After the terrible death of 146 people, most of them young women and girls, in the Triangle Factory Fire of 1911, they swung their support to the garment workers and the social reformers. Their actions set in motion the slow suicide of the machines—and the birth of modern America.
They made possible those union-built co-ops where Shelly Silver raised his family; made possible all the brilliant opportunities they would have. And Silver paid this inheritance forward by ensuring that, while he enriched himself, no Puerto Rican family or Chinese senior citizen would ever live on those empty lots.
“They would rather have the vacant lots and rats than have minority people there,” Francis Goldin, a member of the Lower East Side Joint Planning Council, told the Times about Silver and his friends.
https://kevinbaker.info/sheldon-silvers-biggest-sin-neighborhood/
