Happy Land fire
The Event A deliberately set fire in a dance hall
kills eighty-seven people
Date March 25, 1990
Place Happy Land social club, Bronx, New York
An unemployed factor y worker, whose girlfriend worked at a
second floor social club that catered to New York City’s Hon-
duran immigrant population, set fire to the club’s single
exit, trapping scores of patrons.
Lydia Feliciano worked the coat check at Happy
Land, one of dozens of so-called social clubs in New
York City, neighborhood ethnic clubs that sold large
quantities of untaxed liquor in facilities that often
did not meet minimum safety codes. Happy Land
had operated under the radar for years (although it
had been investigated in 1988 and its operators told
to shut down as it had no sprinklers or fire alarms
and insufficient fire exits). Early on the morning of
March 25, 1990, club patrons—no one knows ex-
actly how many—crowded the tiny (sixty-by-twenty-
foot) hall to celebrate Carnivale, a festival akin to
Mardi Gras. Feliciano’s on-again, off-again boy-
friend of six years, Julio González, a Cuban army de-
serter and ex-con who had just lost his job at a
Queens lamp factory, argued with her about her
working at the club.
After a drunken González was ejected from the
club at about 2:30a.m., he roamed the streets
around the club for nearly an hour until he pur-
chased a dollar’s worth of gasoline at an Amoco sta-
tion three blocks away (he told the attendant his car
had broken down). Returning to the club, he
poured the gas into the hall’s only open stairwell,
tossed several matches into the puddle, and then
crossed the street to watch. The fire exploded up the
wooden stairwell; patrons immediately panicked,
as the only other exit had been locked to prevent
customers from dodging the cover charge. Within
three minutes, the hall was engulfed. Thick toxic
smoke from the building’s insulation and the
bar’s plastic supplies was trapped in the windowless
hall. Firefighters later determined that most of
the eighty-seven fatalities were from asphyxiation.
González returned to his apartment and passed
out, his gas-soaked clothing next to his bed when he
was arrested hours later. He admitted setting the fire
and was eventually sentenced to 174 concurrent
twenty-five-year sentences (eighty-seven counts of
arson, eighty-seven counts of murder)—at the time
the most severe prison sentence in New York judicial
history.
Impact Although the fire initially created a bond
within the city’s Honduran community, efforts to
forge a permanent ethnic organization lost steam
amid allegations of illegal immigrants patronizing
the club. Although the number of casualties stirred
outrage over the operation of unlicensed clubs, the
building’s owners argued that such clubs were an in-
tegral (and inevitable) part of neighborhood socie-
ties and that the heinous nature of this arson was
such that it could have affected virtually any facility.
A record $5 billion class-action lawsuit brought
against the building owners and the city by survivors
and victims’ families was unsuccessful, as the city had
theoretically closed the club two years earlier.
Further Reading
Bukowski, R. W., and R. C. Spetzler. “Analysis of
the Happyland Social Club Fire with Hazard I.”404 Happy Land fire The Nineties in America
The Happy Land social club, where Julio González committed an
act of arson that killed eighty-seven people on the night of March
25, 1990.(AP/Wide World Photos)