Smoke was in the air when I walked out of my apartment this afternoon to get a haircut. I didn't think much of it because I didn't see any fire or smoke, nor did I hear any sirens. After the haircut I took the 1 train to 110th Street to get some bagels. That's when I saw this scene:
where Broadway, West End Ave, and 106th Street intersect at Straus Park. It looked like the top two floors of the building were gutted.
Oddly enough, that is the third fire I've seen in the last ten days. I saw this fire above a theater a block away from my hotel in Seattle:
The fire was caused by sunlight passing through a magnifying glass in a storeroom. The focused beam set some cardboard boxes on fire.
The next night, there was a fire in a restaurant across the street from my hotel (sorry, no pictures).
In Seattle they closed the streets off to traffic to fight the fire. In New York, cars were stilll running down Broadway. There were also about three times as many firefighting vehicles in New York.
That is me in the window......
Posted by: S | 26 March 2009 at 08:55 PM