Identifying the Triangle Dead
In February of 2011, a story appeared in the New York Times. With the hundredth anniversary of the Triangle fire a month away, eyes were focused on a stone monument in the Cemetery of the Evergreens on the border of Brooklyn and Queens. The monument was erected to the garment workers who died in the Triangle fire but were never identified.
Photos courtesy of the Kheel Center, Cornell University: http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/P
The Asch Building today.
There is a bas-relief figure of a kneeling woman, head bowed, mourning for the victims so badly charred that relatives could not recognize them. Nearly a century later, the five women and one man, all buried in coffins under the Evergreens monument remained unknown, although relatives and descendants knew their loved ones had never returned from the shirtwaist factory.
Thanks to a man named Michael Hirsch, the remains have been identified. It wasn’t forensics that helps identify the bodies, but rather the exhaustive work of one very persistent, obsessive researcher. For more details, check New York Times article: “100 Years Later, the Roll of the Dead in a Factory Fire is Complete:” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/nyregion/21triangle.html?pagewanted=all