A hundred years ago this March, a fire at a New York City sweatshop claimed the lives of 146 young immigrant workers, taking its place as one of the worst workplace disasters since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The workers were mostly recent Italian and Eastern European Jewish immigrants who came to the United States to seek a better life.

As the world's foremost repository of information about the Triangle Waist Co. fire, the Kheel Center at the ILR School's Catherwood Library is commemorating the anniversary of the tragedy with an exhibition and new information about the victims and the legacy of the tragedy.

This commemoration includes an expanded website -- one of the most popular at Cornell, with 30 million hits in 2010 -- where visitors learn about the Triangle fire and its impact, visualize the events and conduct research. The site includes:

Visitors can also contribute to the site by sending details, photographs or other information that adds to the body of knowledge about the fire.

"The fire was a turning point for New York City, the American labor movement and workplace and fire safety legislation," said Curtis Lyons, director of the Kheel Center. "Many of the victims were women, some as young as 14, and they'd recently come to the United States to seek a better life -- we owe it to them to remember what happened."

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.

Gwen Glazer is a writer at Cornell University Library.