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Fire On Church Street
Seventy-two-year-old Salvador Rosillo, an artist who has lived and worked on the fourth floor of the building for 30 years, said he first noticed thick, acrid, chocking smoke coming in through the window. Within two minutes, it was unbearable. He took off his shirt and wrapped it around his face like a mask before fleeing up two flights of stairs to the roof. “I can tell you how you could die in a minute from that smoke,” Rosillo said. “All I did was go two floors up with a mask on. I don’t know how those firemen do it.”
On the top floor, musician Mark Hennen was resting when he herd a heavy pounding on his door. “You knew it wasn’t someone coming for a cup of sugar,” he said. It was the firefighters, who directed Hennen and several of his neighbors up to an adjoining roof. “The smoke was very thick. It was coming up from the Church Street side and from the airshaft side as well as from the Reade Street side,” he said. “We were almost surrounded by the smoke. It was pouring out of the vents and the stairwell.”
“We tried to come down the stairs but there was too much smoke, I couldn’t see a thing,” she said. “We came back in the apartment and I was panicking for about two minutes.” Jemden looked out the window. “I could just see beyond the smoke this red hat,” she said. “We started shouting, ‘We’re in here! Help! Help!’ Within two minutes he came and got us.” The firefighter, Thomas Mareska, coaxed the four trapped residents out the window and into the bucket of his cherry-picker, then lowered them safely to the street. On the street after the fire, a reporter suggested that Mareska was a hero. “I don’t know about that,” he said doubtfully. “We all do our job and then we go on with our lives.” Firefighters also rescued two miniature dachshunds from a smoke-choked third-floor apartment, taking them to an ambulance on the street where they were administered oxygen. The dogs’ owner says they appear to have fully recovered from the ordeal. The morning after the fire, Shmuel Maksumal, an owner of the shoe repair store on the floor where the Fire Department said the blaze began, came back to survey the damage. It was total.
Maksumal, who has owned the store for 18 years, was grim. “Everything is ruined,” he said. For the upstairs residents, however, what is remarkable is how close they came to ruin, saved by the quick response of the firefighters. “It was hard not to feel that we had a major event going on and it could escalate,” Hennen said. “But the firemen were here in full force and I always had the feeling that they would get it under control.” The Fire Department has not determined a cause of the blaze, saying that it is under investigation.
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