‘My beautiful radium,’’ Marie Curie once said of the element that made her famous, earning her two Nobel Prizes. “It’s good for the people in the neighborhood and the people of Orange.’’ The playground that now stands on the site Richard Harbus “I think it’s a good idea they ,’’ resident Robin Laurent, 40, recently told The Post after learning of its past. Quietly tucked into a tree-lined residential neighborhood, it has been renamed High & Alden Street Park and features a playground - perhaps a fitting tribute to the young lives lost. Today, 100 years later, the young women’s bodies still glow in their graves, the effects of radiation poisoning.īut while their story is laden with tragedy, their deaths set the stage for one of the most famous workers-rights court cases in US history - and ultimately saved thousands of lives.įew if any residents in the town today know the history of the former plant site. Her body became racked by aches, and within two agonizing years, she was dead. Then Maggia’s teeth started inexplicably to fall out. The fact that they were also sudden local celebrities - dubbed the “ghost girls’’ because of their ever-present green glowing skin - didn’t hurt, either. It was lucrative - plus painting glow-in-the-dark radium on soldiers’ wristwatch faces meant she and her young female co-workers were helping in the war effort. in Orange, NJ, in 1917, and at first reveled in her job. The 19-year-old woman started working at the Radium Luminous Materials Corp. Amelia “Mollie” Maggia was the first to die.
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