Harlem

Aug. 7 (UPI) — Families of victims of last year’s Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in Harlem are suing New York City, alleging neglect and failures to follow to its own regulations led to dozens being sickened by bacteria and several deaths.

Three lawsuits filed Thursday by Attorney Ben Crump, along with co-counsel Jared Scotto and Nabeha Shaer, represent five of the seven people who died in the outbreak and 41 individuals and families who say it harmed them.

Announcing the lawsuits during a press conference, Rev. Al Sharpton, founder of the civil rights organization National Action Network, said they were not going to allow those harmed to be forgotten, while Crump stated that Harlem, a historically Black neighborhood, was neglected during the outbreak compared with other parts of New York City.

“Harlem is the center of Black America, historically has always been; that does not mean Harlem should be the center of a Legionnaires’ outbreak in the center of New York,” he said. “And so, we’re here today telling people that Harlem should never get less than — it should get everything that everybody else gets.”

Harlem was struck by a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak from July to August 2025, consisting of 118 confirmed cases and seven deaths.

Legionnaires’ disease is a type of pneumonia caused by Legionella bacteria that grow in warm water. It is contracted by inhaling water vapor that contains the bacteria.

According to the lawsuits, the plaintiffs were exposed to Legionella bacteria while in the vicinity of cooling towers that tested positive for the bacteria at two locations: Harlem Hospital and the NYC Public Health Lab.

The complaint alleges that the city, along with its health department and a handful of contractors, failed to develop and follow a water management plan required by the New York State Sanitary Code and failed to meet the code’s cooling tower registration, inspection, testing and other related requirements.

Crump and Sharpton spoke during the press conference surrounded by victims of the outbreak, including the fiancee and 6-year-old daughter of Bruce Scott, who died from the outbreak.

“I’m a single mother now,” Lakisha Plowden said as she hugged her and Scott’s daughter, Brooke. “We don’t have her best friend and we don’t have my soul mate.”

UPI has contacted NYC for comment.

“Our lives mean something,” Sharpton said. “You cannot act as though the lives of people and the worth of people depend on what part of the town they live in. Geography does not have anything to do with biology. If Legionnaires’ disease was bad in one part of town it should be valued the same in every part of town. And that is what this is about.”

The announcement came nearly a week after the NYC Health Department declared an end to the Upper Easter Side Legionnaire’s disease outbreak that led to 92 confirmed cases and seven deaths.

Colson Whitehead’s latest foray into the bent world of “reluctant fence” Ray Carney — “Cool Machine,” the third and final installment of his Harlem Trilogy — is an American epic disguised as a heist novel. It’s a dizzyingly brilliant measure of the versatility and depth of the acclaimed author’s literary talent.

After writing two books dealing with monstrous historical trauma and institutional abuse — “The Underground Railroad” and “The Nickel Boys,” for which he won two successive Pulitzers — Whitehead pivots to an entirely new genre, subverting it, toying with it, making it wholly his own. And while the Harlem novels, too, have a great deal to say about serious subjects such as systemic racism, corruption, and crimes and misdemeanors of various proportions, they often lean on humor to get the message across.

In fact, it’s easy to envision the author at his laptop, as exhilarated as his prose, cracking himself up over how he bends language, employs slang, and forges descriptions like this one about a bar where Carney and a partner in crime conspire over how to fence a stolen diamond necklace: “He met Flinch Wilson at the Marlin, a narrow dive on 110th and Broadway with a decor inspired by an old leather shoe that lived in a drainage pipe.” Or this about a rival who has it out for Carney and his cohorts: “Buzz struck him as a plumber, one who comes back when you aren’t home to strangle your parakeet if you stiff him on the bill.”

“Cool Machine” is set in the 1980s, and Carney is still in the picture. It’s the Reagan era, and predatory capitalism rules, as does Mayor Giuliani, who’s waged war on the mafia and the homeless. What Whitehead dubs the “churn” roils the city and his protagonist. It’s that “churn” that beckons Carney to break his promise to himself and once again divert from his legit furniture store business. The excuse this time is that his wife Elizabeth wants to open her own travel agency, and can’t get a bank loan. Despite the couple’s closeness, for all these years her husband has managed to conceal that he’s a part-time crook. He desires respectability, but savors the buzz, the camaraderie — the honor among thieves. Carney falls in with criminal mastermind Uncle Rich and signs on to his outrageous plan to break into the Waldorf Astoria; the goal is to liberate Jesse Owens’ Olympic gold medal from those who forced him to cash it in.

The intricacy with which Whitehead details the planning and execution of this caper marks him as a top-tier researcher — he’s drawn on many primary sources to ground this work of fiction in historical fact. (There’s also his obsessive use of Pinterest.) The scenes set in the bowels of Grand Central, where there’s a secret train track leading to the Waldorf, are thrilling enough to read for their action, but the atmospheric descriptions are equally delectable: “Track 23’s next departure pulled into the station. One commuter joined Carney and Uncle Rich on the platform, a deflated man in a pinstripe suit with shiny elbows, then another businessman who sagged on one side, as if his briefcase was filled with lead weights.” One of the marvels of this novel is how effortlessly such sentences land, despite being honed to perfection. It would be a spoiler to say anything further about whether the thieves’ mission impossible yields their reward.

Part two of the novel shifts downtown, into the heart of the ’80s East Village art scene. A preoccupation of Whitehead’s — Jean-Michel Basquiat — is the inspiration for a fictional graffiti artist whose omnipresent scrawls capture the pretensions of the burgeoning wheelers and dealers, who, like uptown crooks, are relentless strivers, albeit with sleeker facades. Their snobbery is juxtaposed with Carney’s friend and colleague Pepper’s unsettling bluntness and eyeball to eyeball stare. He’s on the trail of a psychopath-for-hire dubbed “the Melancholy Hitman,” while battling stomach issues that have him downing Pepto-Bismol and coughing up blood in random bathrooms. In this section, Carney plays a supporting role to Pepper’s lead; “Escape from New York” is the enveloping soundtrack.

In the novel’s final act, Carney reemerges from straight life and Pepper from retirement in Delaware to rescue Carney’s nephew, Robert, who’s on the mob’s hit list for a murder he witnessed. Political corruption is rampant, and the revelation of who’s on the take has rattled a lot of cages. Robert is unwittingly entrapped, and has absconded with something mob bigwig Lombardi wants revenge for. Carney dons his best furniture salesman hat to make the pitch of a lifetime, a deal that could save Robert’s life, or take Carney’s. As Carney drives to the meet-up, he reflects on New York’s evolution: “Crime transformed the city by degrees. He thought of what John [his son] told him about rap music, where it came from. Rap was part of the New York environment now, barging from boom boxes and windows. They created something new from the spoils, the theft of turntables from record shops, the rip-off of a musical line or riff from another song — a crooked art.”

For those who enjoy knowing how an author’s inspiration arrives, it’s amusing to note that in the case of the trilogy that kicked off in 2021 with “Harlem Shuffle,” Whitehead told the New Yorker: “I was staring off into space and thinking about how much I like heist films and how much fun it would be to write a heist.” That sounds simple enough, but “Harlem Shuffle” turned out to be years in the making. The idea initially came to him around the same time he was writing “The Underground Railroad,” which was published in 2016. It wasn’t until after the release of that book, and then “Nickel Boys,” that Whitehead decided to lighten the mood by composing a crime novel set in New York City in the 1960s. And while he usually avoids staying on the same topic or voice from book to book, in the midst of writing “Harlem Shuffle,” Whitehead found he was still imagining further escapades for his main character, this time in the 1970s, with the city on the verge of bankruptcy, and incendiary conflagrations between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army trending. As he envisioned what would become “Crook Manifesto,” Whitehead thought: “Why not make it three?”

Carney is part poet. Part crook. Part salesman. Part philosopher. To my knowledge, Carney’s creator is neither crook nor salesman, but Whitehead can lay claim to those other two mantles. His vocabulary appears boundless, as does his apparent love for the city he grew up in, where he still lives. “Cool Machine” is a modern masterpiece and an ode to New York, no matter that rats skitter and cockroaches scamper underfoot. When Carney has the chance to move anywhere in the world he wants, he ponders the appeal of fresh air. “Fresh was nice,” he reflects, “but so was other stuff. Noise, dirt, and struggle.” After escaping Manhattan, he wonders, “Where do you go? There’s no place else. It was like going on the lam from yourself.”

Whether or not New York is your jam, or a place you have escaped from or to, Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy is destined to live on as an American classic. Never mind the rats and cockroaches — it’s the churn.

Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist, and co-founder of the Ink Book Club on Substack. She was director of Oprah’s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.