UPDATE: Rosenwach Fire
photo: everyplace on flickr
Regarding the fire last night at Rosenwach, I have heard via a third party that a resident of the loft building across the street said that the fire was started by fireworks – white kids in their 20s shooting Roman candles off near Rosenwach, and that some of those fireworks landed in the yard. Since the yard was a big huge pile of wood, predictable things happened.
On flickr, everyplace has a photo set of fire pictures from last night (including video). As I said last night, the fire was intense – and I assume pretty damn scary for the residents nearby. You can see in everyplace’s photos that the flames rose up to at least the height of the loft building across North 9th Street. According to another eyewitness, fireman were still working to contain the fire at 11:40 (two and a half hours after the first trucks reposonded). (Thanks to mikkipedia for the flickr link.)
Correction: three white kids, one with Native American roots, 1 half hispanic half white and one black guy with white parents.
Easy with the caucasian lecture innuendo.
No innuendo – the eyewitness report I have is that there were some “white kids in their 20s” shooting “Roman candles”. I don’t know if there three or more or less, nor do I know how white they were. I suppose “kids” is not the right term, but that’s what was passed on to me.
The fire department quickly got the fire under control about 20 minutes after it started (no visible large flames), but it is true that they were still there for a long time. I left around 10:15 and they were still spraying it.
I left around 10:15 too – there were still flames visible, but nothing like the conflagration shown in the photo. Gothamist is reporting that the fire was “under control” by 10:15, which probably refers to FDNY parlance, not what you and I might call under control.
I was in the area (the police wouldn’t let anyone NEAR it— at least anyone headed north, anyway) at 10:30 and it had been put out. You could smell the smoke FOR BLOCKS. The gutters were overflowing with water.
I live that building, in an apartment that’s obscured by the flames in the above photo. It was pretty scary! We were BBQing on the roof when the fire started, and we wound up evacuating the building w/ our pets for about 45 minutes.
I took some photos from our apartment…the heat was super intense. http://www.flickr.com/photos/42987002@N00/3689225986/
The FDNY was actually there before anyone on our roof realized what was happening.
The Rosenwach people didn’t sustain any major damage…the fire mostly just burned some of their stored wood, so they were out there the next day sorting out the burned wood from the rest.