Magazine, The Immigrant Experience, By Ray Sanchez, CNN
New York (CNN)When the 19-story Twin Parks North West building in the Bronx turned into a deathtrap one week ago, nearly all of the 17 people who perished — including eight children — were immigrants from Gambia and other West African countries.
“They were our aunts and uncles and others who were coming to our food pantry since the pandemic,” said Ajifanta Marenah, secretary of the Gambian Youth Organization, just blocks from the site of last Sunday’s fire. “This is a community of people who have to work two or three jobs to make ends meet.”
For over a century, the worst fires in New York City history have claimed the lives of immigrants.
Sunday’s fire was the city’s deadliest since 1990, when arson at an unlicensed Bronx nightclub killed 87 people, mostly Honduran and Central American immigrants.
The Happy Land Social Club inferno — about a mile from the Twin Parks North West building — was the deadliest in the city since the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in Manhattan, where 146 young mostly Jewish and Italian seamstresses perished.
These historic fires parallel immigrant life in the city.
“Those who are most vulnerable, and least valued, live and work in precarious situations often under conditions where legal and regulatory enforcement is lax,” said Elissa Sampson, a lecturer in Jewish studies at Cornell University.
“The law, that is building and fire code, is insufficient as well as often poorly enforced, and this is the case today in the Bronx and it was as well in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory.”
All victims died of smoke inhalation
Outside a middle school next to the fire-damaged building, a makeshift memorial emerged with flowers, candles and photos of those who died and others still in hospitals.
The dead included Haji Dukary, 49, his wife, Haja Dukureh, 37, and their three young children. Fatoumata Tunkara, 43, and her 6-year-old son, Omar Jambang. Fatoumata Drammeh, 50, and three of her children. There was Seydou Toure, 12, and 5-year-old sister Haouwa Mahamadou. The youngest victim was 2-year-old Ousmane Konteh.
Across from the school, classmates put up a poster-sized photo of Seydou with handwritten messages. A cardboard box on the side of El Triangulo deli grocery shielded candles from the cold wind.
All 17 victims died of smoke inhalation, according to the city medical examiner. A communal funeral was to be held at the Islamic Cultural Center of the Bronx on Sunday morning, according to a board member.
“A lot of essential workers come from our community,” said Marenah, 24, referring to the people who continued to show up to work during the Covid-19 lock downs.
“We have taxi drivers and construction workers. There are teachers, social workers and people at nursing homes.”
The storefront Gambian Youth Organization filled up last week with donated clothes, boxes of baby formula, toys and other items for the displaced.
“There were parades for essential workers,” said Maimuna Gassama, 24, a volunteer at the organization. “People talk about how immigrants are the backbone of the country and then when it really comes down to their needs… they fall through the cracks.”
The fire started when one of several space heaters that had been running for days malfunctioned in a third-floor duplex, a fire official told CNN.
The self-closing front door of the unit failed to close, according to fire officials. The fire-fueled smoke spread upward to the 15th floor, where another door failed to close automatically. Victims were found in stairwells on every floor, many in cardiac and respiratory arrest.
The building’s doors and reports of malfunctioning smoke alarms are a focus of the investigation, Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said. Residents of the 120-unit building said fire alarms often malfunctioned.
There were at least four heat-related complaints and one complaint about a defective self-closing door reported last year to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, according to the agency. Some violations had been corrected, HPD records showed.
