Happy Land fire
1990 arson fire in Bronx, New York
The Happy Land fire was an act of arson and mass murder that killed 87 people on March 25, 1990, in the Bronx in New York City, United States. The 87 victims were trapped in the unlicensed Happy Land social club, located at 1959 Southern Boulevard in the West Farms section of the Bronx. Most victims were young Hondurans celebrating Carnival, many of them part of the Garifuna American community. Cuban refugee Julio González, whose former girlfriend was employed at the club, was arrested soon afterward and ultimately convicted of arson and murder.
The fire was the deadliest in New York City since the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, and the deadliest in American territory since the Dupont Plaza Hotel fire in Puerto Rico in 1986 and the Winecoff Hotel fire in 1946.
Background
The building that housed Happy Land club was managed by Jay Weiss, the primary leaseholder, and Morris Jaffe. In 1987, Weiss and Jaffe's company, Little Peach Realty Inc., leased the building space for seven years to the club owner, Elias Colon, who died in the fire. An eviction trial against Colon had been scheduled to start on March 28, 1990, three days after the fire.
Before the blaze, Happy Land was ordered in November 1988 to close for building code violations including lack of fire exits, alarms or a sprinkler system. No follow-up by the fire department was documented.
“Happy Land fire” enters the record as 1990 arson fire in Bronx, New York. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Happy, Land and fire can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5652893. Authority coordinates are 40.843, -73.886. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1990, 1959, 1911 and 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “Happy Land fire” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.