Perhaps you’ve heard of this fire – if you live in NYC or you follow labor history, you’ve probably heard of it. Or if you’ve seen the movie, possibly in high school…

The Triangle Fire was a sweatshop fire that occurred in 1911 and killed almost 146 young women, who worked there. The young women, almost entirely immigrants, were making “shirtwaists,” fashionable clothing made of out highly-flammable fabric -T you may have seen pictures of them in Gibson Girl pictures. Immigrants, in those days, meant Italians, Eastern Europeans, Germans, Irish. Yesterday’s immigrants are today’s “pure Americans” trying to keep out the new immigrants.

The Triangle factory was located on the Eastern side of Washington Square. Now it’s owned by NYU and I attended classes there as an undergrad. I had vaguely heard about the Triangle Fire in high school – I have a possibly spurious memory of watching the movie in class, although that seems unlikely – but I didn’t put 2 + 2 together until I was in college. You would think that, if some place was going to be haunted, it might be this place; but despite all the time I spent in the building as an undergrad, I saw no signs of it and I don’t know of any spooky stories. Many of the girls jumped off window ledges to avoid getting consumed by the flames. They lined them up in an impromptu mortuary along the East River, for their families to identify. Some were never claimed.

I read this book at least once a year. It’s a compelling read, and you get a good picture of the women who worked there and the jerks who locked the doors to keep them from possibly stealing. Does that sound familiar? It feels like every time there’s a fire at a club or a factory, the doors are locked and some owner or manager claims they had to lock the emergency exit to prevent stealing or people sneaking in for free or sneak out to the parking lot for a drink or something.

The movie is also great and – now I could be wrong about this – I think there’s a channel (PBS maybe?) who shows it every year around the anniversary of the fire. Keep an eye out for it. When you see the scene where the law students at the university in the next building extend boards from the roof of their building across the street to rescue women from the roof of the Triangle building, keep in mind that those students were the start of NYU. That building is still there, too, and is also part of NYU. You can stand on the street between the two buildings, look up, and imagine trying to crawl in long skirts and corsets along slim boards from roof to roof across the street between the buildings.

The Triangle Fire was one of the things that helped unions get a foothold in the US. Yesterday I wrote about The Great Molasses Flood in Boston, which took place in the same decade and shares some of the same themes. If we had been living then, the two events would seem separate and distinct, but looking back at history is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope – everything gets pushed together and merges into a single moment. We can look at early 20th Century events that were years apart, and see them as part of a larger pattern. We look at things happening in the 13th-14th centuries, and they all collapse together (unless you’re a historian specializing in that era).

These days, if a disaster similar to the Triangle Fire occurred, there’d be some dope with a megaphone claiming it was fake news, that no one died, that it was a false story designed to promote unions. There are always going to be foolish people believing dumb things; how did we end up giving these people a platform?

How will historians judge the events of the early 21st Century?