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Firetrap!

The Happy Land Club did not live up to its name in the early morning hours of March 25, 1990. The tiny club had been filled with fun-seekers, mostly Honduran immigrants. All but five of the 92 people inside died in a fire set by the angry boyfriend of a club employee.

Julio Gonzalez was mad—really mad. First, he had lost his job. Now he was broke. He had to hustle spare change from strangers on the streets of New York City. And to top it all off, his girlfriend, Lydia Feliciano, had just said she did not want to see him anymore.

Gonzalez hoped to win Lydia back. On March 24, 1990, he went to see her at the Happy Land Club in the Bronx. Lydia worked there taking tickets and checking coats. But things didn't go the way Gonzalez had planned. The two began to argue. “Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” Lydia cried.

Gonzalez, who had been drinking, wasn't thinking clearly. He became furious. He started swearing at her. At that point, the club bouncer told him to leave. “I will be back,” Gonzalez threatened. “I will shut this place down.”

Gonzalez kept his dire threat. Around three o'clock the next morning, he returned to the club. He carried with him a plastic can filled with gasoline. He had paid a dollar for it at a local gas station. Gonzalez splashed the gasoline around the club's front door. Then he tossed a lighted match on the gas. As the flames climbed up the door, Gonzalez just stood there and watched. Then he walked down the street and back to his room.

Inside the club were dozens of young people. Most were immigrants from Honduras. They had packed the place, coming to dance and have a good time. They were listening to the music they loved—salsa, reggae, and calypso. One lucky man had left at one o'clock. The club was too crowded for him. “You could barely move,” he later said. “I had a feeling something could go wrong.”

Even without Julio Gonzalez, there were lots of things that could have gone wrong at Happy Land. The club was unsafe. The city had ordered it closed 16 months earlier. The small, two-story club was a firetrap. It had no fire exits or emergency lights. It had no sprinkler system. It didn't have a fire alarm.

Lots of people knew about the fire hazards. A man named Jerome Ford explained how he had tried to warn his family. He had spoken to his niece, his cousin, and his wife's three brothers. “I told them not to go,” he said. “But kids are kids. I knew it was dangerous.”

The dangers meant nothing to Elias Colon, the club's owner. To him, the Happy Land Club was a great moneymaker. So he kept the place open. Although the city had told him to close it, officials did nothing to enforce the order. One city worker explained how hard it was to get such places closed down. “You shut them down one day, and they reopen the next,” he said.

New York City had hundreds of these clubs. They were all illegal. None had the city licenses they needed. Few, if any, met the city's fire code. But these “social clubs” seemed to fill a void in people's lives. They gave immigrants a place to relax with their own people. They were an old tradition in New York City.

The Happy Land Club was not an exception. Most of the regulars were looking for a club of their own. They had settled on Happy Land. The prices were low, and the music was loud. It even felt a bit like home. “It was great,” said one man. “You could dance, you could get a drink. It was beautiful.”

But there was nothing beautiful about it in the early morning of March 25,1990. The blaze Gonzalez had set spread quickly. Thick black smoke billowed up inside the club. It soon reached the second-story dance floor, where all the people were. Not only did this area lack fire exits, it also lacked windows. The people up here were trapped. Some ran to the stairs, hoping to get down to the first floor. But the fire stopped most of them. A few did make it down. But even then, there was no way out. There were two small windows on the ground floor. But both were blocked. One had bars, and the other held an air conditioner.

Firefighters got to the scene as fast as they could. They heard no screams. They saw no one fleeing from the building. The people trapped inside were already dead. Sixty-eight bodies were found on the second floor. Nineteen more were discovered on the ground level. Among the dead was Happy Land owner Elias Colon.

It was the smoke, not the fire, that killed most people. The smoke suffocated them before they could react. Some died so fast they still had their drinks in their hands; some still had their legs wrapped around a bar stool. Many had thrown themselves into corners, hoping the smoke wouldn't reach that far.

Firefighter Richard Harden helped put out the fire. Then he helped remove the bodies. The tale of terror still showed on the victims' faces. “Some looked horrified,” he said. “Some looked like they were in shock. There were some people holding hands. Some people had torn their clothes off in their panic to get out.”

The Happy Land fire was the worst fire New York City had seen in a long time. [The worst ever had occurred exactly 79 years earlier. On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist factory had caught fire. That blaze killed 146 women. They, too, were mostly immigrants.]

Five people made it out of Happy Land alive. These five found a seldom-used door on the first floor. Outside, a gate blocked their escape. They managed to force it open and get away. One of the five was Julio Gonzalez's ex-girlfriend, Lydia Feliciano.

Meanwhile, back in his room, Gonzalez went to bed. The police arrested him there later in the day. Gonzalez quickly admitted his guilt. When he realized what he had done, he began to cry. “I got angry,”he said. “The devil got into me.” His tears may have been sincere. But they couldn't bring back the 87 people who died in the Happy Land Club.