The Happy Land Fire, March 25, 1990

The Fire

The address was 1959 Southern Boulevard, in the West Farms section of the Bronx, a few blocks from the Bronx Zoo and a few blocks from Theodore Roosevelt High School. The Happy Land Social Club occupied the ground floor — vestibule, bar, coat-check, the foot of a narrow staircase — and the second floor, where the dance space ran roughly sixty feet by twenty, with tables along the walls and a DJ booth in one corner. On the night of March 24 and into the morning of March 25, the club was holding a Honduras Carnival celebration. About ninety-three people were inside. The crowd was predominantly Honduran and predominantly Garifuna, a majority under twenty-five. The DJ was a Garifuna man named Ruben Valladares, working through a mixed Latin-Caribbean set: merengue, salsa, reggae, calypso. Honduran flag bunting hung along the walls. A hand-lettered sign in Spanish listed drink prices.

Julio González was thirty-five, Cuban-born, in the country since the Mariel boatlift of 1980. He had packed boxes at a lamp factory in Queens for roughly ten years and had lost the job. He lived in a boarding house at 31 Buchanan Place and was two weeks behind on rent. Six weeks earlier he had broken up with Lydia Feliciano, who worked the coat-check at Happy Land. He came to the club that night to try to win her back. She ended it again. The bouncer put him out. As he was leaving, he shouted that he would be coming back.

He walked to a nearby Amoco station, picked up a plastic container of the kind discarded behind a service station, and bought a dollar’s worth of gasoline. He returned to 1959 Southern Boulevard. He poured the gasoline at the base of the only staircase that connected the second floor to the street, lit two paper matches, and pulled down the metal front gate behind him.

The fire that resulted was small by tonnage. What killed the people inside was the geometry of the room above it. The staircase was the single exit; the side doors had been padlocked by the operators to keep out non-paying entrants; the windows were barred or blocked. The interior was wood paneling, low-density fiberboard ceiling tiles, vinyl, plastic and crepe-paper Carnival decorations — all combustible. NIST engineers later modeled the upstairs space and found that carbon monoxide reached fatal concentrations within approximately two minutes.¹ Most of those who died died of smoke inhalation. Few of the bodies were burned. Some were found with their drinks still in their hands. Six lay within several feet of the front door. Others had punched a hole through a wall into an adjoining union hall and found the opening too small to climb through.

One hundred and fifty firefighters arrived from the Fire Department of New York. The fire was out in five minutes. The building was condemned and demolished within twenty-four hours.² Eighty-seven people were dead. Six survived: Feliciano, near the entrance with the coats; Valladares, the DJ, who escaped with second- and third-degree burns over half his body and spent roughly a year in a hospital; the wife of the club’s operator, Elias Colon, who himself died inside; and three others. Valladares, interviewed thirty-two years later, would put it this way: “It never goes away. You try not to think about it. It’s never easy.”³

González walked home to Buchanan Place, removed his gasoline-soaked clothes, and fell asleep. He was arrested later that day, after Feliciano told the police about the fight, and confessed. In August 1991 a Bronx jury convicted him on one hundred and seventy-four counts — eighty-seven of murder, eighty-seven of arson — and the court sentenced him to twenty-five years to life on each. New York law required the sentences to run concurrently when the deaths arose from a single act, which made the actual sentence twenty-five years to life. Several papers reported the consecutive math instead and printed the figure of 4,250 years. That figure was not the sentence.⁴

The Building

The lethality lay in the building, not the fire. The small two-story commercial structure on Southern Boulevard housed a club whose only egress had been deliberately sealed. Side doors padlocked from the inside. Windows barred. The front staircase the single way out. The building had not been designed as an assembly space, and no one with regulatory authority had ever permitted it to operate as one.

Sixteen months before the fire, in November 1988, the Buildings Department had issued a vacate order on 1959 Southern Boulevard. The cited violations were a near-complete inventory of what the structure lacked: no secondary exit, no emergency lighting, no sprinkler system, an inadequate stairwell. The club closed temporarily. A task force convened by the mayor’s office to address unlicensed social clubs sent inspectors to verify compliance, twice; both times the building was empty; the inspectors moved on. The club reopened. Almost a year later, on November 1, 1989, the Buildings Department issued a second closure order. Mayor David Dinkins, holding his first press conference on the fire on the morning of March 26, cited the date directly from the city’s records.⁵ The building had been under one order or another for sixteen months. It had been closed neither time.

The mechanics of the failure were not particularly mysterious. No single agency owned the case file. Vacate orders sat on a list. The list was long. Bronx social clubs ranked low on it. The constituency affected — poor immigrants, a substantial share undocumented — had no political weight that traveled to the desks where enforcement priorities were set. The Fire Department of New York, the Buildings Department, and the Police Department each held a slice of jurisdiction; coordination among the three was effectively nonexistent. Buildings Commissioner Charles M. Smith Jr., facing reporters the morning after the fire, described the club as a firetrap, which it had been documented as being for sixteen months. Dinkins, eleven weeks into his term, walked the scene that morning and announced an emergency sweep, deploying twenty specialized inspection teams across the boroughs within the week.

Behind the operating club stood a chain of people who held paper on it. The club’s operator was a man named Elias Colon, who died in the fire that night; an eviction trial against him had been scheduled in housing court for March 28, three days later. The primary leaseholder was Jay Weiss, who held the building through Little Peach Realty Inc. with a partner, Morris Jaffe. The building itself was owned by Alex DiLorenzo III. Weiss at the time was the husband of the actress Kathleen Turner. The New Yorker’s Andy Logan, in a piece published on April 23, quoted Turner on her husband’s connection to the property: the fire, she said, “was unfortunate but could have happened at a McDonald’s.”⁶ The line traveled. It became, in the months that followed, a shorthand for the distance between the people who held the lease and the people who held the cover charge.

Weiss and DiLorenzo were each charged with misdemeanors. Each pleaded guilty in May 1992. Weiss paid sixty thousand dollars toward a planned community center for the affected families and was sentenced to fifty hours of community service; DiLorenzo paid ninety thousand and a comparable service obligation.⁷ No felony charges were brought against either man. A civil suit filed by the victims’ families against the owners, the leaseholders, the city, and several building-material manufacturers had originally sought five billion dollars. It settled in July 1995 for fifteen million eight hundred thousand dollars in total — roughly one hundred and sixty-three thousand per victim. Families publicly called the settlement unjust.⁸ The community center toward which the misdemeanor pleas had been directed was, two decades later, still not built.

The paperwork had done the killing as much as the gasoline had.

The Institution

The unlicensed social club was not, in the geography of immigrant New York, a deviant institution. It was a piece of community infrastructure: where birthdays and baptisms and anniversaries took place, where Carnival was observed, where neighbors gathered on the night of an election back home to wait for results. In neighborhoods that had no community center and no church hall available on a Saturday night, the club functioned as the substitute for both.

The scale of the institution before March 25, 1990 was substantial and largely uncatalogued. The Police Department’s working estimate was that more than two hundred locations were selling alcohol without a license. The task force that the Dinkins administration deployed in the days after the fire identified two hundred and twenty-seven active sites and another twelve hundred and fifty so-called defunct sites whose status required confirmation. Citywide, the running estimate of unlicensed clubs converged on roughly a thousand.

The city had been warned twice in the two decades preceding. In October 1976, an arson at the Puerto Rican Social Club in the South Bronx killed twenty-five people. In August 1988, a suspicious fire at a club called El Hoyo on Jerome Avenue, also in the Bronx, killed seven and injured twelve firefighters. The El Hoyo fire occurred the same year that Happy Land’s first vacate order was issued. The pattern the regulatory response after Happy Land was praised for addressing was the pattern those two earlier fires had already described.

The post-fire response was, by the standards of city enforcement, unusually decisive. Dinkins’s twenty inspection teams worked through the spring and summer of 1990. Within one year, an estimated ninety percent of the thousand-odd unlicensed clubs in the city had been shut down or compelled to legalize. The cross-agency mechanism the task force developed — bringing FDNY, Buildings, Police, and the State Liquor Authority into a single coordinated response — was institutionalized under the acronym MARCH, the Multi-Agency Response to Community Hotspots, an apparatus the city carried forward against problem premises across the rest of the decade.

By the end of the decade, the enforcement after Happy Land had worked in the way the enforcement after Triangle Shirtwaist had worked. Driven by mass death, sustained through one or two cycles of political attention, and then absorbed back into the city’s standing tolerance for the kind of systemic risk that accumulates in poor neighborhoods. By the late 1990s, the real-estate values climbing in the former club neighborhoods of the South Bronx and parts of Brooklyn were doing what the inspectors could not — pricing out the storefronts in which the clubs had operated, pushing the institution outward toward the edges of the city or downward into basements and house parties. The institution adapted. It did not disappear.

The Dead

Eighty-seven dead. Of the eighty-seven, fifty-nine were Honduran. Of the fifty-nine Hondurans, roughly seventy percent — about forty-one — were Garifuna. Twenty came from other Latin American countries. About nine were United States citizens, most of them Puerto Rican. Sixty-one were men. Twenty-six were women. Half were twenty-five or younger. Five had been students at Theodore Roosevelt High School, a few blocks away.

The work the dead had done was the work that holds the city up at hours and in places its readers do not see. Domestic workers in Manhattan apartments. Cooks and dishwashers in restaurant kitchens. Building maintenance staff. Garment workers. Hospital aides. Gypsy-cab drivers. Child-care workers. Factory hands at the small manufacturers still operating in the South Bronx and Long Island City. Their addresses ran along the corridor of West Farms and Tremont — most of the dead lived within walking distance of the club — and outward from there to Morrisania, to Hunts Point, and across to the parts of Brooklyn that the Honduran community had reached: Bushwick, East New York.

Documentation status, for the eighty-seven, was mixed. A substantial share were undocumented; the precise proportion was never tabulated, and the families and consular officials who handled the aftermath had reasons not to tabulate it. Lack of papers complicated body identification, complicated family notification across borders, and complicated the civil claims that followed; it did not legally bar any of these, but it slowed each of them. Some victims were identified only by their jewelry or by the clothes they had worn. Some families asked that names not be published.

The collective Mass took place at the Church of St. Thomas Aquinas, 1900 Crotona Parkway, a few blocks from the site. Mayor Dinkins attended. Cardinal O’Connor attended. Bishop Francisco Garmendia — the first Hispanic auxiliary bishop of New York, the vicar of the South Bronx — sat with the families. The president of Honduras, Rafael Leonardo Callejas, attended, beside the Honduran Consul General. O’Connor committed the archdiocese to matching a twenty-five-thousand-dollar donation from the Honduran government toward a future Bronx community center, and pledged, from his own funds, the figure of nine hundred ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents. The Honduran consulate arranged the repatriation of remains for families who requested burial at home. Some of the dead were buried in Trujillo and the smaller towns of Honduras’s North Coast.

The phone calls reached the villages on Honduras’s North Coast through a few houses that had working lines. La Ceiba. Trujillo. The villages strung along the coast east toward the border with Nicaragua. Word traveled house to house. Word traveled village to village. By the time the Mass began at St. Thomas Aquinas on Crotona Parkway, the news had crossed the Caribbean and arrived at the doors of people whose children, brothers, sisters, cousins had been dancing the night before and were no longer alive.

The Community

By the 1990 census, roughly twenty-two thousand Honduran-born people lived in New York City, a figure that almost everyone working with the community treated as a substantial undercount given the undocumented share. Community estimates ran from forty thousand to sixty thousand. The population was mid-tier in size relative to the other Latin American populations of the city — much smaller than the Dominican or Puerto Rican populations, comparable to the Mexican population then beginning its rapid growth — and near zero in political visibility.

Most of the Hondurans in New York were Garifuna. The Garifuna are an Afro-indigenous people whose ancestry traces to free Africans — escaped or shipwrecked from the slaving routes of the seventeenth century — who merged on the island of St. Vincent with the Kalinago and Arawak peoples already living there. In the late 1790s the British suppressed a Garifuna resistance on St. Vincent and exiled roughly twenty-five hundred survivors to the island of Roatán, off the coast of Honduras — an exile the community marks each spring. From Roatán the Garifuna spread along the Caribbean coast of Central America: the North Coast of Honduras, southern Belize, the Atlantic coast of Guatemala and Nicaragua. By the second quarter of the twentieth century, Garifuna men had begun arriving in New York and New Orleans through the merchant marine.⁹

The distinction between Garifuna and the broader Honduran or Latino population was not nominal. Garifuna people spoke Garifuna — a language with an Arawakan base and Carib, French, English, and Spanish elements — as well as Spanish, and many in New York spoke English besides. Their religion was syncretic Catholic and ancestral; the dügü, a several-day ceremony for communication with ancestors, had no analogue in the Catholicism of the wider Latin diaspora. Their music was punta and paranda, distinct from the merengue and salsa that the wider Latin diaspora carried into New York’s nightclubs. (The night of the fire, the set was mixed Latin and Caribbean — what the room danced to was not, in the strict sense, Garifuna music.) Many Garifuna in the United States identified as Black before they identified as Honduran. The American racial schema, reading them by appearance, sorted them into African-American; they rejected the flattening.

The geographic concentration in New York was, and remained, West Farms and the South Bronx — the corridor of Southern Boulevard, 174th Street, Boston Road, and Crotona Parkway. By the 2010s a Garifuna American heritage organization would describe West Farms as the largest Garifuna village in the world. In 1990, that was already substantially the case, and the city did not know it.

The word Garifuna had not appeared in the mainstream English-language New York press before the fire. It was a word anthropologists used. Sarah England’s later study of Afro-Central Americans in New York would describe the racial space the community occupied — Black-coded but Spanish-speaking, immigrant but not Latino in the way the city’s editors used the term — as one for which the city’s vocabulary had no slot. José Francisco Avila, a Garifuna community organizer who became one of the most visible community spokesmen after the fire, said it directly in an oral history recorded by the folklife documentation group City Lore: “I say I represent a community that up until March 25, 1990, no one knew.”¹⁰

The first sustained piece in the mainstream English-language press to use the Garifuna name and trace the community’s geography in the Bronx was Tim Golden’s article in the Times on April 1, 1990 — “In the Saddest Way, New York Learns About Hondurans.”¹¹ It ran a week after the fire.

In the months that followed, an umbrella body called FEDHONY — the Federation of Honduran Organizations of New York — formed to coordinate roughly twenty existing Honduran groups. FEDHONY accompanied families to court, processed civil claims, helped with the consular logistics of repatriation, and negotiated with the Dinkins administration for land on which to build the community center the city had publicly endorsed. The center was never built.

The Coverage

Day-one coverage was full. The New York Times ran four separate pieces on March 26: Ralph Blumenthal with the lead, headlined “Worst New York Fire Since 1911”;² James C. McKinley Jr. on the closure history, walking the reader through the November 1988 vacate order and the November 1, 1989 second order;⁵ James Barron on the bodies and the families searching the lists at the morgue; Don Terry on the social-club enforcement context. The Post and the Daily News led with tabloid front pages. Newsday put four reporters on the story. WNBC News broke it on its morning broadcast: David Diaz reporting from Southern Boulevard, Ralph Penza and Carol Jenkins anchoring from the studio. NY1, the city’s twenty-four-hour cable news channel, did not yet exist; it would launch in September 1992.

The Spanish-language press named victims faster than the English-language press did. El Diario / La Prensa ran obituary-format profiles of the dead for weeks.

Times coverage continued through the end of March: Josh Barbanel on the ownership chain on the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth; a Sunday piece on the twenty-ninth profiling seven of the eighty-seven victims; Robert McFadden on Dinkins’s enforcement crackdown on the thirty-first; Tim Golden’s Garifuna community piece on April 1.¹¹ The April 1 piece used the word Garifuna in the Times for what was, by every available account, the first time.

The Sunday profile package was of seven victims out of eighty-seven. The gap between seven and eighty-seven was, in numerical form, the editorial decision the paper had made about how much identifying labor it could afford to spend on the dead. The comparison the math invited was Triangle Shirtwaist: in 1911, the major papers had named the Triangle dead individually within seventy-two hours. The Triangle dead had been mostly young immigrant women — Jewish and Italian — and the papers had treated them with the granularity due to civic catastrophe. The Happy Land dead, mostly young immigrant men and women, Honduran and Garifuna, received the granularity due to seven of eighty-seven.

Coverage faded between April 8 and April 10. The 1991 trial brought brief returns. Sentencing brought a brief return. After that, largely gone.

That the fade was visible to media critics inside the first three weeks is itself documented. Sydney Schanberg, then writing a column for Newsday, published a piece on April 13 — nineteen days after the fire — under the headline “Please, Some Respect for 87 Who Died.”¹² The column was a complaint about the speed at which the city’s papers had moved on.

Years later, the geographer Ray Bromley, who had studied the disaster’s aftermath, would put the comparison this way: poor people’s fire tragedies are big news for a very short time and then they fade away. The Triangle Shirtwaist workers, he noted, had had to jump out of the windows of the tenth floor — visible, spectacular, industrial, during the workday, in front of a crowd of bystanders on Greene Street. The Happy Land victims had been sitting at two in the morning, drinking beer and listening to music. They were celebrating. The enjoyment of life, in the wrong zip code, did not generate crusades.³

In 1995, a granite monument inscribed with all eighty-seven names was erected in a small triangular park at Southern Boulevard and East Tremont Avenue, across the street from where the building had stood. The block of Southern Boulevard in front of the site was renamed the Plaza of the Eighty-Seven. On March 25 each year a small ceremony takes place there — members of the local community board, a contingent from the Fire Department and the Police Department, family members from the Bronx and from out of state, occasionally an official from the Honduran consulate. The names are read aloud.¹³

Also drawn on: Joe Flood, The Fires (Riverhead, 2010).