Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Quotes

It was not...a woman's fancy that drove them to it, but an eruption of a long-smolering volcano, an overflow of suffering, abuse and exhaustion.

Twitter could not be described as it was: a mechanism by which teenagers tormented each other into suicide while obsessing about ephemeral celebrities and on which Adeline argued about whether or not she hated the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory of 1911.

There was a stricken conscience of public guilt and we all felt that we had been wrong, that something was wrong with that building which we had accepted or the tragedy never would have happened. Moved by this sense of stricken guilt, we banded ourselves together to find a way by law to prevent this kind of disaster.

..I began speaking.. First, I took issue with the media's characterization of the post-Katrina New Orleans as resembling the third world as its poor citizens clamored for a way out. I suggested that my experience in New Orleans working with the city's poorest people in the years before the storm had reflected the reality of third-world conditions in New Orleans, and that Katrina had not turned New Orleans into a third-world city but had only revealed it to the world as such. I explained that my work, running Reprieve, a charity that brought lawyers and volunteers to the Deep South from abroad to work on death penalty issues, had made it clear to me that much of the world had perceived this third-world reality, even if it was unnoticed by our own citizens. To try answer Ryan's question, I attempted to use my own experience to explain that for many people in New Orleans, and in poor communities across the country, the government was merely an antagonist, a terrible landlord, a jailer, and a prosecutor. As a lawyer assigned to indigent people under sentence of death and paid with tax dollars, I explained the difficulty of working with clients who stand to be executed and who are provided my services by the state, not because they deserve them, but because the Constitution requires that certain appeals to be filed before these people can be killed. The state is providing my clients with my assistance, maybe the first real assistance they have ever received from the state, so that the state can kill them. I explained my view that the country had grown complacent before Hurricane Katrina, believing that the civil rights struggle had been fought and won, as though having a national holiday for Martin Luther King, or an annual march by politicians over the bridge in Selma, Alabama, or a prosecution - forty years too late - of Edgar Ray Killen for the murder of civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, were any more than gestures. Even though President Bush celebrates his birthday, wouldn't Dr. King cry if he could see how little things have changed since his death? If politicians or journalists went to Selma any other day of the year, they would see that it is a crumbling city suffering from all of the woes of the era before civil rights were won as well as new woes that have come about since. And does anyone really think that the Mississippi criminal justice system could possibly be a vessel of social change when it incarcerates a greater percentage of its population than almost any place in the world, other than Louisiana and Texas, and then compels these prisoners, most of whom are black, to work prison farms that their ancestors worked as chattel of other men? ... I hoped, out loud, that the post-Katrina experience could be a similar moment [to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fiasco], in which the American people could act like the children in the story and declare that the emperor has no clothes, and hasn't for a long time. That, in light of Katrina, we could be visionary and bold about what people deserve. We could say straight out that there are people in this country who are racist, that minorities are still not getting a fair shake, and that Republican policies heartlessly disregard the needs of individual citizens and betray the common good. As I stood there, exhausted, in front of the thinning audience of New Yorkers, it seemed possible that New Orleans's destruction and the suffering of its citizens hadn't been in vain.

GHOSTBUSTERS I always wanted the reboot of Ghostbusters to be four girl-ghostbusters. Like, four normal, plucky women living in New York City searching for Mr. Right and trying to find jobs—but who also bust ghosts. I’m not an idiot, though. I know the demographic for Ghostbusters is teenage boys, and I know they would kill themselves if two ghostbusters had a makeover at Sephora. I just have always wanted to see a cool girl having her first kiss with a guy she’s had a crush on, and then have to excuse herself to go trap the pissed-off ghosts of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire or something. In my imagination, I am, of course, one of the ghostbusters, with the likes of say, Emily Blunt, Taraji Henson, and Natalie Portman. Even if I’m not the ringleader, I’m definitely the one who gets to say “I ain’t afraid a no ghost.” At least the first time.

Recognizing tectonic shifts in New York’s social and physical landscape, Henry James felt dispossessed, uprooted, his past amputated, leaving him with a chill in his heart. His birthplace off Washington Square had vanished, torn down to make way for a nearby factory building that in March 1911 was to be the site of a fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory that took the lives of 146 workers, mostly Jewish immigrants. Trinity Church, long a commanding ornament of lower Broadway, cringed in the shadow of a steel-framed, elevator-served, twenty-story office building. Immigration and trade had transformed the town James remembered from his childhood as small, warm, and ingenuous, with some of the feel of a family party.

It is impossible to take a step without walking through a ghost. Every memory creates one. Every version of ourselves leaves a shadow behind. Every regret and every promise and every touch against the skin. The living houses of San Francisco know this--arms gripping the hem of the San Andreas Fault, The death fields around Wounded Knee know this, where every blade of grass and weed briar is poison to the touch. The Tallahatchie River knows, gone bone dry the day Emmett Till was pulled from the waters, The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory knows, and Columbine High School knows, and Ford's Theatre knows-- with their leviathan eyes, their mouth that lick familiar air and sigh. The land, inch by inch, brick by brick, is alive with remembering.