New research: Sylvia Pankhurst and the fire at Public School 62

On 7 April, in the last days of her 1911 lecture tour, Sylvia Pankhurst visited Public School 62 on New York's lower East Side. According to the Evening World, this was an 'unexpected visit' which indicates that Sylvia had planned it herself. She was impressed by what she saw, telling a reporter "We have nothing like this in England . . . That's why I never went to public school" (Evening World 8 April 1911). It's an intriguing comment. According to Sylvia, her father Dr Richard Pankhurst had wanted his daughters to attend school in London, but her mother Emmeline Pankhurst was resolutely opposed fearing this would hamper their individuality. When the family moved back to Manchester in the early 1890s, Sylvia was sent to Manchester High School for Girls where she felt very much like an outsider. Her father, an agnostic, had his children excused from religious instruction and Sylvia found many teachers as well as pupils were hostile to her family's radical politics. What was it about P.S. 62 (as it was known) that Sylvia found so attractive?

Young Sylvia Pankhurst (image from E. Sylvia Pankhurst papers, IISG)

Yesterday, Morgan and I went to the lower East Side to find out more about this visit and its impact on Sylvia. P.S. 62 was situated on Hester Street between Norfolk Street and Essex Street facing Seward Park. In 1911 it was claimed to be the 'biggest school in the world', (Evening World 8 April 1911). One account described it as a 'white granite building, pillared, porticoed and five stories high' (Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange, Syracuse University Press, 2000, p10). In its place today is a large basketball court overlooked by high-rise blocks of flats.

The site of P.S. 62 today

To find out what had happened, we made the short walk across Seward Park to the nearby branch of the New York Public Library. Directed to local history and archives on the third floor, we met Andrew Fairweather who kindly told us about the school's fate. In the late 1920s, this vast structure found itself in the path of the F train subway line and so it was knocked down and replaced by the Seward Park High School.

Andrew sent me a history of P.S. 62 which revealed the scope of the school's work and a clue to Sylvia's admiration for it. P.S. 62 opened in 1905 and was described as 'truly a temple dedicated to learning', with two shops, two gymnasiums, shower baths, science rooms, 'large airy classrooms' and 'the largest auditorium and lobby built in an elementary school' (Robert B. Brodie, 'The Passing of Public School 62'). It was in that 'magnificent auditorium' that Sylvia attended the school's morning assembly of 1,200 students who sang 'in beautiful harmony'. (Evening World 8 April 1911).

The school was particularly associated with the local District Superintendent of schools, Julia Richman (1855-1912). Born to a middle-class Jewish family in New York, Richman chose to help impoverished children who lived on the lower East Side. At the beginning of the twentieth century, this part of New York was where many immigrants first settled, a large proportion of them Jewish, fleeing anti-Semitic pogroms in the Tsarist Russian Empire. In the New World, they encountered overcrowded housing to live in and sweatshops to work in. Richman evidently conceived of schools as playing a reforming and elevating role and P.S. 62 would have a number of prominent alumni, including the successful basketball player Nat Holman and the photographer Dorothea Lange, most famous for capturing the dispossessed of Depression Era America. Richman rented a home near the school which functioned as a Settlement House.

Julia Richman (1855-1912)

One of the arguments in A Suffragette in America is that Sylvia was profoundly influenced by a number of Settlement Houses, particularly those run by women. It is not hard to understand why Sylvia woukd have wanted to see P.S. 62 and why she felt it to be a progressive institution. Although Richman championed assimilation, with the cultural erasure that implies, she nevertheless refused to cast the children of the lower East Side as lifelong, 'foreign' outsiders. Likewise, Sylvia resisted those in the suffrage movement who did not believe that working-class women could be fighters for their own emancipation.

On 8th April, the Evening World reported Sylvia's visit to the school, which is how I was able to find out about it. But in the report, Sylvia's visit is incidental to the main story: the outbreak of a fire at the school. Sylvia had just just left when the fire alarms began to ring, but it's likely she would have heard the commotion: 'the east side was thrown into an uproar by the engines responding to the third alarm.' (Evening World). The story in the papers was one of praise for the orderly evacuation of the huge school which ensured the safety of all the students.

We can understand how fearful local residents must have been when we recall that on 25 March 1911 a fire had broken out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, on the top floors of a building in Greenwich Village, close to the lower East Side. Because the managers habitually locked the doors (if workers had to file out of one door they could be searched before leaving), the workers found themselves trapped. That day, 146 workers, most of them women, most of them from immigrant backgrounds, were killed in the fire, or in desperately fleeing the flames by jumping to their deaths on the pavement below.

Only two days before the fire alarms sounded at P.S. 62, thousands of people marched through New York in the funeral procession organised by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union for the Triangle's victims. Sylvia Pankhurst was one of those who joined the procession. If she heard the alarms on the 7th April, she must have been fearful of the outcome.

Funeral procession for the victims of the Triangle fire

Certainly, the pupils and local residents would have thought of the Triangle. Many would have known the victims, their families and co-workers. The difference in the outcome of the fire at P.S. 62 revealed that what happened at the Triangle was not inevitable: rather it was the consequence of employers who regarded their profits as of far greater value than the lives of their workers. That conclusion was an important one which Sylvia Pankhurst took from her 1911 tour.

Graffiti outside the site of the Triangle fire, 2017

I'll be talking more about Sylvia Pankhurst and her radical contact with the lower East Side on 2nd July at 265 Henry Street at 6.30pm. Go to the Facebook event to see more.