Original subtitles

i remember one time after the war i was about 12 my father

had a job in a factory across the way and because he had lost his leg he had a

stump and a wooden artificial leg

and in the summer and there's nothing quite as ferocious as a new york august

he would work on this assembly line eight hours a day and he was home

that night and i heard him weeping in the dark around one o'clock in the morning

and i knew that no matter what i ever did i couldn't articulate it exactly

that i had to honor that pain that you must honor that and i think

that's what the children of immigrants do all of us we know what they gave up they

gave up their countries some cases they gave up their languages

they worked at the lousiest rottenness jobs in order to put food on our tables

we have to honor that for the rest of

our lives

in early december 1883 a 34 year old german jewish poet

named emma lazarus appalled by the recent upsurge of anti-semitic violence

in russia submitted a 14-line poem to help the faltering fundraising campaign

for the pedestal of the statue of liberty the liberty her sonnet celebrated had

nothing to do with the abstract political ideals the french had intended

it was liberty as a beacon of hope shining out to oppressed peoples around

the world it was the future reaching out to the present

to unchain humanity from the shackles of the past

the promise of new york to anybody who comes here is the promise

of emma lazarus the statue of liberty and there was a reason that that poem

which structurally and in terms of the words used could be

thought to be very sentimental certainly it is and then it contains something

the test of that poem is that it is true and and these huddled masses yearning

to be free did come here and we did make them free

in fact no matter who you are at some point in your life

hearing those words or reading those words just thinking of those words

your eyes will fill with tears and what makes you tearful is that truth

give me your tithe your poor your huddled masses yearning to breathe

free the wretched refuse of your teeming shores send these

the homeless tempest tossed to me i lift my lap beside the golden door i'll never

forget those words emma lazarus herself never saw the

statue her poem so movingly commemorated or the epic human tide it foretold

traveling in europe during the final months of the statues construction

she was diagnosed with hodgkin's disease passing through the harbor on her way

home in the summer of 1887 she was too ill and weak even to come on

deck she died in her home in manhattan three months later

at the age of 38.

more than 15 years later on may 6 1903 a bronze plaque inscribed with her

stirring words was finally affixed to the base of the statue

it would take decades more for americans to realize the full meaning

of the gift the french had given them

not like the brazen giant of greek fame with conquering limbs astride from land

to land here at 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

from her beacon hand glow's worldwide welcome

her mild eyes command the air bridged harbor

that twin cities frame

keep ancient lands your storied pomp cry she with silent lips

give me your tired your poor your huddled masses yearning to breathe

free the wretched refuse of your teeming shore

send these the homeless tempest tossed to me

i left my light beside the golden door

emma lazarus

at two o'clock on the afternoon of may

11 1896

a photographer named william highs hoisted a strange-looking camera

up onto a tripod at the southern end of herald square

passersby assumed he was about to expose a glass plate negative

but the cumbersome apparatus the latest invention of heise's employer

thomas alva edison did not take still pictures

instead exposing one frame after another each just an instant apart from the next

16 times a second it was capable of capturing for the

first time the speed and vitality of urban life

people were terrified when they first saw these images they had no idea what

they were they had just brief 15 30 second shots of things

but they hand tinted some of them to be colored

they did have this one film of a wall of water just

rushing at you and people got up in a panic and stormed out of the theater i

mean just charged out of the theater because they thought that

you know the wall had broken down and there was some kind of tidal wave coming

through the wall mesmerized by the kinetic energy of new

york the first cameramen carried their equipment everywhere

shooting short films they called actualities

real-life views of actual places and events most had no plots and no

characters and most lasted only a minute or two

but audiences everywhere flocked to see them enthralled by the spectacle of the

city itself which by 1900 had become the greatest show on earth

what the cameras revealed was a city that now had the world's busiest harbor

the world's biggest ships and longest bridges

the worst slums and grandest mansions it had a statue 15 stories tall and a park

840 acres in size it had trains that ran 100 feet above the ground

and leapt across rivers though the film sometimes captured grand

civic ceremonies and great public events the most effective were those of daily

life entranced as walt whitman had been by the humblest and most

ordinary of moments a trolley moving down the street

a windy day a woman's smile the new motion pictures conveyed as

nothing else had the mystery and beauty and democratic glory

of the modern world motion pictures come into play and they

record the city and they record it in such a way

that make it even seem more exciting than it was

but certainly they captured the image of the city in motion

as it had never been captured in the still photographs of an underwood and

underwood or byron who often had to photograph on a sunday

morning because the film moved so slow that if a cart moved by you'd see it as

a shadowy thing suddenly you catch that cart moving you

can see the new york traffic and suddenly people become enthralled

with what in a certain way they were rebelling against the 19th century

traffic itself density itself

and yet even as motion and change became a way of life in manhattan

an even greater transformation was underway between 1898 and 1913

the human and physical and political landscape of the city

would be transformed beyond recognition during that time the entire world would

arrive on the city's doorstep and most of those who came would be

changed utterly by what they found there

but in the end nothing would be more moving or proved to have more lasting

consequences for the city and the nation than the

changes the newcomers themselves would bring to the life of new york city

in little more than a decade the 20th century itself would be born on the

streets of new york and nothing would ever be the same again

well i think one of the great things about new york is it's not a static

thing it's not new york is new york is always becoming

it's becoming physically as buildings are torn down and

and change much more so than any other american city

but it's also always becoming in terms of what it is

in something we can't see in the culture of the city

so the immigrants came to new york city especially in these large numbers

between 1880s and 1920s and made it their own made it a kind of

place that the world had never seen before

made it where there were more italians than in new york than they were in

naples i mean there were more irish than in dublin more greeks in athens it was an

incredible experience because the city was so vast and so many

of these immigrants were there that the city was open to these changes

so that even today what is new york it's more than a mosaic it's a new kind

of city

if you were living in new york in those years at the turn of the century you

knew it was happening right there in front of you in in your in your village

and of course it disturbed many people didn't like it

they thought it was going to ruin the country and they were wrong

it began in the 1880s spurred on by poverty

and persecution by financial panic and political upheaval

by family strife and personal woe they came not from northern europe this

time but from the east and from the south italians jews

greeks and poles russians hungarians ukrainians armenians

and turks out of the remote and little-known reaches of europe

one awestruck observer wrote marches a vast and endless army

it was a huge human tide and coming on

all the time year after year and

growing in 1907 1 million 200 000 people

1 million hundred thousand people came into the city of new york

from europe primarily there were two hundred and eighty nine thousand of

them from italy alone two hundred and fifty six thousand from

russia just in one year and in the long run they gave us

more than they got

one way or the other they had all heard the same thing

there was freedom and opportunity in america for anyone willing to work

and the place with the most jobs was the sprawling

unfathomably large seaport of new york for most it meant leaving everything

familiar behind the day i left home my mother came with

me to the railroad station when we said goodbye she said it was

like seeing me go into my casket i never saw her again

piriagoni prof 1899 was a sense that the

city a message that the city whispered to its

people and to people from all over the united states

you know come here everything is possible now that's a seductive sound this is a

seductive whisper a lot of people failed at it but at least the promise was there

there's always been a feeling of promise in new york and the promise is there

because it is the entrance city it's the beginning

but i still think of it as a city to which as james joyce said about his

characters here comes everybody

about four or five o'clock in the morning we all got up

the whole boat bent toward her because everybody went out

everybody was beautiful

with the sunshine so bright and so big

and everybody was crying the captain came and said

please everybody we should move a little bit to the center

but nobody would move

the thrill was unbelievable but always the fear

because you have to go through ellis island

i heard all kinds of things that they would tell you on the boat

my god i said i hope they're not going to send me back

joseph the lazy

for decades immigrants to new york had come through castle garden

a ramshackle state-run depot at the foot of manhattan

but by 1890 the one-time concert hall had been completely overwhelmed by the

tidal wave of new immigrants and work had begun on a massive new

federal installation far out in the harbor on an abandoned ammunition dump

called ellis island on december 17 1900 the massive complex

of brick stone and steel was finally complete

built to accommodate a half million people a year it was soon handling twice

that number sometimes as many as twelve thousand a day

in 30 years 12 million people would stream through the great echoing

registry room hoping to find sanctuary and a new beginning in america

more than four million of them would settle permanently in new york

tripling its population in less than a single lifetime

immigration made us huge you could never bred to yourself into 8 million people

in 50 years immigration did it it also made for an industrial city

the people who arriving were from the farms in the maine arriving here in

curious reversals it was when the wheat from kansas began

arriving in the baltic that peasant population there became

surplus they turned around arrived here

on disembarking the pilgrims entered a vast bewildering

impersonal machine an assembly line for processing immigrants

with numbered tags pinned to their clothes they were swiftly herded into

long lines then ushered inside the main building by harried immigration officials

who barked orders at them in dozens of different tunnels

inspectors were required by law to turn back polygamists

paupers criminals and the mentally ill as well as anyone with a heart condition

or a physical disability or a contagious disease the inspections were brusque

irreversible and carried out with astonishing speed on the busiest days

the examiners had less than six seconds to detect any one of 60 conditions

the unlucky ones were swiftly removed from the line without explanation

and sent to special examination rooms with chalk letters

hastily scrawled on their coats l for lameness c for conjunctivitis

h for heart problems x for suspected insanity the examination for trachoba an

incurable disease of the eye was particularly traumatic anyone

infected was sent back twenty-five-year-old fiorello laguardia

working as an interpreter on ellis island to pay his way through law school

never forgot the harrowing scenes that ensued

sometimes if it was a young child who suffered from trachoma

one of the parents had to return to the native country with the rejected member

of the family when they learned their fate they were stunned

they had never felt ill they had never heard the word trachoma

they could see all right and they had no homes

to return to fiorello laguardia

for the majority who passed the medical exam the last hurdle was the registry

room where the final interrogation was held the nearest earthly likeness one man

said to the final day of judgment in rapid succession each immigrant was

asked to state his or her name place of birth destination and occupation

how much money he or she had whether he or she had ever been in jail

or had ever been an anarchist no immigrant's name was ever known to

have been changed by the inspectors at ellis island

who merely confirmed information already before them in the ship's manifest

for eighty percent of the newcomers the harrowing experience was over

in four or five hours and in the end fewer than one in 50 were denied

entrance to america without ceremony or congratulation the

new arrivals were currently waved down a flight of stairs toward the exit

where at a place called the kissing post after separations that had sometimes

lasted months or years they were finally met by family and friends

the italian kisses his little children but scarcely speaks to his wife

the hungarian and slavish people put their arms around one another

and weep the jew of all countries kisses his wife

and children as though he had all the kisses in the world

and intended to use them all up quick

most of the immigrants quickly dispersed to distant towns and cities around the

country but for one in four of the new arrivals

the final destination was a 15-minute ferry ride away

on an island many of them would never leave again

on board the ferry approaching the battery they stood in wonder at the last

and most extraordinary site of all an astonishing vision that seemed to

corroborate everything they hoped the new world might be

everybody was looking at manhattan and i must admit that site

i don't think i will ever forget

i thought i was in heaven my god

was this a city on earth

or a city in heaven

the word skyscraper which you associate with manhattan

that's a that's a sailor's term it's the uppermost sail on a a three-mast

rigged ship crossing over from liverpool

newcomers approaching manhattan as the century came to a close

were greeted by an astonishing sight down at the tip of the island from the

narrow lanes the dutch had laid out three centuries before

new york city had begun to soar straight up into the sky

it is as if some mighty force were a stir beneath the ground

one man wrote pushing up structures that a dozen years ago

would have been inconceivable not since the advent of the great gothic

cathedrals 800 years before had there been such a revolution in the

way men built what happened in the city of new york

when the skyscraper was born is that buildings turn from crustaceans

which are supported by their walls to vertebrates supported by their skeleton

but the skeleton had to be made out of steel it's one of the great transforming

moments in how we live on earth as human beings

and suddenly up out of this granite base of new york city this island

in the sea and remember the east river is the sea it's a tidal strait it isn't

really a river at all up out of that rises this new form which

is entirely american and there it was for all the world to see when they came

arriving at our doorstep well what was new about them was those

two pieces of technology came together and made them

technically possible one was the electric elevator and the other was steel

the masonry building the walls the thickness of the walls

is a factor of how high you can build the building and

it gets very high the walls are so thick at the base there's no room for

using the building i mean it's like a pyramid which by the way was the tallest

building in the world up until the end of the 19th century

the reason the great skyscrapers went up in manhattan

is that manhattan is an island of very powerful bedrock

it's granite and basically very very high density rock that frankly digging

foundations is unbelievably difficult you have to blast to build in manhattan

and the buildings went up in manhattan because of the power of that bedrock

once you dig that foundation and when they dig they really dig they

dig with dynamite and once you dynamite out and you secure that foundation

that building isn't going anywhere with the advent of the elevator and

steel frame construction the low slung four-story skyline of new

york shot up with startling speed beginning with the 11 story tower

building called the idiotic building by skeptical new yorkers

who on stormy days during its construction gathered at a safe distance

and waited for it to collapse it did not and less than a year after it

opened in 1888 it was surpassed by the world building

which climbed to the unthinkable height of 18 stories stepping off on the top

floor one awestruck visitor called out loudly is god in

with each passing year as the number and size of corporations headquartered in

lower manhattan increased the demand for space intensified

limited as to the ground business seeks the air

the journalist lincoln stephens wrote confined on all sides

the only way out is up once that process starts moreover

there's a whole other set of meetings that get attributed to skyscrapers

corporations love them because they are emblems they are like registering their

landmark in the sky over manhattan people use those buildings as

corporate logos as sources of identity in in this new corporate marketplace

year after year taller and taller buildings soared into the sky

the most tangible outward expression of the mighty economic engine

now drawing in people from every corner of the world

americans have practically added a new dimension to space

one scottish visitor wrote when they find themselves a little crowded

they simply tilt a street on end and call it a skyscraper

in 1903 the 21-story fuller building went up at the corner of fifth avenue

and 23rd street soon known as the flatiron building for its unusual shape

five years later the singer building left up twice as tall as the flat iron

it was surpassed only 18 months later by the 50-story metropolitan life building

on madison square by then there were 550 structures over 10 stories tall

in lower manhattan whose soaring skyline had changed forever

the meaning of the word city but there's something lasting that's

more intangible what you've got is a civic culture which is

enthralled with this development and incredibly supportive of it

new yorkers love these buildings they wax rap sonic about them they develop

new metaphors of these glorious mountains rising over the sky there's a sense

that new york is on the cutting edge of global civilization all of the old

wonders of the world were in europe the old-fashioned stuff but now

the new frontier of mankind is in the sky over manhattan remember that lower

manhattan in particular but even all of manhattan

has this great advantage even before airplanes that you can get back from it

and see it you can take a picture of it you can throw people as they arrive from

europe not only immigrants they didn't care about them

but all those rich people getting off all those liners

they look up and see lower manhattan they say what's that building the

bankers trust company what's that building the singer sewing

machine company

what a symbol what an advertisement

gigantic colossal enormous

daring there are no words

words are inadequate to this apparition this landscape

in which the vast river serves as frame for the display of still vaster

human energy

reaching such a pitch of collective effort

this energy has become a force of nature itself

it is the poetry of democracy an immense concert

this is not the parthenon that little temple on a little hill

it is the obscure and tremendous poetry of the modern world

and it gives you a tragic shudder there isn't it so much of mad and

willful humanity

paul boujee

on a freezing cold day in early january with the temperature hovering at 15

below zero thirty-year-old al smith arrived in

albany to be sworn in for his first term in the new york state legislature

the hard-working young man from the lower east side of new york

was shocked by his reception in the capital which was even more frigid than

the weather all through his first term ignored by

senior members and passed over again and again for committee assignments he sat

silently in the last row of the high ceiling

chamber bewildered by the intricacies of the legislative process

and daunted by albany's elaborate political rituals

during his entire first session in the assembly he did not make a single speech

not only was he not educated because he didn't have much schooling

but he didn't like to read and he once said the only book he ever read all the

way through in his life was the life of john l

sullivan but he taught himself state government

by simply reading every bill that he could read

until the late hours of the night night after night

people started to listen to him because somehow all these assemblymen

realized because he had been reading all these bills and no matter what the

subject was this guy smith knew about it he had a grasp of state government that

no one else had slowly but surely

he began to make a name for himself as his influence grew and his confidence

he spoke more and more often from the floor of the assembly

with the easy comic charm of a natural-born actor on subjects he had

mastered in stunning detail in 1908 as his reputation grew silent charlie

murphy the boss of tammany hall came up to get a better look at his

rapidly rising young star murphy's reaction to smith is

fascinating he'd never had a conversation with him and when he realized that smith

might be something very special he called him in for a long talk and he had

a couple of his advisors there and at the end of the talk one of the

advisers said to silent charlie you know al smith never went to college

and murphy looked at him and said if he went to college he wouldn't be al smith

by his third term he was beginning to enjoy himself in albany

more and more often now he threw dinner parties for his colleagues at keeler's

restaurant on state street regaling them with tales from his childhood

on the lower east side by then the old neighborhood in the

fourth ward in the shadow of the brooklyn bridge

had been changed beyond recognition by

the tremendous influx of newcomers

every four years new york adds to itself a city the size of boston or saint louis

it is the largest jewish city in the world the largest irish city one of the

largest german cities

more than 700 000 russians call it home

and it houses more italians than rome new york is the great whirlpool of the

races edwin hill no city was more appropriate to become

the immigrant metropolis than new york from the time of initial dutch

settlement in the 1620s all through the 17th and 18th and 19th

centuries by any comparison in the world new york was a

multicultural multi-ethnic heterogeneous metropolis

it had already established a kind of a tradition of

openness to newcomers of never having a single dominant culture

but still when you think about the incredible migration between

let's say roughly 1880 and 1925 when millions of people come to the city

not just come to the united states come through new york city

every year and they transform the city

even by the standards the city itself had set the mammoth influx of peoples

was without precedent in world history by 1905 four out of five new yorkers

were now either the children of immigrants or immigrants themselves

no fewer than seventy percent of the city's public school children

had been born outside the country forever after many americans would view new york

as a kind of foreign country by 1900 the lower east side was at least

to an american was not an american place because it was a strange babel of

tongues of eastern european jews or little italies had sprung up completely

ethnic neighborhoods that were not separate unto themselves

but if you'd been walking on the streets it would have been hard to tell

what country you were in at the time

most of elizabeth street was sicilian came from

sicily and what that means is that a couple of the immigrants came over on

a boat 1901 192 1910 and they were lucky enough to get a job and luckier

to get two rooms like used to call them rooms

not apartments in the tenements what was happening at 232 elizabeth street was

that people from one town in sicily were coming in and staying in that one

building so that 232 became chamina which is a beautiful town

outside of palermo that my mother's mother comes from

now 241 across the street the same thing was happening but mainly from people

from polizzi felicity generosa which is also outside

of palermo but higher in the mountains that's my father's father comes from

so they were across the street and when my mother said that the that she met my

father there was a problem because there were different nationalities she used the

phrase different nationalities and realities just

from different villages really in coming to new york the immigrants had

not only crossed an ocean they had in most cases exchanged an

ancient way of life for the most modern and frenetic environment on earth

the old village might have been wretched the writer irving howe later said

but it was a thoroughly known place where one's ancestors lay buried

it did not loom up to terrifying heights it required no special knowledge of

machines in shops or on trolleys and it seldom had much to do with the

rigors of the clock i think that there is a tremendous sense as well

of people making a leap from in many cases life that was like the

middle ages into the most modern cosmopolis in the world

i mean think about these people coming from places like russia or poland

in which life was really not a lot different than it had been a couple

hundred years ago and you're coming to new york where

you're in the most modern city of the world you're making an enormous leap into

modernity the jews who come at the time come from a million different places

though mostly from eastern europe and you have people from every class and society

coming you have people who are rich in the old country and who lost it all

and then you have people who are in the middle and who come with a little bit of

property and then the most people come with nothing they

come all they come with is their capacity for labor power

and the ideas in their heads and their capacity to think

and hegel says that's the most important kind of capital for modern man

the capacity to think and if you've got that you can make up for

everything else that you don't have the question is

how does it come that new york attracted all of this energy was able to

channel all this energy and one is the geography thing

two is the energy of the people who were here who

brought with them pent up generations of pent-up

unfulfillment from where they came from the irish had been put down in ireland

for a long time so they came here and they by god they were gonna make it in

america they're gonna show what the irish really could do

and then the germans came were not the germans who were happy at home

they were the germans who were ticked off at home

but if you put all the chinese or all the eastern european jews or all the

irish in the city and they are concentrated areas and they are

five seven stories high and miserable housing

they have to be out on the streets and they have to be struggling to do

something better so they can get out of that awful housing

well that's going to be that's your engine

often when they came they were shocked to discover

that this wasn't what they thought it would be

and there are plenty of accounts of immigrants talking about

life on the lower east side as being so far away from what they imagined

the um the land of dollars to be or the the streets paved with gold there's a

great deal of sorrow and sense of loss for many immigrants

by 1900 the most crowded neighborhoods in the world

were in new york city especially on the lower east side but also in

east harlem conditions were abysmal we don't need to exaggerate

when we say that it's possible that housing conditions

in new york city certainly crowding exceeded

anything that the world has ever known before

or since crowded into stifling often lifeless tenements

immigrants escaped whenever they could to the street

block after block from long before dawn until long after dark

the streets were one vast raucous open-air bazaar

teaming with peddlers and vendors of every kind

hawking their wares from the sidewalks or from push carts

rented for 10 cents a day by 1900 the streets of the lower east

side were jammed with more than 25 000 push carts

which sold everything from vegetables to pots and pans

shoelaces bolts of cloth tools and cracker

in the poorest wards peddler sold goods in minute quantities

a single candle the wing of a chicken one egg

or just the yolk of one egg forget your past your customs your

ideals select a gold and pursue it with all your might

you will experience a bad time but sooner or later you will achieve your goal

a bit of advice for you do not take a moment's rest

run do work and keep your own good in mind

a final virtue is needed in america call cheek do not say

i cannot i do not know

gm price you take whatever is available to survive

people can get sanctimonious about immigrant groups and

what they do but they do what they have to do to survive that's that's also a

law of the city it is a law from the beginning and will be at the end

and that's not always going to work on wall street because that's not

accessible to people cities are also about people coming from

one environment and really making a tremendous adjustment into another and

doing what they have to do to survive that is not often a pretty picture in

cities so not always a pretty picture nobody dragged them here nobody

brought them here in chains they came exhilarated by what was here by the

possibility of it in my case my parents are both catholics from belfast

so the sense that their children and they themselves

could function a place where nobody's going to ask their religion was amazing

the case of the jews is of course the great example

you know to go in one generation from um the shtetl to have your kids graduate

from universities in one generation amazing and that energy that challenge

the questioning that goes on with someone who's new saying why is that here

why does it work that way why do you do it that way what if we do it this way

that kind of energy i think was was the essence of it

for most the process of assimilation took place with remarkable speed

in less than a single generation in just 10 years on average

most families on the lower east side had moved up or off

the jews start a little bit higher in the sense that they come with skills

needle trades often and a little bit more money in their pocket

and rise higher but the italians also rise rapidly

so that what you have in this cauldron down in lower manhattan you have these

groups making an astonishing change in the space of a single generation or two

so that new york is what it was advertised it was a city of opportunity

and the nation was rags to riches no but to get a solid job to get a foothold

in the land to change from that peasant status that you've known

new york turns out to be the best place in the united states to do that between

about 1880 and certainly 1925.

the absolute demand of the city that you get to know each other because

you had to you couldn't really stay in a ghetto and

function you had to leave the ghetto to go to work you had to go to manhattan

you had to go to midtown you had to go up town you had to go down wherever it was

people moved and the subway then became one of these great binding elements

in the city that moved people around and put them up against

each other and sometimes they came up against each other in

conflict but the conflict didn't ever last very long

the irish fought the italians and till they started marrying them

and then they both fought the jews until they started marrying them

it's a constant negotiation how much will i let go of who i have been

and how much will i take on of a new persona

and that is true within a family and is true for an individual

parents wanting the children to maintain traditions that have

helped define their own lives from their own culture their own religious group

their own racial group their own language group

and the children wanting to be american and that often to the children means

sloughing off these other what they would consider vestiges of the old ways

for the parents this is who we are this conflict is set up

we have to be americans we shall be

we shall learn english we shall love america and help to build

america we shall accomplish in the new world

a hundred times more than we could in the old

but you will not be able to erase the old home

from your heart the heart will be drawn elsewhere

and in your solitude images will rise up

and stare in your faces with eternal sorrow

abraham

what is a new yorker is he jew or irish

is he english or german is he russian or polish

he may be something of all these and yet he is holy none of them

something has been added which he had not before

he is quicker in his movement less trammelled

in his judgment though he may lose wisdom in sharpening his wit the change is

unmistakable new york indeed resembles a magic

cauldron those cast into it are born again

charles wibble

the astonishing phenomena is that these people are attracted because there are

job possibilities here and to an amazing extent the job possibilities are

involved in providing the goods and services

for the newcomers who are arriving what you set up

is this astonishing self-fulfilling feeding on itself

a state of affairs but there's also the fundamental fact of

what's making the economy go the port is exploding

and as the port explodes partly because all those immigrants are coming in

those immigrants are the ones who are working on loading the goods and services

by 1900 the millions of newcomers pouring into new york were propelling an

era of expansion and physical growth without precedent in the city's history

in the years to come in little more than a decade

they would fill out and then draw together the five separate boroughs of

the metropolis transforming new york along the way into

the most modern city on earth

one of the things that drove people crazy was that you've now got this huge

greater new york 370 odd square miles and the vast majority of the population is

huddled in manhattan and down the lower east side

the bronx at the time of consolidation was still

a rural backwater the question is you know how are you going to make

consolidation real it's like hamilton said you know you can write a

constitution but it's a piece of paper how are you going to make it real

you've still got you know manhattan and brooklyn and all these sort of scattered

areas how are you going to in fact integrate them what happens

is an explosion of of you know connectivity

what you've got is most dramatically the subway system

the subways are in fact the thing that really make consolidation

real and viable here within an incredibly short space of time

there were an underground set of linkages pulling this dispersed geographical

territory together to me the the real essence of new york

city is the subway system that the modern city as we know it

is impossible to conceive without this underground

kind of tether of tunnels part of which makes new york

new york in fact much of it is invisible to the eye

above the streets because everything is moving below the ground

and making possible that congestion and that intensity

that you can see without that which you cannot

see which can seem much less impressive new yorkers will never go into a hole in

the ground one financier confidently declared

but by 1900 the city had let out a contract for construction

and work had begun

operated by a private firm called the interborough rapid transit company

the mammoth project was under the direction of a wealthy german jew named

august belmont whose father had changed the family name

from schoenberg and become one of the richest men in new york

in four years belmont's army of 7 700 men most of them italian immigrants would

cut more than 20 miles of subway tunnel threading their way through a tangle of

underground pipes and conduits to build the most modern transportation

system in the world there was nothing revolutionary about

any single piece of the building in new york city

subway the london house subway before that there were no great engineering

breakthroughs what was extraordinary is that the subway system was built

at least the heart of it in just four years while

the busiest city in north america continued to operate

so the speed and audacity of this project by modern standards is really rather

awesome because this required opening up streets

most of the suburbs built by what they call

cut and covers they would dig a trench build walls to it lay the foundations for

what will be the track level and then put the ceiling which is the

street essentially back on it and do this right in the heart of manhattan

it had a thousand individual challenges and then of course there was one

conceptual breakthrough which was the express training

which was a innovation of the new york city subway system

which allowed enormously rapid travel from

distant points into the center of the city

the very concept of an express subway train is totally on european

in paris there is only one train on a line going in each direction

here we have local trains express trains we have the most complicated subway line

it's like a national railroad underground with trains that go to

harlem some trains go up broadway some go to brooklyn some terminated city hall

you don't find that in paris you don't find that in london it's all rather

boring and single-minded so when it opens in 1904 it is overnight

the most extensive subway system in the world and it remains so

until long after world war ii by some measures it's still the world's most

expensive subway system just four years after construction had

begun the system was ready to begin service

on october 27 1904 in an exquisitely tiled station 30 feet beneath city hall

mayor george b mcclellan the son of the famous civil war general

was presented a ceremonial silver motorman's handle

along with the honor of starting up the train for its first official run

as worried engineers looked on the mayor quickly throttled the a-car train up to

full power rocketing north through the bleecker street station at 45 miles an

hour when the chief engineer suggested he relinquished the controls

the exhilarated mayor roared back i'm running this train now

and pushed onto 103rd street seven miles to the north

finally at seven that evening after an endless series of ceremonial rides

and an hour-long safety inspection the chief engineer gave the signal

and the subway was open to the public for the first time in his life father

nicobacca went underground yesterday to the number of hundred and fifty

thousand amid the two-day whistles and the firing of salutes the official train

made its run exactly on time arriving at 146th street

in exactly 26 minutes and all along the way crowds of excited new yorkers were

collected around the little entrances talking about the trains that they knew

were dashing below the new york herald

the fair was a nickel what a nickel does is subsidize outer development unlike

the situation in europe where the amount you pay is a function

of the distance you are traveling in new york as elsewhere in the united

states we had a single fare that has enormous implications that

means that if you want a house for your family

it does not cost you any more to move out that explodes the size of the city

even now you have the longest subway ride in the world i think the a train is

more than 30 miles from one into it would cost you now it's a little more it was a

nickel ride for half a century an incredible statistic

traveling from one end of the sprawling metropolis to the other

people soon forgot what life had been like without it

within a decade new york subway system was carrying nearly a billion passengers

a year opening the vast reaches of the entire consolidated city

to all new yorkers

within a period of 15 20 years the bronx was the sixth largest city in the united

states if you counted it in its own right what happens now is that there is a vast

exodus out of manhattan and into these outer boroughs they pour across the new

bridges into brooklyn and queens and they take the new subways up to the bronx

the subway system does a couple things it gives access to

all the wonders of the metropolis if you want to use that kind of a phrase

to the working population of the city as well as its upper and middle classes

so everything from the woods of vancouver park to the ocean beaches of

coney island to the lights of times square to the city colleges to the cheap

concerts are now available for only a dime round trip to the

population of new york

even as the new underground tether of steel drew the far-flung reaches of the

city together a frenzy of construction went on above

ground linking the burrows even more tightly by 1909 in just six years

three more bridges had been thrown across the east river

by then electrified railroads had made possible what steam engines could never

do connecting the island for the first time

since the ice age to the mainland of the north american continent

for many many years most of the railroads got to the hudson river and stopped dead

i mean the iron horses kind of pawing the water impotently but now you get

pennsylvania railroad driving tunnels underneath the hudson

driving connecting tunnels out to long island and on

to new england building penn station right in the middle of those things and

the city is not only consolidated but you know connected

to crown the arrival of the two great railways in new york

twin stations the greatest ever built in the world

now arose just 12 blocks apart from each other in midtown manhattan

at the beginning of this century new york's imperial age we built two

imperial railroad terminals grand central for the new york central railroad and

pennsylvania station for the pennsylvania railroad which had built a tunnel under

the hudson came up with 34th street a great architectural firm mckim mead

and white designed this they used as their model the baths of caracalla

in rome these predictable domed affairs and it was a joy

pennsylvania station was the first to open in 1910

at 7th avenue and 33rd street it was the new york times declared the

largest and handsomest train station in the world

built to last for all time and proof one awestruck observer said

that new york had come of age

just three years later grand central terminal opened its doors for the first

time at the corner of 42nd street and park avenue

high atop the structure's monumental south facade soared a 40-foot tall

statue of mercury the winged god of speed

inside the massive barrel vaulted ceiling spangled with dozens of electric stars

showing all the constellations of the night sky seem to go on forever

the grandeur the folly of the architecture the enormous waste of space

there's this sheer gorgeous volume of space that you're in

there you're now with which of course i lift up my eyes and hills he says i

lifted my eyes to this to that sky inside and of course the continuous

expression of vitality and having 60 or 80 000 people pouring

through back and forth all day long through this thing

it's like a sea back and forth back and forth all day long

and in the old days all night long here is this great public room

all you do is catch a train in both of them and they were splendid

and these rooms and particularly pennsylvania station

it was in a classical language it went back directly

to ancient rome it was a language of architecture that almost

everyone at least from europe who was an immigrant to america

could understand so in that sense it was truly democratic

you didn't have to ask where the railroad station was if you got anywhere

near it you could just look and that had to be the railroad station nothing

more grand could be

the station was murmurous with the immense and distant sound of time

great slanted beams of moated light fell ponderously throughout the

station's floor and the calm voice of time hovered along

the walls and ceiling of that mighty room distilled out of the voices and

movements of the people who swarmed beneath

here as nowhere else on earth men were brought together for a moment

at the beginning or end of their innumerable journeys

here one saw their greetings and farewells

here in a single instant one got the entire picture of human destiny

men came and went they passed and vanished

all were moving through the moments of their lives

but the voice of time remained aloof and unperturbed a drowsy and eternal murmur

below the immense and distant roof

thomas wolfe

by 1909 the concentration of human and economic forces in new york

was reaching an astonishing peak two years before ellis island had

experienced the busiest single day in its history

when in less than 12 hours 11 747 immigrants were admitted to the country

fully forty percent of the city's population was now foreign born

immense new ocean liners eight stories tall and eight hundred feet long

capable of transporting three thousand people at a time most in steerage

now birthed where henry hudson's ship the half moon had once ridden that anchor

in september 1909 exactly 300 years after hudson first sailed into the harbor

and a century after robert fulton launched his steamboat

off the west side of manhattan new york held the greatest birthday party

in its history called the hudson fulton celebration

it was a triumphant affirmation of the mighty metropolis

that had risen so spectacularly from the sea for ten days hundreds of thousands of

new yorkers lined the waterfront to watch an immense procession of ships

streaming in and out of the harbor and to catch their first glimpse of an

airplane piloted by wilbur wright himself circling within 25 feet of the statue of

liberty the climax came on a brilliantly clear autumn night in early october

when a million incandescent lights provided by the edison company

turned the bridges ships and tall towers of new york

into a glittering city of fire

the city was one long banner of light that

sparkled and scintillated in the crisp night air

paling even to insignificance a moon of harvest splendor

there were electric wonders for all to gape at

tall buildings enough to send their shafts of molten splendor where all

might see

and search lights enough to streak the sky wherever crowds were gathered

new york times

never again would the fires of capitalism burn quite so brightly in new york city

never again would so many people be gathered together on the island of

manhattan which in less than a year would reach its peak population of 2.3 million

people six weeks after the hudson fulton celebration ended

tens of thousands of new yorkers would take to the streets again

not in celebration this time but to protest the appalling suffering

and stunning inequalities that had haunted the city for almost a century

by november pitched battles were being waged in the streets between striking

factory workers and the police as new york's poorest citizens

rose up to protest the heartbreaking extremes of the capitalist system

and the failure of the government to do anything about them

i think new york became an arena in which a fundamental

question facing america was explored which is

what is the meaning of democracy in the society

of modern industrial structures and great economic inequality

how can you continue to have the formal structures

of participatory citizenship in a society where so few have so much and so many

are in need and that issue which is a threat throughout all of american

history comes to the forefront in the early 20th century particularly

in the cities and particularly here in new york

in the months and years to come as strikes and unrest swept the streets of

manhattan new yorkers would be forced to confront

the greatest challenge of the industrial age would it be possible to close the gap

between rich and poor in new york city and unite the dreams of capitalism

and democracy to do so would call for an effort far

greater than that required to build bridges

subways train stations and skyscrapers and require new yorkers as never before

to think of their city as a whole before it was over the most harrowing

tragedy of the industrial age would sear the city to its very soul

and then change life in new york and america

forever i think there's a crisis that becomes

sort of clear by the turn of the century a crisis that's brought on

partly by just the enormous swell of population particularly in lower

manhattan by the new immigration we tend to forget

that the vast majority of new yorkers lived in tenements

jacob reese's other half was really the other two thirds

or even the other three quarters if you want to think about it that way

and i think there are a lot of different political groups out there

in various ways all i think moving toward the same

goal namely how to get control of the city

how to make the city livable for almost two decades the reform

movement had been gathering momentum in new york ever since jacob reese's searing

indictment how the other half lives galvanized the conscience of a generation

year after year the movement widened spurred on by socialist leaders

muckraking journalists immigrant groups on the lower east side

and an increasing number of progressive politicians

in 1900 reese's old friend theodore roosevelt now governor of new york

threw himself into the fight for housing reform

before the year was out the progressive politician

had rushed a revolutionary housing bill through the new york state legislature

the first of its kind in the country outlawing the old tenements

forever the progressives actually make some progress i mean they have

consequences some of their greatest degree of progress come in public health

new york city is a fabulous pioneer in developing public

health services and clinics there's a bureau of child hygiene which

dr s josephine baker establishes which is the first in the world

to send people out to help families get through pregnancies and child rearing

their anti-tubercular campaigns the city is a model and a pioneer in again

developing a sense of entitlement to public health and impact spreading

it around by 1909 the progressive movement in new

york had made critical advances in health and housing

but no force it seemed could penetrate the core of the city's

industrial engine the 30 000 factory floors and sweatshops

where each year 612 000 workers most of them

immigrants were now turning out a tenth of the industrial output

of the entire united states the heart of that machine was new york's

fiercely competitive garment industry where each year a quarter of a million

men women and children labored without regulation of any kind

11 hours a day six days a week under brutal dehumanizing and often dangerous

conditions you might be working a 16 to 20-hour day

you might be doing fine sewing without appropriate lights you can't really see

and your eyes are are very much taxed if if not destroyed

you are locked in to your space you cannot go

at will for instance to go to the bathroom if you are sick

you may be fired so you have to come in sick

and you're paid by the peace which means that

speed is everything and quality is by the boards

in many shops and factories conditions were nothing short of nightmarish

to increase productivity shop foreman set brutal quotas

fired employees who lagged behind docked the paychecks of anyone caught

talking or humming on the job and often locked the fire exits to keep

out union organizers and to keep the women focused on their jobs

we worked from sunrise to set seven days a week

those who worked on machines had to carry them on their back to and from work

it was a regular slave factory for talking shop girls were immediately

fired

the hissing of the machines the yelling

of the foreman made life unbearable clara lemlick

the problem with the garment industry is that it is thousands of small

businessmen many of them recently garment workers themselves who have

opened up you know a little a floor in a brownstone

in fact require people to bring their own sewing machines with them who pay

next to nothing and bid against one another for contracts from big

garment manufacturers or department stores

so even with the best of will if in fact you don't

grind your workers down to the bare minimum you're going to go out of

business you know it's the it's the last a fair

competitive market at its absolute worst year after year as the number of

immigrants increased and conditions in the factories slowly worsened

reformers trooped up to albany to plead with the state legislature

demanding that the government intervene but nothing changed neither the

reformers nor the fledgling garment workers union

could overcome the power of the factory owners or the hostility

of the most powerful political organization in the city

the stumbling block to all of this is tammany hall tammany hall has been

talking liberal they've been talking union ever since the henry george

campaign when they perceived a serious threat to their dominance

but nonetheless they are basically in league with in bed with

big housing interests and real estate interests and manufacturing

they're not interested in rocking the boat when change started to come it would

begin in the most unlikely of places with the most powerless of the city's

long-suffering workforce the impoverished teenage daughters of

southern italian immigrants and eastern european jews

all through the summer of 1909 anger and frustration

had been building amongst the young women when a series of small strikes failed to

make headway the daring idea of a general strike

aimed not just at one manufacturer but at the industry as a whole

began to take hold on the evening of november 22nd 3 000 women

most of them still in their teens showed up for a mass meeting at the great hall

of cooper union as the night wore on the union leaders most of the men

continued to counsel caution warning that a general strike

would spark brutal reprisals from the owners

but then a member of the audience came forward a frail 23 year old seamstress

and union activist named clara lemling so battered from a

recent brawl on a picket line that she had to be helped to the platform

but once before the crowd her voice rose and she spoke with mesmerizing fervor

i am a working girl she said in yiddish in a rush of words that no one present

would ever forget one of those who were on strike against intolerable conditions

i am tired of listening to speakers who talk in general terms

i move that we go on a general strike now

the response was overwhelmed as jewish workers translated limelik's

words into english and italian the hall exploded into thunderous

applause and her motion was resoundingly endorsed

the next morning fifteen thousand shirt waste workers left their machines

and manned the picket lines within days they had been joined by five thousand

more thousands and thousands left the factories

from every side all of them walking down toward union square

it was november the cold winter was just around the corner

we had no fur coats to keep us warm and yet there was the spirit that led us

on and on pauline newman

it is a conflict between employer and employees one newspaper wrote not only

unprecedented in its development but also the largest strike of women

ever known in the united states on the picket lines ill-clad young women

stood shivering in the freezing rain and cold

huddling together for warmth an equal number of men

one union official said would never hold together

under what these girls are enduring they're up against it

because tammany for whatever its professions is in fact sending the

police the police are arresting these folks in large numbers

in very demeaning ways they're in fact dragging off the women and calling them

as they are technically doing walking up and down street walkers and they'd toss

them in jail with the heart and prostitutes and such

by the third week of december the union's financial resources were all but

exhausted when the flame of protest leapt from the ragged band of immigrant women

to the wives and daughters of some of the richest men in the city

some of the picket lines contained women in minks

as well as women in their shirt waists and it got a huge amount of publicity

in the press and um became a kind of cause celeb in the city

in the end the uprising of the 20 000 the first great strike of the modern

labor movement in new york was doomed to failure as dwindling

resources and bitter cold took their toll but what clara limlick

and her sisters had started could never be undone three months later

60 000 members of the cloak makers union went out

bringing the garment industry to a halt and forcing owners to the bargaining

table in earnest the rising of the 20 000 1909 1910 really represents i think the

first modern successful effort to unionize garment workers

particularly workers and so-called ladies garments it really is the the

genesis of the international ladies garment workers union

it really marks a turning point i think as well in the

emerging political power as well as union power of the immigrant working class

but though the resulting settlement called the protocol of peace

represented another step forward few real concessions had been rung from the

factory owners and some of the largest firms like the

big triangle shirtwaist company on the east side of washington square

that simply refused to sign the protocol at all

for all that had been accomplished there was still no law regulating conditions

in new york's factories which by the spring of 1911 remained as brutal

unsanitary and dangerous as ever

in the past year alone four small fires had broken out in the building

occupied by the triangle factory whose owners still did nothing

pointing out that under the city code

their building was technically fireproof

late on the afternoon of saturday march 25th 1911

the 500 employees of the triangle shirt waste company

were racing to fill their quotas teenage girls for the most part eager to finish

up collect their pay and plunge into the mild spring evening

around 4 45 pm with just 15 minutes left in the workday

someone on the eighth floor must have dropped a match or burning cigarette

into the heaps of discarded fabric that littered the shop floor

triangle shirtwaist factory occupied the top floors of a 10-story building a fire

broke out apparently someone dropped a cigarette

into a drawer that held what they called remnants of scraps of cloth

and fire sprayed pretty quickly and the doors were locked

allegedly to keep out union organizers this would

be a company that resisted unionization was trying to

so with this rapidly spreading fire there was really very little way to get out

and the result was a horrible carnage within seconds the combustible litter of

cloth and tissue paper had burst into flames and before anyone could stop it

the fire began to spread with startling speed from one stack of fabric

to another as cries of panic went out and terrified workers scrambled for the

exits i heard somebody cry fire

i ran for the door on the washington place side

but the door was locked and immediately there was a great jam of girls before it

some girls were screaming some were beating the door

with their fists some were trying to tear it open rosie safran

it was horrifying it was a large loft

in which the doors had been locked from the outside and so when the fire began

um the women working at the machines tried to get out of the exits

could not move the doors and there are accounts of bodies being

crushed up against the doors and of women trying to escape

most workers on the 10th floor managed to escape

held to safety across an adjoining rooftop by students from new york

university hundreds more made it down by elevator 30 people at a time

jammed into cars meant to hold half that number

but by 455 the searing heat had forced the last of the elevators out of service

and with the fire now spreading from the eighth floor to the ninth

nearly 200 women remained trapped in the building

with no means of escape

on the eighth floor workers tried bravely to stop the fire

but the flames were too quick and the water pressure in the fire hoses

failed as the searing heat and smoke intensified

the factory floor became an incinerator and as bodies piled up in front of the

locked main exit those who still could raced for a fire

escape on the far western end of the building

fewer than 20 women managed to get up before the rusted metal supports gave way

sending several workers plunging to their death and cutting off the last

means of escape for all the others

with a wall of fire advancing on them the terrified women

moved to the open windows

the girls behind us were screaming and crying several of them

as the flames crept closer ran into the smoke and we heard them

scream as the flames cut their clothes

one little girl who worked at the machine opposite me cried out in italian

goodbye goodbye

outside on the street below a huge crowd had gathered

the new york fire department had arrived within minutes of the call

rushing 35 vehicles to the scene along with the most modern firefighting

equipment in the country but even the tallest

ladder could go no farther than the sixth floor two full stories below the burning

factory floors where tons of flame could already be

seen curling out of the windows the fire of course like any fire in manhattan

could be spotted from blocks and blocks around because of the smoke

so there were big crowds on the streets below

and the fire had gone on long enough that people had also heard the word

down on the lower east side and had come up

to the village waiting to see what would happen

and then it became apparent in this heart gripping moment that no one could

get out except if they jumped

at 505 a laborer named dominic cardiani pushing his wheelbarrow down green

street heard a muffled explosion followed by the sound of breaking glass

glancing up he saw what he thought were dark bundles of clothes

sailing from an eighth floor window

you know you can hardly believe it when you read about it

i mean imagine from the eighth ninth and tenth floors

of a building overlooking washington square park you know first this great

tongue of flame leaps out you know and pierce's by where there's some policeman

said it was just a momentary accident then all of a sudden one person boys had

something that looked like a bale of old clothes

comes plummeting down from the eighth floor

and hits with this thud which somehow seemed too loud

for a bale of clothes on the sidewalk and someone said they must be throwing

and it was burning as it fell and it must be throwing out the burning

bales of clothes and then other bodies started to come

down people realized they did even young girls would go out on

ledge the flames would be looming up behind them

and they'd jump of course to die some would try to

cling to the ledge with their fingertips but they couldn't

you have plummeting down to the street scores of burning dead bodies

there was also an iron fence below so some of the young women when they jumped

were impaled on the iron fence and people who saw it said

that they never forgot it that it was a sight that burned itself on the retina

of the watchers

william shepard a reporter for the united press

called the story in as he watched from a pay phone across the street

i learned a new sound more horrible sound than description can picture

it was the thud of a speeding living body on a stone sidewalk

thud dead

thud dead

thud dead

thud dead there was plenty of chance to watch them

as they came down the height was 80 feet

the first 10 thuds beds shocked me

looked up saw that there were scores of girls

at the windows the flames from the floor below

were beating in their faces

somehow i knew that they too must come down

i even watched one girl falling

waving her arms trying to keep her body upright

until the very instant she struck the sidewalk

then came the thud then a silent unmoving pile of clothing

and twisted broken limbs william shepherd

by now dozens of women at a time could be seen standing at the eighth and ninth

floor windows all but engulfed by the inferno

as those below watched in horror groups of women

three and four at a time grabbed each other by the hand

closed their eyes and plunged off the building

they hit the pavement just like rain a stunned fire chief named edward worth

later testified francis perkins a 31 year old advocate with the consumers league

stood with her hand at her throat helpless to stop the unfolding tragedy

the nets were broken the firemen kept shouting for them not to jump

but they had no choice the flames were right behind them for by this time

the fire was far gone francis perkins

by 5 15 the scene on the street was a bedlam

as thousands of workers poured out of nearby factories

and pressed against the barricades fire engine horses reared at the strong

smell of blood while police tried without success to

control the crowd the floods of water from the firemen's

hose that ran into the gutter were actually stained red

with blood i looked upon the heap of dead bodies

and i remembered these girls were shirt waste makers

i remember their great strike of last year

in which these same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions

and more safety precautions in these shops

these dead bodies were the answer

it was over in less than half an hour

firemen inspecting the burned floors the next day found dozens of bodies

charred headless trunks some still bent

over the sewing machines among the remains the inspectors found

11 engagement rings

in all 146 people teenagers for the most part immigrant girls

some as young as 14 had died in the greatest industrial disaster in

the city's history

some died of smoke inhalation piled against the doors trying to get out

some dog were burned to death and some jumped out of the windows and delight

young women died of course when the the fire

men finally enter that building the dead bodies are heaped up against the doors

because there were no fire exits there was no safety precautions

march 26 1911 the remains of the dead it was hardly

possible to call them bodies because that word would suggest something human

and there was nothing human about most of these

were taken in a steady stream to the morgue

for identification the new york times

at a temporary morgue set up on a pier along the east river

relatives lined up to identify the corpses

the ghastly process took three full days

seven bodies were so badly burned they could not be identified

and on april 5th 1911 a mass funeral was held for the unknown victims

120 000 working people joined in the procession

despite a heavy rain while 400 000 more watched silently from the sidewalk

a mass emotion of sorrow and despair was felt everywhere that day

but in the weeks that followed these emotions gave way to

angry questioning and a determination that a similar tragedy must never take

place in new york again

a few months later the owners of the triangle factory

isaac harris and max blank were tried for manslaughter

having locked their workers in but to the shocked disbelief of the

victims families and of most new yorkers the two men were acquitted when the

prosecution was unable to prove that they had actually known that the

exit door was locked at the exact time of the fire

there was a trial and the trial found that the owners were not guilty for they

had broken no law yes they might not have been very nice

to have locked in these young women but there was no law and so there was no

repercussion within weeks the triangle factory had reopened in a nearby building

visiting the new plant fire inspectors found the exit door

blocked by rows of sewing machines

but now something extraordinary began to occur

from the ashes of the triangle shirt waste factory fire would begin to arise

one of the most dramatic and far-reaching political

transformations in american history it was a kind of a moment that the city

could no longer ignore the reality that had been with the city

for decades of what a sweatshop was the whole city

felt involved in those bodies that were threatening to the pavement

and you couldn't say they don't relate to us

the impact of this one fire the horror of the bodies

the number of the dead had an impact that transformed it was a

turning point in the fight for social welfare legislation

in new york the triangle fire catastrophe it's a it's an epic event

in in the dynamics of the city's politics and economy and everything else

in the immediate aftermath what happens is a mass meeting of concerned citizens

a lot of officials in business put together an operation

and go up to the state legislature and say you've got to do something about this

we need reform legislation to police the workplace and make sure nothing like

this ever happens again the key to change lay with the new york state legislature

the key to the legislature however lay in the pocket of silent charlie murphy

the inscrutable taciturn boss of tammany hall

and the last man in new york from whom reformers could expect any help

but the reformers were wrong silent charlie was an extremely shrewd

politician and he understood that the demographics of the city were changing

that you couldn't simply win by appealing to to the irish vote

that you had to make some attempt to draw in jews italians other new immigrants

that you had to worry about competing politicians particularly

socialist party and also progressive republicans

that you had all these people now in settlement houses and progressive

reformers were also a part of the political scene and i

think that that what murphy understood was that

that somehow um tammany had to adapt to the new realities of the city

new political realities to the amazement of the reformers whose

efforts had been stymied by tammany at every turn

murphy supported the call for an investigation then placed two of his

closest proteges on it robert f wagner senior the leader of the state senate

and 38 year old al smith now head of the state assembly

the grueling four year long factory investigation that ensued

would make smith's career and change forever life in new york

week after week month after month the factory commission ground on

taking testimony from fire inspectors sanitation experts

health officials and labor leaders calling in its first year alone more

than 200 witnesses then launching an unprecedented statewide tour of factories

beginning with new york this factory commission started to tour the state

and the reformers couldn't help noticing that no matter how hard the trip was

everyone would miss one trip or another al smith never missed a trip they

couldn't help noticing his face when they would go to these factories

and they'd see these rooms without a window in which mothers with their

children worked seven days a week they remembered going to one factory

where the owner assured him he had no children working and then someone

pointed them to an elevator and he had put all the children in an elevator and

put it between floors so nobody would see them then it came time for the factory

commission to write its laws and smith sat at the table he was very

conscious of his lack of education and he said you make the recommendations i'll

fight for them and it was a very wonderful and dramatic thing the

reformers had gone up to albany for years and had

never gotten these proposals for child labor laws for women's labor laws for

wages and hours laws for factory compensation

the disability compensation passed now they sat up there in the galleries of

the assembly and down there on the floor was this man they despised

fighting for them and getting these things through and for the years to come

after that al smith was the weapon of reform in new york

he was the red-faced loud-voiced horny tammany henchman who cut through

the dreams of social welfare reforms for which reformers have been dreaming now

ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution

the resulting flood of legislation one man later said

was nothing less than epic making landmark laws affecting not only fire

protection but every aspect of factory life

plant owners would now be required to provide enclosed staircases

fire sprinklers and adequate lighting ventilation

and washrooms dangerous machinery would be regulated by law

women would not be allowed to work more than 54 hours a week

children under 14 would not be allowed to work in factories at all

and the log jam is broken and what you get in 1913

is a flood of progressive legislation at the heart land of it all is indeed

safety regulations but there's a tremendous raft of new laws

and wagner and smith are at the heartland of this they introduced something like

60 bills in which 56 get passed and the political center of gravity of the

city and the state as a consequence is as profoundly shifted

business interests were outraged to own a factory in new york

is now a calamity the leaders of the real estate board declared

but nothing could stop the momentum of the campaign al smith was now leading

with almost evangelical fervor to use the power of the state

to change people's lives well in other words

politics is not simply now about helping people out when they're in need or

giving them the cold to get through the winter or helping them get a job with

their unemployed it's now about using the power of the

state government to really get at some of the underlying problems of city life

the point here is that machine politicians find that it's in their own

interest to begin to think about politics in a

less parochial way and ultimately in a more national way

what can we do when we control the city or the state or the congress

to make people's lives better how can we improve working conditions how can we

improve housing conditions how can we improve educational opportunities

as the subway had brought new yorkers together physically so the grief and

horror of the triangle fire brought them together emotionally and spiritually

we banded ourselves together francis perkins later wrote

moved by a sense of stricken guilt to prevent this kind of disaster from ever

happening again in the years to come as the leaders of

the factory investigating commission moved into positions of power

in city hall in albany and eventually in washington

the remarkable alliance would become an unstoppable engine for change

not only in new york but across the nation

looking back francis perkins appointed by franklin d roosevelt as the first

secretary of labor and the first woman cabinet member in american history

would say simply the new deal began on march 25th

1911 the day the triangle factory burned

is new york the most beautiful city in the world

it is not far from it no urban nights are like the nights

there

i have looked down across the city from high windows

is then that the great buildings lose reality

and take on magical powers squares and squares of flame

set and cut into the ether here's our poetry

for we have pulled down the stars to our will

as repound 1913

by 1913 anything seemed possible in new york

at 7 30 precisely on the evening of april 24th president woodrow wilson pressed an

electric switch in the white house 200 miles to the north on the corner of

broadway and park row in new york the 80 000 electric lights of a brand

new skyscraper the woolworth building blazed out

brilliantly across the city

it looked one man said like an immense ball of fire

giving the effect of a gorgeous jewel resplendent in its setting of rich gold

and visible to mariners 40 miles out to sea

rising 60 stories and nearly 800 feet into the sky

the tallest building in the world by far was immediately called

the cathedral of commerce you had a new building form achieving

for the first time a kind of artistic power of its own more even than

the flatiron building which is so very important one of the great

american buildings of all time a building like none other that had ever been built

before paid for by mr woolworth in cash

13 million dollars all from his five and 10 cent stores a lot of a lot

of nickels and dimes five years later new yorkers proved

anything was possible on the night of november 5th 1918

al smith the irish boy from the fourth ward of the lower east side

who had grown up in the shadow of the brooklyn bridge and whose only degree

was from the fulton fish market sat anxiously in the ballroom of the hotel

biltmore in new york watching the election returns coming

by midnight the results were clear the 44 year old hero of the labor reform

movement had been elected governor of the largest and most important state

in the union when he won the governorship really meant something

to the irish in america it was the first time an oath of office had ever been

taken for the governor of state or the senator to stay in the accents of

the old country when smith was inaugurated all the night before

i trains brought up to albany the irish immigrants they marched all night

through the streets singing this new two-step which was al

smith's him the sidewalks of new york and when smith took the oath of office

up there it was the triumph of the immigrants in america

new york's working classes could not believe their good fortune

on the lower east side jubilant immigrant voters

irish and non-irish alike danced in the streets

while down in the fourth ward smith's home district

housewives tied brooms to the railings of their tenement stoops

the old tammany symbol for a clean sweep

in the years to come no politician in new york history would do more than al

smith to make government answerable to the needs of all the people

and help make the great democratic vista walt whitman had once seen on the

streets of new york a reality whitman sang of the immigrants

smith talked of the immigrants he talked in different it was us

against them he he said there are no votes over on fifth avenue they're all

down here in the fourth ward where i live he was turning

the force of the immigrant flood he was channeling

the the governmental institutions the policies of the state to meet their needs

and make them a part you might say of the fabric of the city

smith had never read whitman you could be sure of that but he was going to be

the guy who in effect trans put whitman's verses into a

political slogan because it was alfred e smith who said

the cure for the evils of democracy is

more democracy

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