In the guest book of the recently revamped ILR School's Kheel Center website devoted to the 1911 Triangle Factory fire, a 13-year-old girl from Pennsylvania wrote, "If I had been alive, I could have been one of those girls. It's so horrible, and the way some people jumped out ... it's the Sept. 11 of 1911."

So noted University Librarian Anne Kenney at the March 23 Cornell University Library Salon at Lighthouse International in Manhattan, two days before the 100th anniversary of the fire at the Triangle Waist Co. that killed 146 workers and became a tipping point for widespread national labor and safety reform.

"While we are very proud of the work that we have done to bring the story to the world, we cannot lose sight of the fact that this is a commemoration and not a celebration," said Curtis Lyons, the Harriet Morel Oxman Director of the Catherwood, Hospitality and Management Libraries at Cornell, in delivering a lecture about the fire and the website. "Our goal here is to leave you not entertained, but appreciative -- of the events, the context in which they happened, and the role that libraries and archives play in educating people about the events that help shape their lives."

The fire broke out close to closing time on March 25, 1911, on the eighth floor of the company's factory building; it spread quickly, said Lyons, through the highly flammable materials, including the light fabric, sewing machine oil and many wooden tables and partitions. The flimsy fire escape collapsed, and firemen arrived to find their ladders and nets inadequate for the scale of the building and the fire. Around 52 people chose to jump rather than burn to death.

Thousands of people turned out to memorialize and protest. "Immediately after the fire, demands for justice rose from many quarters," Lyons said, "as did excuses from various departments about why it was not their fault. The sight of burning children falling from factory windows presented the public and the authorities with a moral imperative: Something had to be done."

Soon after the fire, the New York State Legislature formed an investigative commission, which surveyed working conditions for four years, he said. This resulted in 36 new laws, including fire safety regulations, building codes, standards of sanitation, child labor laws and restricted work hours.

"On the one hand, this is a profoundly sad event to commemorate," said ILR Dean Harry Katz at the event. "On the other hand, it's uplifting to think about the effect that that single event had on the health and safety and child labor practices in our country."

Lyons also noted the historical and cultural context of the fire, such as the boom in building and industry at the time. Eight- to 10-story high-rise buildings were springing up and the city's infrastructure -- such as firefighting equipment -- could not keep pace, but real estate developers and factory owners did not want to slow progress. An influx of immigrants allowed for a cheap and nearly inexhaustible supply of labor, he said. The factory employed mostly young female recent immigrants: 100 of the 146 victims were Jewish, most of the remainder were Italian. Fifty-one of those killed were 14 to 18 years of age.

The Triangle Factory fire website, which received 30 million hits last year, now contains a comprehensive list of victims (recently updated) as well as several expanded features that allow the site to be used as a teaching tool, a study of the period, a resource for primary sources and a forum for interactive expression. As an archive dedicated to preserving and disseminating the history of labor and management, the Kheel Center stewards many original documents and secondary sources on the Triangle fire.

David Kessel is a freelance journalist in New York City.