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NYU Marks 100 Years Since Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

By DNAinfo Staff on February 22, 2011 3:45pm

By Gabriela Resto-Montero

DNAinfo Reporter/Producer

GREENWICH VILLAGE — New York University has launched an exhibit charting the impact of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which 146 garment workers died, in honor of the blaze's centennial anniversary.

The show, "The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: One Hundred Years Later," will run through May 19 at NYU Open House at 528 LaGuardia Place.

The exhibit, just blocks away from where the fire happened at what is now the University's Brown Building of Science on Washington Place, looks at the catastrophe of March 25, 1911 in the context of the American labor movement.

One of the catastrophe's most iconic photographs on display shows a policeman looking up at the burning building with the bodies of garment workers who leapt to their deaths from the eight and ninth floors lying at his feet.

Following the fire, where survivors said management had locked the door to the ninth floor, New York State led formal investigations and indicted factory owners on manslaughter charges, but they were later acquitted.

A group of six victims who were charred beyond recognition were buried together at the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn and have finally been identified, the New York Times reported.

Michael Hirsh, an amateur genealogist from the East Village, positively identified Max Florin, Fannie Rosen, Dora Evans, Josephine Cammarata, Maria Lauletti and Concetta Prestifilippo as the six unknown victims.

For the first time since the fire, all of the victims names will be read at a commemorative ceremony in front of the building where they perished, on March 25.