The Hoboken Fires: A Timeline

1930s

In 1939, in a process that would have negative and even deadly ramifications for Hobokenites for generations, the government-sponsored Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) sent appraisers to assess Hoboken neighborhoods regarding their suitability for mortgage underwriting. Noting the “age and obsolescence” of the city’s dwellings, many of which dated from the turn of the prior century, the HOLC also cited the residents’ poverty and ethnic and racial backgrounds to justify “redlining” the city: it drew a line around the city on area maps, colored the regions red, and gave Hoboken a “D” rating—the worst possible grade, insisting that the city was unworthy of investment. Most of the HOLC’s negative remarks were made against Italian residents. “Italians are slowly replacing the better class of Americans as the latter move out of the city,” the appraiser stated. Following the redlined maps, mortgages would not be offered in so-called “hazardous” neighborhoods, and for generations local family ownership was nearly impossible to secure through bank loans, while slumlords discovered they could benefit from the rundown, subdivided rentals.

Late ’50s-’60s

Shipping containerization contributed to Hoboken’s economic decline. The city’s waterfront ports did not have enough land mass to cater to this new method of convenient, compact shipping. Hoboken, unable to adapt, lost much of its shipping industry, which moved to Newark, Elizabeth, or to Southern states. But factories continued to offer residents steady work.

Puerto Ricans began to migrate to Hoboken to work in factories, especially garment workshops and the Sweets Company of America factory, manufacturers of Tootsie Rolls, at Willow Avenue and Fifteenth Street. By the 1960s, Puerto Rican families would settle near the factory, on Willow Avenue between Eleventh and Thirteenth Street, as well in apartments on Bloomfield, Garden, and Park Avenue. The 1960 census reported 48,441 Hoboken residents, with 5,313 from Puerto Rico.

1967-70

Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society program was enacted with a sub-section called “The Model Cities Program ( MCP).” Several anti-poverty initiatives were authorized, including support for after-school tutoring programs, job-training courses, family-planning clinics, and improvements to parks and swimming pools. Private engineering firm Mayo Lynch, representing Hoboken, created the original application for “Model Cities Funds,” which was submitted in 1970. By 1970, Hoboken’s overall population had declined to 45,389, with Italians still the ethnic majority. The city’s Puerto Rican population had doubled, however, to 10,047. Cuban residents had also settled in the city, but they made up a much smaller portion of the population, numbering 2,296.

1972

A Model Cities Agency was formed in Hoboken, and its use of the new funds signaled the first step in the gentrification process. The agency focused on its Home Improvement Program (HIP), a subprogram of MCP that collaborated with United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Agency representatives referred to “rehabilitation,” while the city later used the term “renaissance.” The city allocated public funds into subsidies for low-interest mortgages for brownstone purchases, targeting middle class people from outside Hoboken, mainly from the New Jersey suburbs. These new “adventure seekers” —or “pioneers,” as they were dubbed by the media—were now able to obtain mortgages at a 3% interest rate as opposed to the 9% standard national rate. Redlining, the decades-old scourge, had long prevented residents from obtaining mortgages to purchase the properties in their own city.

1975

With the brownstone boom underway, Mayor Steven Cappiello announced that federal Model Cities initiatives (including the Home Improvement Program) would now be directed by a new local public-private body, the Community Development Agency (CDA). Developers would receive a direct infusion of federal dollars to rehabilitate multi-unit buildings, and the CDA would launch a public relations campaign to attract upwardly mobile professionals to Hoboken.

Hoboken and other cities began to pursue a strategy of dispersed urban renewal, partnering with local entrepreneurs and largely eschewing the Model City-era emphasis on poverty relief. The shift spelled the end of several programs, including subsidized preschool, which targeted the urban working class. The new funding model also did away with Model Cities’ requirement that community members participate in the planning process.

In Hoboken, Project Rehab and federal housing grants were directed to Applied Housing Associates, a local affordable-housing developer. Instead of demolishing and replacing older buildings, Applied Housing preferred to rehabilitate them with financing from HUD-backed bank loans. Its directors, Walter Barry and Joseph Barry (father and son), were committed advocates for low-income people: they hired Puerto Rican residents for key positions, invested in landscaping around their buildings, and secured a total of $2 million in compensation for tenants that they displaced. Without exception, Applied capped monthly rents at 25% of tenants’ income to ensure affordability.

1976

The Community Development Agency launched a promotional campaign designed to lure young professionals to Hoboken, sponsoring public events, printing brochures, and giving optimistic interviews in local newspapers. The CDA created a pamphlet with a thirty-stop annotated walking tour, which was distributed to visitors from its office on Washington Street. The following year, the CDA produced a more elaborate twenty-seven-page visitor’s guide, the cover of which barely pictured Hoboken at all. The CDA was focused on a new demographic: New York’s growing cadre of young corporate professionals. The agency and local developers hoped these young, upwardly mobile professionals (“yuppies”) would be willing to pay higher rents than current Hoboken residents for studios and one bedroom apartments in recently renovated buildings. With unemployment at 17% in Hudson County at the end of 1975 and a quarter of city residents on welfare, the capital for a continued real estate revival would have to come from elsewhere. The CDA hoped that private equity could replace sweat equity in Hoboken. The brownstoners of the late 1960s and early 1970s had flocked to Hoboken for its handsome and affordable housing stock, but the new yuppie commuters were more concerned with the short travel times to their jobs in lower Manhattan. Realtors’ ads emphasized proximity to the PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) train, which whisked commuters from Hoboken to Wall Street in under ten minutes for a 30¢ fare.

1979

In January 21, 1979, Hoboken experienced its worst fire in decades: 22 people were killed and 21 others were injured at 131 Clinton Street. This fire marked the beginning of the “arson for profit” epidemic that would consume the city. The victims, the Rampersads, were identified as Marji Rampersad (33), her children, Sandra (12), Inder (10), Tulsi (9), Sherman (4), Bevar (2), and two other children whose names were not given. The Drepauls also died in the fire: Jacob Drepaul (38), his wife, Kasturi (35), and their children, Rosanne (17), Adrian (16), Bill (14), Gaita (13), Raymond (9), Fatbay (7), and Pealey (6). Members of the Soto‐Torres family who died were identified as Placida Soto‐Torres (53), and her children, Manuel (21), Teresa (18), Margarita (16), and Marilyn (14). The owner of the building, Olga Ramos, was accused by authorities of arson but she denied those charges. No further action was taken. In addition to the deaths, this fire displaced 130 people.

1980

The deregulation of the banking sector and the resulting surge in financial and professional employment brought dramatic changes to America’s urban neighborhoods. Cities such as Hoboken absorbed thousands of so-called “yuppies.” On the blocks around Hoboken’s PATH station, the proportion of residents working in professional or managerial jobs leapt from one in twenty in 1970, to one in three by 1980, to one in two by 1990. Those commuters, almost all of them single or childless, wanted a very specific sort of housing: studios and one-bedrooms with upscale appointments. Along the blocks closest to the waterfront, where many buildings enjoyed views of the Manhattan skyline, the percentage of professional and managerial workers quadrupled during the 1980s; their ranks increased eightfold in the neighborhood just to the north. The proportion of professionals and managers at the southern end of Washington Street jumped from 5.8% in 1970 to nearly 34% by 1980. And on the blocks surrounding the PATH station, over 10% of residents were employed in finance, insurance, or real estate jobs, up from just 1% in 1970.

The supply of high-end apartment rentals and condos could not keep up with young professionals’ demand. In 1981, Hoboken’s residential vacancy rates fell under 1 percent. (By comparison, New York City’s vacancy rate was then 3%.) Two reasons caused this housing shortfall. The first was the widespread conversion of brownstones from multiple units back into single-family residences by middle-class homesteaders. Second, apartments in the city’s walk-up tenement buildings, which still made up one-third of Hoboken’s housing stock, were overwhelmingly occupied by families who enjoyed rent control on their seven-hundred-square-foot railroad flats. For landlords of those five-story tenements, profit beckoned. Yet New Jersey law compelled landlords to give tenants three years’ notice prior to converting to condos, and occupants could apply for up to five additional one-year extensions. Eager to cash in quickly on yuppies’ strong demand for renovated apartments, some landlords sought to remove their rent-controlled tenants with an organized program of harassment, neglect, and, most terrifyingly, arson.

1981

Hoboken’s City Council weakened the city’s rent control laws and made it easier for tenants to be evicted. Some landlords took advantage of loopholes in the city’s rent-control law to try to replace poorer tenants with better-off newcomers. One statute allowed owners to decontrol rents if they made capital improvements equaling 50, and later 100, percent of the structure’s (often artificially depressed) value. After finishing these improvements, a landlord could double or triple the original rents. For residents subsisting on Aid to Families with Dependent Children, pensions, or unsteady wages, such a rent increase was simply unsustainable. Many of those tenants left without a fight, or were paid off, and their apartments were re-rented at market rates.

The Hoboken City Council passed two pro-development measures that might have made arson seem a more lucrative option than removal by renovation. The new rules weakened rent control laws, and encouraged landlords to find a way to replace their low-income tenants with well-off renters. The first measure allowed a “hardship increase” that permitted owners to hike up rents if they could demonstrate that they did not make at least an 11.5% yearly profit from each unit. The second measure was the vacancy decontrol law, which the council passed over the objections of tenants-rights organizations which grew in size as the fires grew in number, and despite a petition of opposition signed by nine thousand residents. It allowed landlords to raise rents to “whatever the market could bear” if rent-controlled occupants vacated their apartments. Unscrupulous owners could now shift their efforts to tenant harassment and intimidation.

In 1981, arson became an almost daily scourge. In April, four arson-related fires over two days displaced sixteen families. A multi-alarm blaze on July 30 left seventeen more families homeless. That summer, three arson-related fires filled the five-story apartment building at 411 First Street with thick smoke. The owner, an absentee landlord, had repeatedly threatened her tenants that she would remove them, even if she had to resort to arson. And on September 2, a suspicious fire—the fourth that year—gutted the top floors of a building at Third and Madison Streets. Fifty-one residents, almost all Puerto Rican, were unable to return to their apartments. Most were unable to find another apartment in Hoboken’s inflated rental market. Hoboken Housing Authority director Joseph Caliguire was not sanguine about rehousing those displaced by the fire: “It will be almost impossible. The vacancy rate is nil. And in most cases, if there was a vacancy, they wouldn’t be able to afford it.”

Hoboken’s low-income tenants organized several groups to combat the arson campaign and the city ordinances that had encouraged it. In 1981, Puerto Rican residents and local Catholic clergy founded Por la Gente, which joined the recently formed tenants’ groups Emergency Coalition to Save Rent Control in Hoboken and Citizens United for New Action (CUNA, an acronym chosen because it means “cradle” in Spanish). Working together, these groups used direct action tactics to protest the arson wave. They papered the city with flyers that blamed gentrification for the fires. Tenants, they promised, would “not sit by while children are killed in arson fires” and Hoboken was “turned into a preserve for
the rich.” Above an image of a building engulfed in flame, block letters declared, “No more arson deaths! No more displacement! No more war against the poor!” At 1327 Willow Street, residents and Por la Gente volunteers began an around-the-clock arson watch. Meanwhile, Hoboken’s Tenant Union (an umbrella organization that included Por la Gente) challenged the city’s vacancy decontrol laws on legal and political grounds, with no immediate success. The union also appealed to the Hudson County and New Jersey district attorneys to investigate the arson for profit.

On October 13, 1981, three adjacent buildings at 65, 67, and 69 Park Avenue were consumed by an arson fire. The victims were two young boys, Javier Rosa (2) and Modesto Echavarria (7). Their mother and sister survived after jumping out of their third-story window; the two boys were found together in their bathtub. At the time of the fire, the buildings’ smoke detectors were either missing or broken, and their fire alarms had been disabled. That night, thirteen more people were injured, and one hundred residents, almost all Puerto Rican, were left homeless.

Within a few days of the Park Avenue fire, arson took the lives of 11 people at 1202 Washington Street. As was the case with the Park Avenue fire, and the vast majority of buildings that saw arson, smoke detectors and fire alarms were either non-functioning or dismantled. A liquid accelerant ignited from the first floor was found to be the cause of this fire. Several prior arson attempts had been made, but had been extinguished by tenants. Weeks before the fire, the owner, Olga Ramos, who was the owner of 131 Clinton Street, in which 22 people had died in a fire two years before, had threatened to remove her tenants by any means, even if she had to burn them out. A formal complaint of this threat was made at City Hall and initialed by a city official. Ms. Ramos was questioned by authorities but never charged. Police investigators would later announce that they had no real leads. Two families, of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent, died in the Washington Street fire: The entire Mercado family, who lived on the fifth floor: Ana Mercado (33), Godovin Mercado (34), Ana’s father, Manuel Valez (74), and the Mercado children, Ruth (13), Denise (12), Walter (10), and Kenneth (9); and on the fourth floor, the Rios family: mother Reineira Rios (43), and her children, Frank (20), Marybell (18), and Jesus (13).

On November 14, tenants’ rights activists held an anti-arson march that began in front of the burned-out building at 12th and Washington. Over four hundred residents joined in the protests, carrying signs bearing the names of fire victims. Organizers used the demonstration to publicize the sheer scale of displacement in Hoboken: some ten thousand people, according to one CUNA representative. The arson-related death toll, he added, was forty-one since March 1978. Tenants-rights activist Tom Soto encapsulated tenants’ grievances. “They are trying to push the poor people out to make this an exclusive upper-middle-class community,” he said at a Por la Gente meeting. “The landlords, for their own profit, are being encouraged to push out the poor.” Arson, he argued, constituted “an offensive against the poor.”

Even as public protests and media attention mounted, the arsons for profit continued. In November 1981, the American Hotel, a five-story single-room occupancy building, went up in a fatal blaze that investigators determined had been set by arsonists. The hotel’s owner had been under contract to sell the building to a developer for $500,000 under the condition that it be “delivered vacant.”

1982

On April 30, 1982, 12 people were killed in a fire at the Pinter Hotel, 151 Fourteenth Street. The victims were: Hilda Perez (48), her grandson, Angel Perez (8), Mrs. Perez’s daughters, Olga (22), and Luz Delia Garcia (17), Olga’s daughter, Katelin Torres (4 months), and Luz’s two children, Jorge Negron (1) and Erica Negron (3 weeks). Also identified as victims were Juan Serrano (32), his wife, Francisca Vasquez (42), her son, Ismael Vasquez (15), her grandson, Charles (3), and Xavier Calon (4). Witnesses watched as desperate mothers dropped their infants from windows to passersby before jumping out themselves.

Summation

Between 1978 and 1982, dozens of fires ripped through tenements and rooming houses in the mile-square city of Hoboken. The blazes killed fifty-six people, most of whom were children, and left more than eight thousand homeless. Almost all of the displaced residents were Puerto Rican; most never returned to Hoboken. Nearly every fire, investigators determined, had been the result of arson. This rash of destruction, dislocation, and death occurred alongside another dramatic story: a transformation the local and national press hailed as the “Hoboken Renaissance.” Beginning in the late 1960s, the traditionally working-class city of 45,000, located just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, experienced a sudden influx of middle-income people. Homesteaders looking for historic brownstones made up the first wave of the “Renaissance.” By the end of the 1970s, thousands of young professionals joined them, attracted to Hoboken more for its proximity to Wall Street and corporate headquarters than for its distinctive architecture. These two narratives, one of death, another of rebirth, competed for readers’ attention in newspapers across the metropolitan area. Coverage alternated between breathless profiles of brownstone renovations and grisly tallies of the dead and injured. In truth, the stories of destruction and resurgence were one and the same. Hoboken’s arson wave resulted from a new phase of metropolitan transformation, as owner-occupied brownstone renovations gave way to landlords renovating tenements into luxury apartments. As the potential rent or sale price for converted units soared at the end of the 1970s, property owners faced powerful incentives to displace low-income tenants’ market-rate units. Hoboken’s old tenement buildings rapidly became condominiums: from 41 units in 1981 to 3,500 built or proposed units by 1986. In 1982, over oysters and white wine, newly arrived stockbrokers discussed the benefits of the Hoboken-to-Manhattan commute just a half block from where an arson-related fire had killed twelve people a day earlier. “I don’t want people to be burned,” one remarked, “but I wouldn’t mind a nicer element of people here, if you know what I mean.”