He told his children that he tried to return to rescue his sister but was stopped by firemen. Hochfield’s father, Max, like his sister Esther, worked at the Triangle, but managed to escape down a staircase. Hochfield said.Įsther Hochfield, victim of the Triangle fire. “What has happened is that the fire won’t go out - it’s stuck in the imagination of many people,” Mr. “She was dead before I was born and I have no sense of her as a person.”īut for many of the Triangle fire descendants, the dead tug at their souls - particularly this time of year. His aunt Esther was 22 at the time of the fire and had to be identifiedīy her jewelry. “I can’t say that it has any special meaning for me,” said George Hochfield, 84, of Berkeley, Calif., a retired English professor. “And I don’t want her memory to die.”įor other descendants, the fire has receded into the dimness that is the fate of distant ancestors. Ida Baumgarten, almost 90, lights a memorial candle every year for her aunt Fanny Rosen, though she never met her and only recently learned where she was buried. HBO Fannie Rosen, a previously unidentified victim of the Triangle fire. ![]() Then he tries to picture how his grandmother and the aunts succumbed, guessing from how badly their bodies were burned that they must have been squeezed against a locked exit door on the ninth floor by the crush of Maltese, 77, a ruddy, white-haired former court officer. “It was five blocks north and five blocks west” - if they did not take a shortcut, said Mr. Vincent Maltese often imagines how his Grandmother Caterina, and her two daughters, Lucia, 20, and Rosaria, just 14, must have walked to work on the morning of March 25, 1911,įrom their apartment on Second Avenue to the building at 29 Washington Place in Greenwich Village where the Triangle factory was located. A few put their dead ancestors out of mind. Others try to fill in the blanks with their own musings orĮducated guesses. Some of the descendants snatch at scraps of information or try to read clues to biography and character in a sepia-tone photograph that they have inherited. Often, what was passed down was a single memory - a description, an anecdote, a complicated tale of family relationships. Remembering the fire that killed 146 workers at a garment factory in Manhattan and its lasting impact.ĭiscretion was the code of life in those days, and many of the immediate relatives of the dead were too distracted by the day-to-day acts of living to leave their own accounts of those they had lost - even if ![]() With names finally attached to every buried body. Yet the lives of the victims themselves quickly faded from the pages of newspapers, and it was not until recently that a full accounting of all the dead was made, The rights of workers and the safety of buildings. 11, 2001, the Triangle fire left a scar on the city’s psyche and its history - so deeply was it felt that it eventually galvanized unions and officials to pass path-breaking laws protecting Some seldom spoke again about those they had lost.Īs the nation on Friday marks the fire’s 100th anniversary, across the country descendants of the 146 victims are taking pains to mourn people they know very little about - most of them penniless newcomersįrom Italy and Eastern Europe who sewed blouses for 60 or more hours a week so they could send a portion of their earnings to even-worse-off kinfolk in their homelands. Or walked away in frozen anguish, left with memories of people who were mostly young and barely formed. Newspaper accounts at the time said that 100,000 people lined up there to examine the bodies, though most of the crowd were not relatives, but the curious - morbid voyeurs. Many were burned so badly that they were almost impossible to identify. ![]() Set up at the so-called Charities Pier off East 26th Street. On the day after the Triangle fire, the scores of victims were laid out in a makeshift morgue At his home in Bayside, Queens, he has photographs of Aunts Rosaria and Lucia, left, and Grandmother Caterina, at right. James Estrin/The New York Times Vincent Maltese lost his grandmother and two aunts in the tragic fire at the Triangle Waist Company on March 25, 1911.
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