Hello and welcome to this day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.

Welcome to 50 Weeks that shaped America, our series for America's semi-Quincentennial, that's 250 years of this country.

And this week is week 12. We are off to March

1911 in the heart of New York City, just a block from Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village,

when Manhattan had a large number of working factories across a variety of industries. And there

is a 10-story building that houses the triangle

shirt waste factory that catches fire. The fire started on the 8th floor, quickly spread to the 9th

and 10th floors. Workers, almost all women, were trapped inside. In the end, 146 workers died

that day. The largest workplace death toll until 9-11, actually,

and the impact of this fire is really hard to overstate. In the wake of it, there were, of course,

recriminations and lawsuits and trials, but also enormous reforms. From this era, we got all

sorts of regulations about workplace safety and a larger drive to protect workers in general.

This fire molded a generation of activists and politicians.

A few of them will talk about who went on to fundamentally change labor laws in this country.

So, in two parts, let's talk about the triangle, shirtwaist fire, and its aftermath.

Here, as always, Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there. Hello, Jody. Hey there. Now, we've done a shorter episode on this, a number of years back, but this is going to be a much deeper look at both the specifics of the fire and its aftermath. And I will say, I know this story quite well. I mean, it's one of the kind of big stories in labor history for sure. It never ceases to amaze me the geography of this, right? And people who know New York City are visited New York City. I mean, Washington Square Park, heart of the village. We're talking about one block east on Washington Place at the corner of Green Street. The building still stands there. It's now owned by NYU. No surprise.

But, you know, I don't know. It just always blows my mind that it was right there.

I think that because it's like we don't have factories in the middle of cities anymore, right?

They all had gotten pushed out to

the suburbs or to the outlying exorbed areas. And you also have just like people all

crushed together. You have workers, but you also have elites and bohemians. And there's a kind of

mixing that's happening socially that just it's hard to imagine in the cities these

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