Brooklyn, New York
The Evergreens Cemetery
Final resting place for the Triangle Shirtwaist fire’s unidentified victims.
Opened in 1849, The Evergreens Cemetery is a nonsectarian graveyard that runs along the Brooklyn/Queens border. It houses everyone from Civil War soldiers to an assortment of vaudevillians to Jonathan Reed (the man who lived in his wife’s mausoleum).
It also holds the unidentified remains of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire’s victims, buried under a monument of a grieving woman. According to the cemetery’s records from April 5, 1911, there were eight graves: one man, six women, and one casket holding people whose gender could not be identified.
On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out in a Greenwich Village sweatshop called the Triangle Waist Company. Because the owners kept the exits locked, the workers were trapped, resulting in an estimated 146 deaths, 50 of which resulted from workers jumping out of windows.
The unidentified bodies were honored with a funeral procession that was attended by 400,000 mourners. Soon after, one of the women’s bodies was claimed by her family and moved to Calvary Cemetery.
One hundred years later, a researcher named Michael Hirsch came up with the possible names of the other six victims. Even though their remains were not tested for DNA, their names were included in a list of the dead that was read at the centennial.
Contributed by
HJHausman
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