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Thursday, March 24, 2016

Postcard Thursday: Triangle Shirtwaist Factory


The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, March 25, 1911
Tomorrow, March 25, marks the anniversary of the deadly fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1911. It remains one of the deadliest industrial fires in American history and a turning point for worker safety and unionization in America.

The factory was predominantly staffed with young women who lived in Little Italy and the Lower East Side, and when we are giving walking tours of those neighborhoods, our clients are sometimes surprised to discover that the factory was in Greenwich Village. So much of that neighborhood—including the Asch Building, where the fire occurred—is now dominated by NYU that it is easy to forget that the stretch of the Village on both sides of Broadway was once a vital part of New York’s garment industry. In Inside the Apple we note:



Long before the fire broke out, the factory was infamous for its poor labor practices. In 1909, New York’s largest job action, known as the “Uprising of the 20,000” began when workers walked off the job at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. For months, the majority of the city’s shirtwaist factories were crippled by the strike, but the factory owners refused to budge. Though the International Ladies Garment Workers Union brokered a settlement in 1910 that stopped short of forcing the recognition of their union, the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, refused to agree to it. The factory’s workers went back to work having gained few concessions. 
On the day of the fire, a Saturday, only about half of the factory’s 500 employees had come to work. Just as the afternoon shift was ending, a fire broke out on the eighth floor. Typical of garment centers of the day, the factory floor was a virtual tinderbox, with clothes, scraps of cloth, and unswept trimmings everywhere. When the fire started, the majority of the workers on the eighth and tenth floors were able to escape,* but those on the ninth floor had been locked in. This was done, some speculated, to cut down on unauthorized breaks, though it is also likely that it kept union organizers off the factory floor. Soon the elevators stopped working, which meant that the only remaining exit was the fire escape. Tragically, the fire escape had been poorly installed and maintained, and when too many young women began to climb down, it collapsed beneath their weight, sending them plunging to their death. The rest of the women on the ninth floor were then faced with jumping out of windows or waiting to burn to death. Many chose the former, raining down on the assembled crowd from above. The fire department did arrive, but as their ladders reached no higher than the sixth floor, it did little to save the women. In the end, 146 women died, most of them at the scene—some were only thirteen years old.
* Blanck and Harris, the owners, were able to get up to the roof and escape from there.

The building today, courtesy of Google street view

Though the fire forced the Triangle's owners to abandon the factory, the building still stands at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street. Then known as the Asch Building, it was renovated and reopened the next year. However, a New York Times article from 1913 noted that the building's tenants hadn't learned many lessons from the fire -- "they were, in fact, heaping its floors with scraps of clothing and flimsy material... and permitting smokers to stand near these heaps--(revealing) once more the singular carelessness of humanity." The building was purchased by NYU in 1929 and renamed the Brown Building; today, it houses university classrooms.

This post in adapted from an earlier entry in 2009, and one marking the centennial of the fire in 2011.


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SAVE THE DATE

Thursday, April 21, at 6:30pm

we will be talking about Footprints in New York at
The Mid-Manhattan Branch of the New York Public Library

details to come


****

Read more about NYC history in

 




Thursday, March 17, 2016

Postcard Thursday: Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup


"The Mother's Friend," pictured above, was actually a tincture of opium and was wildly popular in the United States in the 19th century.

Earlier this week, James had a story published in The Guardian that traced some of the history of opiate use in America, which goes back at least as far as the Pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower.

One opiate user was President Thomas Jefferson, who grew his own poppies on his Monticello estate. Though this part got cut from the final Guardian story, it turns out that Monticello was still growing poppies in the 1980s in its historic garden. One day in 1987, the DEA raided. They yanked out the poppies, removed the seeds from the gift store, and scared the living daylights out of everyone who worked there. The gift shop employees were so spooked they even removed all the t-shirts that sported an image of a poppy and burned them so that they couldn't be accused of promoting drug use.

You can read James's entire opiate piece -- including more about Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup -- at http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/15/long-opiate-use-history-america-latest-epidemic

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SAVE THE DATE

Thursday, April 21, at 6:30pm

we will be talking about Footprints in New York at
The Mid-Manhattan Branch of the New York Public Library

details to come


****

Read more about NYC history in

 







Thursday, March 10, 2016

Postcard Thursday: Lillian Wald


On March 10, 1867, the pioneering nurse Lillian Wald was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is the subject of one our chapters in Footprints in New York. As we write, Wald
came to New York City in 1889 to study nursing; three years later, having worked for a time in the overcrowded conditions at New York’s Juvenile Asylum on Tenth Avenue, Wald decided to improve her training, enrolling in medical school. 
While studying, Wald also volunteered at a school on Henry Street; it was there that an encounter with a young girl—in the midst of a lesson on how to make a bed—changed her life. As Wald recalled in her memoir:

The child led me over broken roadways—there was no asphalt, although its use was well established in other parts of the city—over dirty mattresses and heaps of refuse . . . through a tenement hallway, across a court where open and unscreened [water] closets were promiscuously used by men and women . . . and finally into the sickroom. . . . That morning’s experience was a baptism of fire. Deserted were the laboratory and the academic work of the college. 
It wasn’t long before Wald hit upon the notion of a “settlement” house— unaware that other progressive health professionals were having the same idea. The idea was simple: Too often, charity work consisted of throwing money at the poor, or convening panels or government agencies to study a problem.... Wald wanted something different—a place where professionals would actually help the poor on an ongoing basis. In order to do that, they would need to live, or “settle” in the neighborhood. Wald and her friend, a fellow nurse named Mary Brewster, moved to a tenement on Jefferson Street, originally dubbed Nurses’ Settlement.

 

There were few doctors on the Lower East Side, and most tenement dwellers would not have been able to afford them anyway. Wald’s team of nurses made the rounds to the tenements (today’s Visiting Nurse Service of New York is the direct descendant of Wald’s settlement house), helping expectant mothers, acting as midwives, and focusing on preventative care. Wald coined the term “public health nurse” to describe her work, and over the course of her lifetime, thousands of families benefited from her care. In 1895, financier Jacob Schiff bought Wald an old townhouse at 265 Henry Street as the settlement’s new headquarters. Over a century later, the organization is still there.

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SAVE THE DATE

Thursday, April 21, at 6:30pm

we will be talking about Footprints in New York at
The Mid-Manhattan Branch of the New York Public Library

details to come


****

Read more about NYC history in

 








Friday, March 4, 2016

Postcard Thursday: Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump

James wrote a piece earlier this week for the Guardian wondering if there are parallels between the 2016 presidential campaign and that of 1824, when four Democratic-Republicans squared off for the nation's highest office.

In 1824, Andrew Jackson won both the popular vote and the most electoral votes, but it wasn't enough to secure victory. Instead, the election was shunted to the House of Representatives, where John Quincy Adams was selected to be next president in what became known as the "corrupt bargain."

You can read the story James wrote here:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/02/dont-believe-trump-could-win-weve-elected-xenophobic-presidents-before

which really isn't about xenophobia, no matter what the headline says.

Before it was edited to fit in the Guardian's format, the original piece also looked at the election of 1828, in which Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams squared off against each other again. That time, Jackson won in a landslide, but not before the Adams campaign did everything possible to derail his candidacy.



1828 was really the first campaign to use negative advertising, and the Adams camp printed up what have come to be known as the "coffin handbills," that alleged that Jackson -- a general and war hero -- had sent militiamen to their deaths. Jackson was also branded an adulterer and a possible cannibal.

You can read more about the handbills at

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2014/03/05/andrew_jackson_the_coffin_handbill_distributed_by_opponents_in_the_1828.html

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SAVE THE DATE

Thursday, April 21, at 6:30pm

we will be talking about Footprints in New York at
The Mid-Manhattan Branch of the New York Public Library

details to come


****

Read more about NYC history in

 









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