Painting the Town -- Museum of the City of New York

The fire that raced through the Triangle Shirtwaist Company late in the afternoon of March 25, 1911, was extinguished in less than fifteen minutes. Its death toll was catastrophic, however. In the pandemonium unleashed by the fire, 146 workers -mostly immigrant Italian and Jewish women between the ages of thirteen and twenty-three -were fatally burned or crushed to death as they attempted to escape from the flames, which erupted in the sweatshop's eighth-floor cutting room and were quickly fueled by fabric scraps and machine oils. The shock of the incident left an indelible impression on the nation's social conscience, ultimately leading to long-overdue reforms to safeguard workers from dangers inherent in the industrial workplace.¹

The Triangle tragedy was rife with ironies. Located on the northwest corner of Washington Place and Greene Street, the ten-story stone-and-brick Asch building, which housed the factory on its top three floors, had been considered a model of modern fireproof construction when it opened ten years before the disaster.² But by the time Pump Engine 20 and Ladder Company 20 responded to the call, charred bodies of victims prostrate on the sidewalks impeded access to the site. Safety nets that were rushed to the scene failed under the weight of those hurling themselves from on high. The horror was compounded by the restricted reach of the fire department's ladders, which extended only to the sixth floor. Overloaded with evacuees, the rear fire escape of the loft collapsed, eliminating an escape route. Workers trapped inside then stormed the elevators; a few rode to safety, but most died from smoke inhalation or from falls down the shaft as they attempted to slide down the cables when the elevators ceased operating.

For New York's labor movement, the Triangle Fire proved especially galvanizing. Two years before they perished, the factory's employees had been locked out by company owners for joining the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. In protest, the ILGWU and the Women's Trade Union League called a strike. The ensuing walkout, which spread to other local shops, paralyzed the industry and won gains for workers in more than 350 factories. The Triangle's management, as it so happened, managed to crush the union at the very company where the strike had started. In the fire's aftermath, investigators learned that the factory's exit doors had been bolted by supervisors in an effort to deter employee theft and prevent early departures from shifts. Despite the deplorable practices that contributed to the deaths, the factory owners, when brought to trial, were acquitted. The public outcry triggered by their legal exoneration quickened efforts, particularly by the ILGWU, to organize the city's garment industry and to secure legislation for improving health and safety conditions in factories.

Victor Gatto, eighteen years old when the event occurred, witnessed the fire from nearby Washington Square. Years later, he summoned his memories of the historic disaster to produce this vivid pastiche. Perhaps wishing to surpass the visual record bequeathed to history by news photographers, who detailed the fire's grotesque aftermath, Gatto skewed his perspective to enhance visibility of the unfolding events and employed carefully chosen colors to simulate the ongoing drama. Along the painting's bottom border, a line of spectators gravitating to the scene is being detained by policemen. Chaos along the Greene Street block takes form as leaping red flames, spewing brown smoke, churning pump engines, and the blurs of firemen maneuvering equipment clearly ineffectual to fight the inferno. The outline of one worker, with clothes ablaze, can be distinguished falling near the midpoint of the forward ladder. In chilling contrast to this disorder, a row of shrouded bodies methodically arranged on the Washington Place sidewalk spills around the corner to Greene Street.³ Gatto's dense composition, deprived of sky and greenery that would offer relief from the relentless cityscape, suggests the tragedy's suffocating sensation. The small, wrapped corpses appear oddly insignificant in comparison to the monolithic gray masonry and uniform window indentations of the surrounding commercial architecture.

As background facts emerge about this little-known artist, it seems tempting to read the painting as an admonition of the perils of capitalism when allowed to triumph over the welfare of American labor. Gatto, born to immigrant parents in New York's "Little Italy," took up painting in his forties and was proud of his eventual classification as a self-taught "primitive."⁴ A maverick, he had supported himself until then as a steamfitter, plumber, and occasional featherweight boxer and claimed to have turned his casual sketching interest to profit only after seeing the prices charged for similar "handiwork" at an outdoor art show in Washington Square in the late 1930s. Gatto's politics are a matter of speculation. His working-class origins, time spent as a laborer in an ammunition plant and various shipyards, and economic hardship during the Depression probably disposed him toward the ideological branch of Social Realist art that took root in the 1930s and advocated the betterment of life for ordinary American citizens. In this context, the painting fulfills the purpose of alerting a younger generation to the Triangle fire's enduring meaning.⁵

The donor of Triangle Fire bought the painting in 1945 from the Charles Barzansky Galleries on Madison Avenue, venue for the publicized breakthrough exhibition that enabled Gatto to concentrate exclusively on art. Although biblical subjects represented a major vein in his oeuvre, Gatto, whose memory of past events was considered remarkable, also drew on his earlier New York City experiences for numerous other paintings.

Notes:

1 The standard text on the Triangle factory fire is Leon Stein, The Triangle Fire (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1962). The analysis of this plate is also indebted to the discussion of Gatto's painting supplied by Ellen Wiley Todd in her insightful essay "New York Stories: Narratives of Gender and Urban Space," Painting the Town Cityscapes of New York, (Web publication, Museum of the City of New York, 2000), manuscript available in the Museum Archives,1996.

2 The former Asch Building, which still stands at 29 Washington Place, is known today as the Brown Building of New York University. The victims of the Triangle factory fire are memorialized in a small tablet mounted on the building's corner.

3 Here, Gatto has taken liberties with the actual flow of events. During the fire, bodies fell to the sidewalks on both the Washington Place and Greene Street sides of the Asch building. They were not tagged and moved across the street from the factory site until the fire was extinguished.

4 Gatto's childhood and evolving art career are traced by Harry Salpeter in "Gatto, Little Primitive," Esquire (May 1946): 98, 207; by Bess Barzansky in Victor Joseph Gatto: Retrospective, exhibition catalogue (New York: ACA Galleries, 1977); and in the obituary "Victor Joseph Gatto Dies at 71; Plumber-Boxer Became Artist," New York Times, May 27, 1965. See, too, the information on Gatto provided in the catalogue notes for the Staten Island [Art] Museum's exhibition The Island and Bay (Staten Island, N.Y., 1957), entry no. 43, p. 20; and Museum Archives.

5 Gatto's painting merits comparison with Ernest Fiene's dramatic depiction of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, still visible as part of his 1941 W.P.A.-supported fresco on the history of the needlecraft industry for the auditorium walls of New York's High School of Fashion Industries on West 24th Street.


Triangle Fire: March 25, 1911 c. 1944 (depicting 1911) Victor Joseph Gatto (1893 -1965) Oil on canvas, 19 X 28 Signed lower right: Victor Joseph Gatto Gift of Mrs. Henry L. Moses, 54.75
The fire that raced through the Triangle Shirtwaist Company late in the afternoon of March 25, 1911, was extinguished in less than fifteen minutes. Its death toll was catastrophic, however. In the pandemonium unleashed by the fire, 146 workers -mostly immigrant Italian and Jewish women between the ages of thirteen and twenty-three -were fatally burned or crushed to death as they attempted to escape from the flames, which erupted in the sweatshop's eighth-floor cutting room and were quickly fueled by fabric scraps and machine oils. The shock of the incident left an indelible impression on the nation's social conscience, ultimately leading to long-overdue reforms to safeguard workers from dangers inherent in the industrial workplace.¹ The Triangle tragedy was rife with ironies. Located on the northwest corner of Washington Place and Greene Street, the ten-story stone-and-brick Asch building, which housed the factory on its top three floors, had been considered a model of modern fireproof construction when it opened ten years before the disaster.² But by the time Pump Engine 20 and Ladder Company 20 responded to the call, charred bodies of victims prostrate on the sidewalks impeded access to the site. Safety nets that were rushed to the scene failed under the weight of those hurling themselves from on high. The horror was compounded by the restricted reach of the fire department's ladders, which extended only to the sixth floor. Overloaded with evacuees, the rear fire escape of the loft collapsed, eliminating an escape route. Workers trapped inside then stormed the elevators; a few rode to safety, but most died from smoke inhalation or from falls down the shaft as they attempted to slide down the cables when the elevators ceased operating. For New York's labor movement, the Triangle Fire proved especially galvanizing. Two years before they perished, the factory's employees had been locked out by company owners for joining the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. In protest, the ILGWU and the Women's Trade Union League called a strike. The ensuing walkout, which spread to other local shops, paralyzed the industry and won gains for workers in more than 350 factories. The Triangle's management, as it so happened, managed to crush the union at the very company where the strike had started. In the fire's aftermath, investigators learned that the factory's exit doors had been bolted by supervisors in an effort to deter employee theft and prevent early departures from shifts. Despite the deplorable practices that contributed to the deaths, the factory owners, when brought to trial, were acquitted. The public outcry triggered by their legal exoneration quickened efforts, particularly by the ILGWU, to organize the city's garment industry and to secure legislation for improving health and safety conditions in factories. Victor Gatto, eighteen years old when the event occurred, witnessed the fire from nearby Washington Square. Years later, he summoned his memories of the historic disaster to produce this vivid pastiche. Perhaps wishing to surpass the visual record bequeathed to history by news photographers, who detailed the fire's grotesque aftermath, Gatto skewed his perspective to enhance visibility of the unfolding events and employed carefully chosen colors to simulate the ongoing drama. Along the painting's bottom border, a line of spectators gravitating to the scene is being detained by policemen. Chaos along the Greene Street block takes form as leaping red flames, spewing brown smoke, churning pump engines, and the blurs of firemen maneuvering equipment clearly ineffectual to fight the inferno. The outline of one worker, with clothes ablaze, can be distinguished falling near the midpoint of the forward ladder. In chilling contrast to this disorder, a row of shrouded bodies methodically arranged on the Washington Place sidewalk spills around the corner to Greene Street.³ Gatto's dense composition, deprived of sky and greenery that would offer relief from the relentless cityscape, suggests the tragedy's suffocating sensation. The small, wrapped corpses appear oddly insignificant in comparison to the monolithic gray masonry and uniform window indentations of the surrounding commercial architecture. As background facts emerge about this little-known artist, it seems tempting to read the painting as an admonition of the perils of capitalism when allowed to triumph over the welfare of American labor. Gatto, born to immigrant parents in New York's "Little Italy," took up painting in his forties and was proud of his eventual classification as a self-taught "primitive."⁴ A maverick, he had supported himself until then as a steamfitter, plumber, and occasional featherweight boxer and claimed to have turned his casual sketching interest to profit only after seeing the prices charged for similar "handiwork" at an outdoor art show in Washington Square in the late 1930s. Gatto's politics are a matter of speculation. His working-class origins, time spent as a laborer in an ammunition plant and various shipyards, and economic hardship during the Depression probably disposed him toward the ideological branch of Social Realist art that took root in the 1930s and advocated the betterment of life for ordinary American citizens. In this context, the painting fulfills the purpose of alerting a younger generation to the Triangle fire's enduring meaning.⁵ The donor of Triangle Fire bought the painting in 1945 from the Charles Barzansky Galleries on Madison Avenue, venue for the publicized breakthrough exhibition that enabled Gatto to concentrate exclusively on art. Although biblical subjects represented a major vein in his oeuvre, Gatto, whose memory of past events was considered remarkable, also drew on his earlier New York City experiences for numerous other paintings. Notes: 1 The standard text on the Triangle factory fire is Leon Stein, The Triangle Fire (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1962). The analysis of this plate is also indebted to the discussion of Gatto's painting supplied by Ellen Wiley Todd in her insightful essay "New York Stories: Narratives of Gender and Urban Space," Painting the Town Cityscapes of New York, (Web publication, Museum of the City of New York, 2000), manuscript available in the Museum Archives,1996. 2 The former Asch Building, which still stands at 29 Washington Place, is known today as the Brown Building of New York University. The victims of the Triangle factory fire are memorialized in a small tablet mounted on the building's corner. 3 Here, Gatto has taken liberties with the actual flow of events. During the fire, bodies fell to the sidewalks on both the Washington Place and Greene Street sides of the Asch building. They were not tagged and moved across the street from the factory site until the fire was extinguished. 4 Gatto's childhood and evolving art career are traced by Harry Salpeter in "Gatto, Little Primitive," Esquire (May 1946): 98, 207; by Bess Barzansky in Victor Joseph Gatto: Retrospective, exhibition catalogue (New York: ACA Galleries, 1977); and in the obituary "Victor Joseph Gatto Dies at 71; Plumber-Boxer Became Artist," New York Times, May 27, 1965. See, too, the information on Gatto provided in the catalogue notes for the Staten Island [Art] Museum's exhibition The Island and Bay (Staten Island, N.Y., 1957), entry no. 43, p. 20; and Museum Archives. 5 Gatto's painting merits comparison with Ernest Fiene's dramatic depiction of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, still visible as part of his 1941 W.P.A.-supported fresco on the history of the needlecraft industry for the auditorium walls of New York's High School of Fashion Industries on West 24th Street.