The fire moved fast. Eighty-seven people died -- nineteen on the ground floor, the rest upstairs, six of them found within feet of the front door. Some of the trapped victims punched through a wall into an adjoining union hall in a desperate attempt to escape. A hundred and fifty firefighters responded and extinguished the blaze in five minutes, but the damage was already absolute. Only five or six people survived. The death toll made it the deadliest fire in New York City since the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which had occurred on the same date -- March 25 -- seventy-nine years earlier, in 1911. Five of the dead were students at nearby Theodore Roosevelt High School. Each victim had a name, a family, a reason for being there that night. They had come to celebrate Carnival, and what they found was a building with no second exit, no sprinkler system, and no legal right to be operating.

Julio Gonzalez had served three years in a Cuban prison during the 1970s for desertion from the Cuban Army. In 1980, he faked a criminal record as a drug dealer to secure passage in the Mariel boatlift to the United States. By March 1990, he was two weeks behind on rent and, according to the owner of his boarding house, "down to his last hope." After being thrown out of the Happy Land club following a confrontation with his former girlfriend, who worked there, Gonzalez walked to a nearby gas station, bought a dollar's worth of gasoline, and returned. He was arrested shortly after the fire and convicted of arson and 87 counts of murder. He was denied parole in March 2015 and died in prison in September 2016 at the age of 61.

The Happy Land social club had been ordered shut down for building code violations before the fire. An eviction trial against the club's operator was three days away. The Bronx District Attorney determined that the building's owner, Alex DiLorenzo III, and the primary leaseholder, Jay Weiss -- then the husband of actress Kathleen Turner -- were not criminally responsible, since they had tried to close the club and evict the tenant. But the city's Corporation Counsel filed misdemeanor charges against both men in February 1991, arguing they bore responsibility for the code violations their tenant created. Both pleaded guilty in May 1992, agreeing to community service and $150,000 toward a community center for Hondurans in the Bronx. A $5 billion lawsuit filed by victims' families was settled in July 1995 for $15.8 million -- roughly $163,000 per victim -- reduced by the landlord's unrelated financial difficulties.

The street outside the former Happy Land social club has been renamed "The Plaza of the Eighty-Seven." A memorial erected directly across from the site bears the names of all 87 victims. Theodore Roosevelt High School held a memorial service in April 1990 for its five lost students. The fire also left its mark on popular culture: it inspired a Law and Order episode, a Duran Duran song, and a track on Joe Jackson's Night and Day II album. When the Ghost Ship warehouse fire killed 36 people in Oakland, California, in December 2016, journalists immediately drew comparisons to Happy Land -- another informal gathering space operating in violation of building codes, another community devastated by the gap between how people actually live and what the law requires. The 87 people who died on Southern Boulevard that Carnival night in 1990 are remembered in bronze across the street from where they danced.