'What If You Knew Her and Found Her Dead on the Ground'

Because capitalism is infinite greed defined as ultimate virtue – because maximum profit for the capitalists always means minimum pay for workers – the Ruling Class has always preferred to exploit those of us who are most powerless and therefore most easily bullied: women, minorities, especially immigrants. As in the time of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, so it is today: capitalism is capitalism, its malevolence unchanged. But sometimes even the most oppressed workers rise up angry, as an entire nation of workers did after Triangle Shirtwaist, as in this small local protest against sweatshop conditions in Manhattan's Chinatown during the 1980s. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 1984. M Leicas/Tri-X; no other tech data. (One of several related images shot on assignment for and published by the socialist newspaper National Guardian.)

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AS A NEW YORKER – even a New Yorker now in permanent Pacific Northwest exile – I seldom forget I am blessed to have spent my earliest most formative years and a substantial portion of my adulthood in a place that for all its life-celebrating assertiveness is nevertheless also a true city of the dead: a realm where 397 years of ghosts often seem eager to arise and assist the Muse with her chores of inspiration.

So it was this morning, 2,853 road miles from the City, when the curiously jarring slam of something dropped in an upstairs apartment brought me awake remembering a eulogy I once heard broadcast for the 146 victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.

Though the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was a hundred years ago today, 25 March 1911, exactly five days short of the day I was born in Brooklyn 29 years later, its horror has always seemed curiously personal, as if women I knew – or perhaps a lover – were amongst its dead.

I had been thinking about that dreadful fire off and on for most of last night, reflecting on the damning contrast between its profound significance to generations of socialists and labor activists and its utter meaninglessness to everybody else, and I was thinking perhaps I would write yet another denunciation of Moron Nation for its morally imbecilic betrayal of not just the Triangle Shirtwaist victims but of literally everyone in the last maybe 200 years who gave up their lives in the struggle for justice and economic democracy – the very principles last November's election proves beyond any possible argument the Moronic Majority has now rejected forever.

But the sudden noise from above my bed not only woke my everyday intellect but – like the Zen slap that fosters satori – opened my subconscious as well, and for just an instant I was again hearing that long-ago lamentation for the Triangle Shirtwaist dead: a poem of rage and sadness in which the word “thud” served as punctuation and paragraph breaks, its dreadful onomatopoeia echoing the unspeakable sound a young woman's body makes when it smashes against Manhattan pavement from 10 stories up.

Probably – almost certainly – the poem was broadcast on WBAI, the nation's first alternative radio station and the stone favorite of Lower East Side bohemia, the milieu with which I was intimately involved in the real-time 1960s (if indeed “real-time '60s” is not an oxymoron), and in any case the ethos with which I have remained associated by fond recollection ever since. It would have been very much like WBAI to have accorded the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire its own solemn day of remembrance – something the always at-least-incipiently fascist United States would never do – and my memory of the poem, linked in recollection with the amber light of a darkroom and the pungent scent of photo chemicals, has a decidedly 1967 feel, the year of my emergence as a publicly declared photographer: as if I heard the broadcast on the portable radio that sat on the shelf above my developing trays.

My intention last night was to write of Triangle Shirtwaist as an apt metaphor for what the capitalist Ruling Class is again doing to us today – for what, in fact, capitalism has always done to us – but lying abed in this morning's post-thud consciousness and somehow seeing in the apparently unrelated martyrdom of Allison Krause a grisly prophecy of more Triangle Shirtwaist types of atrocities to come it seemed not only futile to indulge myself in yet another for-the-choir diatribe but much more honest to simply quote a line from Neil Young's “Four Dead in Ohio,” the song he wrote for performance by Crosby Stills Nash and Young in the wake of the Kent State Massacre of 1970: “what if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?”

Because so many were found dead on the ground beneath the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, a surprising number of New Yorkers are convinced the site of the fire, the former Asch Building at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, is haunted. And in light of this morning's moment of realization I can no longer deny my own belief, admittedly contradictory for a self-proclaimed materialist, that it is not just haunted but probably the most haunted locale in all Manhattan, indeed in all the Five Boroughs, perhaps in all the United States, unquestionably the most haunted place I have ever encountered.

An accomplished colleague, in the City for a conference with her publisher, rented a bicycle to tour Manhattan on a bright summer Sunday, pedaled into the intersection unaware of what had obtained there and was stunned – almost paralyzed she said – by its overwhelming pall of tragedy, a reaction that left her questioning her mental and physical health until someone informed her of the relevant history.

Once again the strange resonance of Neil Young's lyric.

No doubt in an attempt to hide the Triangle Shirtwaist legacy – which after all is a microcosm of the legacy of capitalism – the structure that housed the factory has been renamed. It is now the Brown Building. But some stains do not yield to propaganda: you cannot exorcise the ghosts of Auschwitz by renaming it Disneyland. Which is why I wonder if the building's present occupant – a New York University science department – was chosen precisely because its personnel would never dare speak of psychic encounters however undeniable: a scientist who claims to have seen a ghost is an instant pariah.

But the janitors and cleaning crews are under no such restraint – and I would love to ask them what eeriness they might have witnessed, especially while working on the upper floors.

I suspect their answers would at least parallel my own experiences – and I was never more than a passer-by.

When I lived on East 5th Street I always walked home from Googie's or the Ninth Circle and diverse other Village saloons or much later from the Lion's Head, and my route was always along Washington Place past Greene Street and what used to be the Asch Building and its factory of death, and even before I knew on what blood-sanctified ground I trod I nevertheless sensed in the eerily silent long-after-midnight solitude the disquieting murmurs of female anguish forever etched on its walls and splattered on the pavement and lingering even now as a strong component of the surrounding air.

Perhaps this is why its wounded spirits always seem to seek me out no matter where I go and – even more so now that I am presumptively age-distanced from fantasy and strong emotion – always bring tears to my eyes: tears of rage and grief and most of all the overwhelming sense of loss and futility that now oppresses so many of us, especially those of us in our waning years.

LB/25 March 2011

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Comments

[Sioux Rose]

First time to this blog and the writing is superb, as it puts you "there." Thank you Loren for your boundless sensitivity and inherent capacity to connect dots few bother to notice, or otherwise remain inured to.

[Barbara Mor]

Thanks again, Loren, for the strong & haunted memory. Women's
bodies falling out of the sky,like thousands of birds falling out of
the sky, seems like the image of evolution's dreams falling out
of their possibility onto the death-throes cement sidewalk of
the American capitalist nightmare. I.e., it's a horrible kind
of poetry that speaks the Truth.