The Brooklyn Rail

On March 25, 1911, over five-hundred workers entered the Asch Building: a ten-story brick-and-mortar death trap on the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street in Greenwich Village. And the rest is history: 146 predominantly Jewish and Italian emigrés were killed that afternoon in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The wide majority of those murdered were women—123 to be exact. Most suffocated and/or burnt to death while many leapt from windows because management had locked the doors. God forbid they took a bathroom break.

After 113 years, a new memorial at the Asch Building designed by artists Richard Joon Yoo and Uri Wegman reminds the public of the injustice that took place there. For decades, a scant plaque donated by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) commemorated the tragedy. The new design by Yoo and Wegman is elegant, and it gets the point across, much like the 9/11 Memorial by Michael Arad. It proffers a sill made of stone glass—at about hip height—inscribed with eyewitness testimonies from the fire. Another sill protrudes from the Asch Building, laser cut with the names of victims, at about twelve feet above grade. When the sun is out, the names are reflected onto the glass below. The designers also proposed a steel ribbon that curves and leaps upward at the Asch Building’s corner on the ninth floor. Its surface is emblazoned with patterns that emerged from a 2019 art project, Collective Ribbon. There, Yoo and Wegman worked with over four hundred people—including the descendants of victims—to knit together textiles, creating a single, collectively interwoven ensemble that stitches together trauma, grief, and memory. Patterns from the exercise were then etched onto the stainless steel of the memorial itself. The result is an emotionally charged ensemble that registers the disaster’s full impact with a minimalist sculpture and the written word.

The Triangle Fire memorial by Yoo and Wegman was designed by consensus—its architects engaged in an admirable level of dialogue and research with stakeholders, descendants, union leaders, and state officials over the past decade. Yoo notes that Talking to the Girls (edited by Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Trasciatti)—a book which compiled essays about the tragedy by scholars, activists, artists, and family members of the Triangle Factory workers—was essential to the design. How exactly to memorialize the catastrophe has queried architects for decades. What should a monument indebted to the victims of capitalism’s unmasked brutality look like?

In 1995, Lee Brozgol—a queer Sephardic Jewish social worker, artist and community activist from the Lower East Side—proffered an alternative vision to what we have now. Prior to this, Brozgol created the remarkable Greenwich Village Christopher Street subway mosaics in 1994, along with other prominent public artworks in Lower Manhattan which called attention to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, among other social issues. After completing his work at the Christopher Street subway stop, Brozgol designed a proposal for a 984-foot Eiffel Tower replica perched above Delancey Street clad with foliage, crowned by a figurative statue of a Grecian woman wearing a toga, as an unsolicited monument to the Triangle Fire victims. One pair of the bootleg Eiffel Tower’s legs would be planted somewhere on Forsyth Street, while the other pair would touch down on Canal. At the base of the tower, Brozgol proposed public gardens. The design also posited widening Sarah D. Roosevelt Park and planting trees between Forsyth and the Williamsburg Bridge. “Eiffel on Delancey was about taking one of the most recognizable, posh symbols of high culture in the world and repurposing it into a monument for predominantly Jewish immigrant women who died through murderous negligence in a sweatshop,” Royal Young, Brozgol’s child, tells me.

Brozgol presented his gonzo architecture to the local community board, but it wasn’t approved. Afterwards he turned the collage of Eiffel on Delancey into postcards, which he then sent to various city officials. A small exhibition on Canal Street about Brozgol’s design, curated by the Canal Street Research Association, was held in 2022, one year after Brozgol’s death. I would be remiss to describe Brozgol’s Eiffel on Delancey as late postmodernism. Brozgol, as far as this author is aware, never described his work that way—but the proposition is in the same vein as other postmodernists from that period whose work poked fun at the modern project’s seriousness with kitsch and replicas. Take for instance Antoni Miralda’s El Internacional Tapas Bar & Restaurant (1984–86) in Tribeca. It came replete with a bootleg Statue of Liberty (another Gustave Eiffel thiefdom!) peeking up from behind the facade; or even OMA’s Casa Palestra (1985–86), a 1:1 scale recreation of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, albeit slightly skewed on its x-axis.

Indeed, the binary approaches to memorializing the Triangle Fire between Richard Joon Yoo and Uri Wegman (2013–23) and Lee Brozgol (1995) make for interesting comparisons. The former was built, and the latter lives on paper. One was fueled by a steadfast level of engagement with city officials, descendants, and stakeholders over a decade, and the other was one person’s unsolicited, perhaps quixotic response to the tragedy. One uses minimalism and oral history to convey the full sense of grief behind the tragedy; and the other uses irony, an equally understandable trauma response emblematic of its time. Or, to quote the great Denise Scott Brown: “We laugh so we don’t cry.”