Yesterday’s rains left bright skies and brisk winds today: about as nice as can be expected this early in Spring.
So, of course, I went for a ride this afternoon. About 3.5 kilometers from my apartment I saw this:
I have passed that spot before, But today I couldn’t help but to notice how it was decorated.
As colorful as the flowers (made of crepe paper) and ribbons were, that spot—a pocket park at the intersection of Southern Boulevard and Tremont Avenue—cannot be festive. That block of Southern is called the Boulevard Ochenta y Siete: Boulevard 87.
And that name is the reason why that park can be decorated only in the sense that people who brave wars, disasters or other tragedies are “decorated” when medals are pinned on them.
On this date in 1990–35 years ago—Julio Gonzalez got into an argument with his ex-girlfriend, who worked at the Happy Land Social Club, across the street from the park. Bouncers escorted him out of the club. Out on the street, he shouted, vowing to have the club shut down—which, ironically, he (or someone else) could have done, as it operated without a license.
In his rage, he went to a nearby gas station and bought a gallon of gasoline, which he would pour onto the staircase—the only way in or out of that second-story club—and light it.
In the wee hours of that morning, revelers, most of them Hondurans celebrating Carnaval, packed the darkened space. By the time firefighters put out the blaze, 87 would lose their lives.
In a cruel irony, Gonzalez’s girlfriend, Lydia Feliciano, wasn’t there. In another terrible twist of fate, exactly 79 years earlier—25 March 1911–the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire claimed the lives of 146 workers, most of them young Italian and Jewish immigrant women. The Happy Land Fire was thus the deadliest conflagration in New York City since Triangle Shirtwaist—whose victims, like those at Happy Land, had no way out.
It wasn’t lost on me that I enjoyed an afternoon ride aboard Tosca, my Mercian fixed gear bike, during a beautiful Spring afternoon that just happened to be an anniversary of two of the worst tragedies to befall my hometown, New York, before 9/11.
