Frances Perkins Place (Manhattan)
Present name:West 46th Street
Location:Between Ninth Avenue and Tenth Avenue
Honoree:  Frances Perkins (1880-1965) was Secretary of Labor for all four terms of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration. The first woman to hold a cabinet position, she implemented most of the New Deal social welfare programs, including Social Security. Early in her career, she lived in Hell’s Kitchen and worked at Hartley House, a social agency at 413 West 46th Street. On March 25, 1911, while working as Executive Director of the New York office of the National Consumers League, she witnessed the deadly Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. In the aftermath of that disaster, she chaired the Committee on Safety that led to important new laws to improve worker health and safety. With the Social Security Act, she implemented unemployment benefits; pensions for elderly Americans; and welfare for the poorest Americans. She pushed to reduce workplace accidents and helped craft laws against child labor. Through the Fair Labor Standards Act, she established the first minimum wage and overtime laws for American workers, and defined the standard 40-hour work week. Perkins also dealt with urgent labor issues during World War II, when women assumed skilled positions in the munitions and aircraft industries. (Speaker Johnson)
LL:2022/54