The Charities Pier

After the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 25 March 1911, the city morgue could not hold the dead. The bodies were carried by patrol wagon and ambulance to a covered pier at the foot of East 26th Street on the East River, the Charities Pier, which New Yorkers called Misery Lane. There, in two long rows of rough wooden coffins, lay the dead of a fire that killed 146 workers, 123 of them women and girls. Through the cold, wet days that followed, families filed past while police held lanterns over the faces, and the rings, purses and pay envelopes gathered from the bodies were used to put names to them. Within a week all but a few had been identified. Those never claimed were buried at the Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn, with Jewish, Catholic and Protestant prayers because nobody knew their faith.

Their names came back a century later: in February 2011 the researcher Michael Hirsch, after about four years of genealogical work, identified the last six as Josephine Cammarata, Dora Evans, Max Florin, Maria Giuseppa Lauletti, Concetta Prestifilippo and Fannie Rosen. Rosen, twenty-one, had been in America six months and had worked at the factory for two days. No pier survives. The shoreline at 26th Street is now the FDR Drive and the platform of Waterside Plaza, a short walk from Bellevue Hospital.