Harriet Pifer, 96, beloved mother and grandmother

Volume One, Issue 31, April 20 - 26, 2007

By Albert Amateau

Harriet Pifer, known as Hattie, died at the age of 96 in a fire on April 11 in the Chelsea apartment where she had lived with two of her sons for the past 46 years.

Her son, William, 70, a retired longshoreman known as Ike who took care of her, was not at home when the fire broke out around 11:45 a.m. because he had an appointment six blocks away at St. Vincent’s Hospital. By the time he returned home around 12:30 p.m., the second floor apartment at 246 W. 18th St. was engulfed in flames.

“He had to stand there on the sidewalk watching the fire. He’s still devastated,” Christina Lyles, Hattie’s grandniece, said in an April 17 telephone interview.

A younger son, Fred, was at his job as a caretaker at St. Michael’s Church on W. 99th St. at the time of the fire.

Born Harriet Hairston in Winston-Salem, N.C., she was the youngest of 15 children in a tobacco-farming family. She married William Pifer and moved to Everson, Pa., southeast of Pittsburgh, where she raised her three sons. Her husband died around 1959, and she moved with her sons to New York in 1963.

“She lived in two other apartments in Chelsea before she moved to W. 18th St.,” said Lyles. The five-story brick walk-up at 246 W. 18th St., an old-law tenement about 100 years old, was well maintained by the landlord, according to neighbors. A Fire Department spokesperson said the fire started in an electric extension cord that was covered with papers.

“She had all her faculties and never forgot a name or an anniversary or a birthday,” said Lyles, who recalled visiting her great aunt as a child and visited her as an adult almost every Saturday until four days before she died. “She was recovering from the flu and was doing fine,” Lyles said.

“Aunt Hattie was a homemaker and never had an outside job,” said Lyles, “She delighted in little gifts and had a real interest in what people were wearing.”

A niece, Myrtle Craft, who lives in the Robert Fulton Houses on W. 17th St., cooked for Hattie, Lyles said. “We’re a very close family,” she added. Another grandniece, Bridget Gilliam, is also a Chelsea resident on 22nd St. between Eighth and Ninth Aves., and a grandnephew, Gary Lyles, lives on 10th Ave. at W. 25th St.

“She had countless nieces and nephews in North Carolina and Pennsylvania,” Christina Lyles said. One of Hattie’s sisters, Della Hairston, died several years ago in a fire that destroyed a farmhouse in North Carolina.

Hattie’s third son, Paul Pifer, lives in North Carolina. Another niece, Mary Malthis Ford, lives in Stroudsburg, Pa.

Two grandsons and three greatgrandchildren also survive.

The funeral was Sun. April 15 at Reddens Funeral Home on W. 14th St., and burial was in Rose Hill Cemetery in New Jersey.