk inscriptions. I know it's not that easy, but it should be.
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