Thanks to: Ikea & FDNY. No Thanks to: Apartment Mgt.

Yesterday (Monday) started off as a good enough day. My roommate and I took a little trip to the Ikea out in Brooklyn to pick up some cheap stuff for our rooms. I'm pretty excited about the stuff I snagged, it but I'll wait until I get it all put in place before sharing. Quick side-note: the Ikea has a shuttle bus that takes you from the subway stop to their front door! It was amazing! The bus was basically a coach bus that had reclining seats and a radio that was playing ridiculous 80's and 90's music. I'm sure the few other people on that bus must have thought we were crazy because we started singing along and laughing hysterically. I suppose you had to be there...

On the way home he informs me that it is Rosh Hashana and, even though nobody in our apartment is Jewish, we decided to celebrate. I guess it is tradition to celebrate by eating apples with honey. He looked up a recipe online for baked apples and, after a quick trip to the grocery store, this is what he came up with:...and after a little baking:
(btw those are not my horrible cut-offs. That would be of my equally-as-skinny roommate.)
They were pretty good.

We had a friend who is a model with my roommate's agency over and we stayed up pretty late hanging out. By the time he went home and I had gotten ready for bed it was about 4am or so. I was actually reading some of the blogs I follow when around 5am I started smelling something. Smelled like smoke. I looked out the window in my room into the air shaft and to my surprise the whole airshaft was filled with grey smoke. I started getting out of bed and *bang* it sounded like a machine exploded or something. The smoke in the airshaft turned dark black and I started scrambling for the things I wanted to run out of the building with. I grabbed my computer, cell phone, camera, modeling portfolio (I paid a lot for those pics!) and ran out into the hallway. I was met by a roommate who shared my idea of a hasty exit. We knocked on everyone's doors and went down to the street where a lot of our neighbors were gathered around. There were firetrucks everywhere and we stood there for a little over two hours while they drug hoses into the building and broke out windows. Here's a video of the scene.


The fire apparently started from the laundromat on the first floor and went up through the walls into the apartment on the second floor just above the portico entrance on the side of the building. There was some fire damage in the apartment above it on the third floor as well. These apartments are across the air shaft from my window and when the firemen broke the windows out into the airshaft a huge cloud of black smoke and smoldering embers flew up into the sky. I caught a little of the smoke in this horribly blurry photo. One of my roommates didn't leave as quickly as I did (I went straight for the street, I don't mess around!) but on the way out looked through the window and saw flames coming up the airshaft. Not cool! After the fire fighters got everything contained we were allowed back into our building. It was surreal, like out of a movie, when we quietly walked single file back up the stairs to our apartments. The floors were wet and dirty and the walls were covered with soot. It was eerie. I took some photos of the air shaft from our apartment. The windows were broken out on the second and third floor. The guy in the third floor window was leaning out to take a photo of the second floor apartment which was pretty much destroyed. Sidenote #2: Don't I have a nice view out of my bedroom window? This photo was taken out of the bathroom window. My window is about four feet to the right and half-obstructed by that metal laundromat ventilation duct. Sweet huh?

On my way to work this afternoon I took a photo of the front door of the second floor apartment where the fire was the worst. I didn't want to go inside just in case someone was there, but I got a feel for how bad it was just from looking into the doorway.
Fortunately nobody was injured and the fire was stopped before reaching our floor and before serious damage to the building occurred. A big thank-you is owed to the FDNY for their quick response!

Really, I'm unhappy with the building management at this point because I found out today that nine years ago there was a large fire that destroyed the seventh floor of the building. When they renovated the building they didn't upgrade the 100 year old wiring. Also, the building management had padlocked the door to the roof which is a no-no for fire safety. We have yet to have our gas turned back on and we still don't have hot water. I understand that there will need to be some checks here and there, but I seriously want to be able to cook and take a hot shower tomorrow. Hop to it guys. Chop-chop!