A Fire In Greenwich Village

100 years ago 146 people, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant girls, many of them teenagers, died in a fire in Greenwich Village.


Previously the workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, a sweatshop located on Washington Place, had tried to organize the shop and improve the working conditions.  The owners of the shop, Isaac Harris and Max Blanck, vigorously opposed all effort at organization, even resorting to hiring men to physically beat the picketers.  Eventually they grudgingly agreed to some concessions, but insisted on locking the doors during working hours to prevent the seamstresses from sneaking out early or stealing.


A fire started on the 8th floor.  Fed by scraps of fabric, nurtured in the dusty, wooden, cramped surroundings, it spread extremely rapidly.

The top three floors of the Asch Building--the fire is alongside Greene Street. 

Workers frantically tried to escape the fire.  Some tried the rear fire escape--which quickly buckled under their combined weight and peeled away from the building, dropping them to their deaths.  Some tried the elevator--which was only able to make a couple of trips before the cables started melting.  Some even jumped down the shaft after the elevator. Some were able to run down one of the two staircases, but access to the other one was impossible--because the doors were locked.  And the foreman who had the key had already escaped.


The foreman with the key had already escaped--and left them locked up on the 9th floor.


The fire engines arrived immediately, but could do little because their hoses and ladders only reached up to the 6th floor.  The fire had attracted many observers--including a young Frances Perkins--but no one could help.  All they could do was bear witness.  All they could do was watch as doomed workers appeared framed in the windows, the flames behind them, and made the only choice they had left--how they were going to die.


Assistant cashier: [I see] my girls, my pretty ones, going down through the air.  They hit the sidewalk spread out and still.


Reporter: The last workers were trapped against the blackened windows, burning to death before our very eyes. The glass they were pressed against shattered. Down came the bodies in a shower -- burning, smoking, flaming bodies, with disheveled hair trailing upward.


It all happened so quickly--less than an hour from start to finish.  All those young girls falling from above.  All those families they never had--those husbands they never married, those children they didn't bear.  Those stories never told.  All those bodies lying on the wet ground, their faces turned to the evening sky.

The policeman who recovered the bodies along the sidewalks wept--some of them recognized the girls as the strikers they'd harassed and beaten the year before.  All that work, all that effort for the strike--for nothing.

Imagine having to identify your sister.  Your wife. Your uncle.


It was Mama's hair. I braided it for her. I know...I know.


Blanck and Harris, of course, denieddenieddenied.  They denied that they knew about the locked doors, they denied negligence, they denied all responsibility for the massacre whatsoever.  They were indicted, tried, and by smearing the testimony of one of the survivors because of her lack of fluency in English, and attacking another's truthfulness, were eventually found not guilty--legally.  The court of public opinion, as they say, was another matter entirely.

Blanck and Harris, and most other industrialists, protested the cost of the workplace reforms in the wake of the disaster.  But they didn't need to worry--they actually turned a profit on the fire, since they overclaimed damages and their insurance company was bullied into giving in.  They were overpaid about $400 per body.  As a final act of despicability, Blanck was found guilty two years later of locking the door in another factory during working hours.

There are a couple of different conventional memorials to the Triangle victims--statues and headstone and so forth--but I rather like the poetic simplicity of this one:

וְאֵלֶּה, שְׁמוֹת בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, הַבָּאִים,


These are the names...

The Theater is a Temple...

This spring Paper Mill Playhouse is performing my favorite Stephen Sondheim show, the musical comedy A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.  Forum is an absolute delight of a show, about a Roman slave who's trying to win his freedom by securing a beautiful virgin for his young master.  Having performed the show twice (a courtesan in high school, Philia in another production), the setting indicated in the libretto made me giggle when I first read it:  200 years before the birth of Christ, a day in spring.  So this would be right after the Second Punic War, when Rome was really the only player left in the Western Mediterranean after having crushed their primary rival, Carthage. 

I studied Roman History last spring and was fascinated by the Second Punic War—this was the one with Hannibal and the elephants.  To sum up (briefly—there were three Punic wars altogether), Carthage was a seafaring city on the northern coast of Africa (in today’s Tunisia) and Rome’s main rival in the western Mediterranean.  Carthage had had its Phoenician ass handed to it by Rome in the First Punic War, 264-241 BC, and was jonesin’ for revenge.  The First War was essentially expansionist and basically unremarkable except for the fact that Rome developed a navy from scratch—yes, notwithstanding Italy’s manymany miles of coastline, Rome (which pretty much controlled the entire peninsula by then) did not have a navy until 261 BC!    Along comes Hannibal, one of the greatest generals in history—he invades Rome via an overland through through the Alps with elephants.

And then proceeds to inflict many, many terrible defeats on the Romans—the site of one especially bitter loss, Lake Trasimene, wallows in the gore with place names like Ossaia (Place of Bones) and Caporosso (Cape Red--as in blood).  

O hai there! One of Hannibal's Gallic allies beheading the Roman general Flaminius.
The Celts were the *scourge* of ancient Rome until Julius Caesar came along--they were the only people who managed to sack Rome until the very end, when the Vandals came in.

Eventually of course the Romans manage to turn the tables and ultimately eliminate their rival--and now that Rome is so dominant, it can relax a little and start to think about non-military concerns.  A Roman cultural and artistic voice begins to emerge—which leads us to Forum.

Forum is based on the plays of Plautus, a Roman playwright who lived roughly 254 BC – 184 BC—so, right around the time the musical is set.  In addition to being the first extant Latin playwright, Plautus was known for his use of stock characters—the scheming servant, the military braggart, the overbearing lady of the house—and these characters populate Forum as well, helpfully cueing the audience with their names:

• Philia = young female love interest
• Pseudolus = con artist
• Hero = …well, the hero!

Of course these archetypes continued on through the middle ages and beyond—commedia dell'arte, Restoration comedies and 20th century musical theater all make use of these same types. In fact farce depends on these kinds of shortcuts--the quicker it can establish the relationship, the quicker the payoff.


Forum's libretto is sprinkled with references to the city's geography and the cultures and civilizations that surround it.  One song, "Pretty Little Picture," begins 


♫ In the Tiber there sits a boat... ♫

The old, old Tiber, seen from the Ponte* Principe Amedeo Savoia-Aosta.
Philia would've sailed up this river when arriving from her home in Crete.

The Funeral sequence is filled with geographical references--in fact a dedicated musical scholar could virtually map out the Mediterranean world through this song alone!


♫ All Crete was at her feet
All Thrace was in her thrall
All Sparta loved her sweetness
And Gall
And Spain ♫


Musical theater--bridging the ancient and the modern worlds!  Plautus would have been so proud...

*Fun Fact--Ponte (bridge) and pontiff share the same root word for a reason--the term predates Christianity and derives from the Collegium Pontificum, the body of Roman priests whose duties included placating the river gods.

What’s Your Favorite Wonder of the World (PART 2)?

Previously in Cliopolitan,

I discussed the magnificent and all-too-short-lived Colossus of Rhodes, the bronze Helios who overlooked the harbor in the city of Rhodes but was brought down by the vagaries of Poseidon, Γαιήοχος Gaiēochos, the Earth-Shaker.  As a child this was my favorite Wonder, along with the golden statue of Zeus who laughed at Caligula.  (Suetonius was a terrible gossip but he definitely comes up with the juicy tidbits! His biography on Julius Caesar is hilarious).  But now as an adult I can better appreciate what a marvel of ingenuity were the...

The ancient city of Babylon was located in the Fertile Crescent, a section in the middle East covering roughly modern-day Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, parts of Iran, Israel, and Turkey.  The Tigris and Euphrates rivers dominated most of the crescent, forming part of a flood plain that ultimately fed into the Persian Gulf.  Periodic flooding would deposit rich silt onto the soil, resulting in an area unusually fertile for the region.  Agriculture, of course, is tied to civilization—once man stopped hunter-gathering and started settling down and growing crops about ten thousand years ago, sedentary culture could form.  (This is also what led to the elevation of cats as revered figures in Egypt--cats kept down the mice population, and thereby protected the grain storehouses.)  And so the Fertile Crescent was known as the birthplace of civilization, spawning such ancient peoples as the Sumerians and the Assyrians, and giving us one of the first deluge tales, the Flood of Gilgamesh (shout out to Noah and his peeps, yo!).  Babylon was right in the middle of the action.

The Cradle of Western Civilization

Nebuchadnezzar II is well-known through the famous Biblical tale of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, memorialized in a terrific song.

♫ And he told everybody when you hear the music of the trumpet,
And he told everybody when you hear the music of the flute,
And he told everybody when you hear the music of the horn,
You must fall down and worship the idol!
     Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego! ♫

But there was more to Nebuchadnezzar than serving as a pagan foil for Judean teenagers—he appears quite a lot in the Book of Daniel and in other texts.  His most endearing act was to help alleviate his wife’s homesickness--which led to his construction of the Gardens circa 600 BC [so, some 300 years before the Colossus went up].  Amytis of Media married ol’ Neb to formalize an alliance between their two empires, and we are told that, like the Biblical Ruth

… sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn

Amytis found the transition from her verdant, mountainous homeland difficult.   And so her husband brought the mountains to Amytis, and wrought The Hanging Gardens of Babylon—like the Taj Mahal and the Mausoleum, a monument to love for the ages.

Another gorgeous picture by our man Maarten van Heemskerck.
And check out the Tower of Babel in the background!

Look at the colors in this, all those various hues of green, olive and jade and chartreuse, emerald, forest.  Allow those greens to surround you, sweep you away, wash you ashore onto a distant land and time.  A young girl, married to a strange king—he wants to see her smile so he promises her anything.  And she says—“Please, bring me a bit of my homeland.  I miss it so.”

She must have been so, so happy, so transported, every time she walked through her gardens.

And on a mechanical note, the ingenuity required to keep all those plants watered is impressive to imagine.  The Hanging Gardens did not actually hang as such, they were suspended, raised up.  Greek historian Strabo tells us

There was also a passage which had pipes leading up to the highest level and machinery for raising water through which great quantities of water were drawn from the river, with none of the process being visible from the outside.

This was 600 BC, and they were able to do this!  Anticipating irrigation and the Archimedes screw—just incredible. 

Unlike the Colossus of Rhodes, there is some doubt as to whether or not the gardens actually existed as they’re described—there are no contemporary Babylonian sources , and most descriptions come from secondary sources, writers like Strabo, who heard about them from others.  I wouldn’t write them off too quickly though—archeological evidence has a way of surfacing even after the millennia, and the ruins of Babylon may yet have a secret or two for us.  I also think modern scholars are way too quick to write off seemingly impossible events as pure myth—I watched a fascinating documentary once, explaining how the Ten Plagues of Egypt could really have happened, including the plague upon the first born!

*N.B. On a side note, the Fertile Crescent is almost gone: damming of the rivers has led to the marshes drying and and unbelievably, most of this process has taken place in the last few decades.

The (Almost Wasn't) King's Speech

Congratulations to The King's Speech for their Best Picture Oscar--I saw this wonderful movie back in January and loved it.  Between scenes, I told my friend in whispers all the back story--the Edward VIII/George VI generation is one of my favorites of the British royal family, there's something so adorable and cozy about the four (five)* brothers and their one lovely sister, all arranged in those adorable outfits.

(l-r, Prince Henry, later Duke of Gloucester; the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, laterLATER the Duke of Windsor; 

Prince John; Prince Albert, later Duke of York, laterLATER King George VI; Princess Mary, later the Princess Royal; 

and Prince George, later Duke of Kent)

The movie takes place during the '30s and as such, it is odd to realize--this is about the current Queen's father.  Just one generation ago, they were grappling with an abdication crisis, precipitated by the determination of the Prince of Wales to marry a divorcée, which was seen as completely unsuitable.  Oh, how times have changed!

I keep comparing it to a TV movie I watched through Netflix called Bertie and Elizabeth--quite different in scope (it encompassed a much longer period, from their courtship in the '20s through to his accession and World War II) , it nonetheless overlaps somewhat with The King's Speech.  And both of them have the Slutty Music Cue for Wallis Simpson--when she first appears on the screen, the soundtrack helpfully cues us what to think about her by blowing a hot blue riff on a sexophone saxophone.  

(Skip to 6:52--yep, there ol' Wallis is getting out of the car, primed for seduction and empire-razing.  Good times.)

At any rate, I've always had a fondness for the current queen's father--he had an idyllic. domestic life with his charming Scottish wife, Lady Elizabeth (born in haunted Glamis Castle!) and his two little princesses, Lilibet and Margaret Rose, "us four" as he termed them.  And then his feckless brother couldn't hack it as King and forced him to step up to the plate and he did so beautifully.  The King's Speech takes a few historical liberties but generally gets the flavor right--my favorite scene was when he is marching to the microphone to make the speech to his people at the end, on the cusp of World War II.  The look of terror and resolve on his face breaks your heart and makes you realize what an incredibly brave man he was.

Another fascinating portrait of that generation of Windsors is the BBC production The Lost Prince, about the events leading up to World War I from the point of view of Prince John.  Through the Prince we get to see not only that lovely, lost, pre-World War I European way of life, we also get to meet his cousins, the Romanovs, who were related to the Windsors in a couple of ways (Alexandra was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria).  In fact Nicholas and George V were twin cousins:

♫ They laugh alike, they walk alike, at times they even talk alikeYou can lose your mind ... when cousins are two of a kind! ♫

*I say five because of Prince John, the hidden sibling, one of my favorite phenomena.  There's something so interesting about a large family with a sibling that never emerges for whatever reason--the Kennedys had one (Rosemary, the oldest daughter, who had some kind of mental problem that was never satisfactorily identified before she was lobotomized) and my own father's generation had one--his youngest sister died quite young of a heart ailment.  Each one of those siblings is a whole life that was never fully realized--a whole story that was never told.  At any rate Prince John had epilepsy and lived away from court, and ended up dying at the age of 13, adding further fuel to the superstition that John is a bad luck name for English royalty.

The Bull of Anglesey Returns!

ABC News has a clip about the newest royal couple paying a visit to Wales.  In their first outing together since the announcement of their engagement, Prince William and Kate Middletown (looking fantastic in one of those peculiarly English fashion statements called a fascinator) visit the Isle of Anglesey, off the northwest coast of Wales.




The broadcaster calls their visit "probably the biggest thing ever to happen in Anglesey, this remote little island in Wales."  O ye of little dynastic awareness!  The Tudor dynasty came out of that exact area--in fact Henry Tudor, who later was crowned Henry VII (and fathered Henry VIII), was nicknamed the Black Bull of Anglesey.  And Henry was William's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.

                                 I left the Firm in damn good shape, kid.  Don't blow it.

But probably the biggest thing to happen today.

What's *Your* Favorite Wonder of the Ancient World? (Part I)

I had an encyclopedia series as a child, the Golden Book series.  I used to curl up with one of these in my Mom's papasan chair and read from beginning to end, which is how I first learned about the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.  I loved the idea of a complete, neat little set and the simple, somewhat stilted illustrations fired my imagination.

(Someone on the Golden Book editorial staff must've had a classical background--there were tons of articles on various Greek and Roman figures, including one of Diogenes with his lamp.  I clearly remember the entry on Damocles, looking up to see the sword hanging above his head.)


(From memory--I promise!)

• The Statue of Zeus
• The Colossus of Rhodes
• The Alexandria Lighthouse
• The Mausoleum
• The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
• The Temple at Ephesus
• The Pyramids at Giza

When I was a child, my favorite Wonders were the statue of Zeus and the Colossus--I think I probably thought of them as huge dolls and then their glamour, what with all that gold and precious gems, fascinated me as well.  Just imagine sailing across the Aegean Sea and seeing that flash in the distance, the light shining off that enormous golden figure, standing against the sun.  Helios, incarnate, towering over the people of Rhodes.  The sad thing is, the Colossus only lasted 56 years before an earthquake destroyed it.  Not quite three generations grew up in its shadow, basking in its protective glory--and then an earthquake toppled their patron and its fragments were scattered about the harbor.

Two vast and trunkless legs…
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies...

The earthquake happened in the 3rd century BC--and for the next 800 years, people from all over the Mediterranean, including Pliny the Elder and Strabo,  came to marvel at the remains.  The Rhodesians wouldn't rebuild; they were afraid the earthquake* was a sign they'd offended their sun god.  And so he lay there in the harbor for 800 years.   The Colossus was the shortest-lived of the Wonders--but perhaps no other has so seized the popular imagination... albeit in error!  Though typically pictured standing, as Emma Lazarus put it,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land          

The Colossus was NOT in fact built standing astride the entrance; the statue was either standing  beside or overlooking the harbor.  For one thing Rhodes would've had to have closed down the > harbor during construction (which was obviously economically unfeasible) but more importantly, engineering technology at that point was not advanced enough to build such a statue.  And so Maarten van  Heemskerck's lovely, detailed, hand-painted 16th century illustration          

is imaginative rather than accurate.  An image of genius indeed--Shakespeare references this Colossus at least three times, most notably in Julius Caesar who is described as a man who




...doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about...


Three different eras are telescoped into one in this passage--Shakespeare's time toward the end of Elizabeth I's reign (ca. 1599), the last year of Julius Caesar's life (44 BC), and finally some two hundred years before, when the Colossus was still standing.  Each with their particular set of attitudes, expectations, connotations, unspoken associations...and the picture of that bronze statue burning gloriously through them all, still evocative.


And as Lazarus's poem title ("The New Colossus") indicates, the Statue of Liberty was an homage to the Rhodes Helios.  Both pedestalled metal statues, both facing east (like cathedrals, in fact, now that I think of it!), both invoking light, both as monuments to Liberty and Freedom (the Helios was built in thanksgiving for Rhodes having resisted invasion during the chaotic period after the death of Alexander the Great).  Lady Liberty is wearing considerably more clothing than the Colossus is usually portrayed, however!  Well, I suppose Rhodes is hotter than New York City.


Here in our sea-washed sunset** gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning and her name
Mother of Exiles...


*The Rhodesians needn't have felt singled out--this being the Mediterranean, most of the seven Wonders were done in by earthquakes eventually


**Since Liberty faces east, this is an odd note.


Next, Part II: Nebuchadnezzar landscapes his city within an inch of its life, all to get some sugar.

San Francisco, November, 1978

Sean Penn plays Harvey Milk.



This is one of those fascinating, only-in-the-'70s, historical narratives to which I am always drawn. I first became interested in Harvey Milk's story back in Virginia when I was called in to audition at the Source Theatre for a musical about Milk's life and death.  In preparation for the audition I did a lot of research about the man, and then later saw a documentary about Milk. The story is compelling: Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the country, elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, just as the gay liberation movement is unfurling across the country. And even then he probably would not have been elected if San Francisco hadn't reorganized their election process.  Previously all supervisors had been elected on city-wide ballots but the procedures were changed so that supervisors were now chosen by their district instead of running at-large.  So basically, the gay district elected him--he called himself "The Mayor of Castro Street."


But progress like this rarely goes unchallenged and across the country there were a lot of public figures who, from either principle or a political strategy, opposed gays being allowed any kind of public role.  This was the era of Anita Bryant's successful campaign to overturn an ordinance in Florida that prohibited anti-gay discrimination (which earned her a pie in the face).





This was also the era of the Briggs Initiave, a bill pushed by California gubernatorial hopeful John Briggs who saw in Bryant's victory an exploitable power base (namely, evangelical Christians) and drafted a bill prohibiting homosexuals from teaching positions throughtout the state--a bill which failed with the help of then-Governor Ronald Reagan (which--whoah--there's an interesting topic for a future post).   But as Briggs assured journalist Randy Shilts, he didn't really hate gays deep down--"it's politics.  Just politics."


Back in San Francisco, Dan White had also been elected to the Board--a former cop and much more conservative, meat-and-potatoes, "traditional values" kind of guy. George Moscone was the mayor, and he and Milk were much closer politically. White and Milk used to tangle on issues--in fact, after Milk reconsidered his support on an issue and ended up voting against White on a particular bill, White opposed Milk on every single vote.  Eventually White finally got fed up and quit, claiming the position of Supervisor didn't pay enough to support his family. His support base convinced him to ask to be reappointed; he tried and originally Moscone was going to, but Milk and two other progressive supervisors convince Moscone otherwise.  A couple of days later White shows up at City Hall with a gun, climbs through the window to avoid the metal detectors, goes upstairs and murders Moscone, reloads, goes downstairs and murders Milk. He shot them both in the head; according to the medical examiner, they both probably would've survived the body wounds had they been treated promptly.  But the head wounds were instantly fatal..


The murders gave a huge impetus to Dianne Feinstein's political career--as President of the Board of supervisors, she now became Acting Mayor and announced to the press what had happened.





White got a slap on the wrist--a 7-year sentence (which ended up being 5 years) for murdering two people. His lawyer claimed White was less culpable due to "diminished capacity," arguing that his increased consumption of junk food was key to his state of depression.  (The media turned this into the Twinkie defense--most people misunderstood the argument, thinking that the junk food binge caused him to snap and murder.  What the lawyer was arguing was that the junk food binge was an indicator of diminished capacity, because White was normally a fitness freak.)  Unbelievably, in light of the indisputed evidence that White had planned out the murders quite thoroughly, the jury bought this theory and found him guilty only of voluntary manslaughter.  The gay community was outraged and responded with what became known as the White Night Riots.


*and in fact later confessed not only to premeditation, but had also intended to kill the two other progressives who'd lobbied with Milk against his reinstatement.


What makes the whole story even sadder and more fatalistic, was that news of the Jonestown tragedy had just broken.  The People's Temple was very much connected to San Francisco--the city had been their base before relocating to Guyana and in fact Jones had close ties to both Milk and Moscone. Just the week before Moscone had attended a memorial service for Leo Ryan, the US Congressman who was murdered by Jones's guard right before the order for the mass suicide was given. In an even weirder coincidence, the practice runs that Jones would order for the massacre to test his adherents' loyalty, where his guards would command the cult members to drink liquids they were told were poison--were known as White Nights.


I have a theory (unprovable admittedly) that, as Ecclesiastes tells us, there are times for things.  That sometimes events all come together not from coincidence but because they're all acting on each other in unperceived ways, influencing each other somehow--that there's a mystical element to the events that affect us most strongly.  When I try to imagine San Francisco at that time, that one singular month, November of 1978, I imagine a cloud, dark and thick, hanging over the city, obscuring the light.  What can possibly make sense of such a black hole of sadness and death, why two such terrible tragedies happened so close together?  Maybe it was just time.


(This material originally appeared, in edited form, in my personal blog.)