March 18, 2007
TIME HEALS ALL WOUNDS, BUT IT REALLY FADES ALL
The New York Times gets off on the right foot this Sunday, but perhaps should have bounced some ideas off an editor over the age of fourty. The concept is a great one: what are the lasting memorials to our urban tragedies, e.g., the death of 20 people in a house fire in the Bronx last week, the murder of three innocents in the West Village the other day. These things fill our airwaves and splash gallons of ink on our frontpages for a few days, but is there any withered or hallowed ground following the media's usual scorched earth practices? The Times checks it out:
Still, time’s erosions are formidable. A million people drain into and out of New York City each decade, and for those who live in many neighborhoods, four decades are no different than four centuries. You walk a line of Tudor-style town houses along Austin Street in Kew Gardens, Queens, where Ms. Genovese spent her last frantic minutes, and talk with a dozen people under the age of 40. No one has heard of her.
The Times highlights some places that are remembered and municipally sanctified. What they leave out is all the more telling. It's one thing to commemorate the killing of John Lennon outside The Dakota. A great deal fewer people commemorate the deaths of more than a 1,000 people from the LES when the General Slocum steamship caught fire in 1904. That was not only the largest loss of life in a single day in NYC's history (pre-9/11), but it shattered an entire ethnic neighborhood and initiated an exodus from the LES all the way to Yorkville, where some of its descendants remain. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire is rightly noted in the article, as it is in most history books, but the 1918 BRT subway disaster wasn't. That's when an out-of-control Brooklyn subway car helmed by a strike-breaking driver jumped the rails. 102 people were killed. If you live in NYC and have heard of neither the General Slocum nor the BRT disaster, don't feel bad, most people haven't.
Frances Morrone acknowledges that most people are shocked to know of the tragic antecedents to their residency:
Mr. Morrone speaks from experience. He has taught classes inside the old Triangle Shirtwaist building at New York University in Greenwich Village, where more than nine decades ago a fire raged and factory doors were locked, and 146 female garment workers burned or plunged nine stories to their deaths. Their deaths would give muscle to the progressive era in New York, as legislators passed a raft of laws protecting the rights of workers.
“When I tell students that they are sitting in a building with that history, I’ve heard their gasps,” Mr. Morrone said. “And that’s a sensible response.”
If Prof. Morrone was in a great and expansive mood, he might share how a crowd of unruly opera fans were cut down by a U.S. militia back in the 19th Century, leaving dozens dead in the street a few blocks from NYU's campus. I think we could all do with some first-hand geographical brushing-up on the history that literally surrounds us every day.
Tagged: history, nyc, nyu, slocum, triangle shirtwaist firePosted by Lexiphane at March 18, 2007 4:40 AM
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