The Ghost of Twelfth Street
This morning I walked out of my building and down the street toward Avenue A when I saw something that made me stop. Written in colored chalk on the sidewalk in front of a building a few feet from my own was this: Josephine Carlisi Age 31 Lived at 502 East 12 Street Died March 25, 1911 Triangle Factory Fire Who wrote this? It was clear by the date why it was written. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was a horrifying event; immigrant seamstresses, many of them teenagers were trapped in a blazing building with almost no way out but to jump. And many did jump from the eighth ninth floors of the building and died right in front of witnesses. The reasons for the senseless death of 146 young men and women (most of whom lived in my neighborhood and the Lower East Side ) were typical. The factory, located in the Asch Building (now the Brown Building) on Washington Place and Greene Streets—today a posh neighborhood—was a sweatshop—unsanitary, unsafe, rarely, if ever inspected, where indivi...