This isn't a Story

This isn't a Story This isn't a Story Nothing was going on in the city, so they told Mark to cruise around and wait for something to happen. The apartment was boring, so I went with him. We were meandering around near the city center where the Brooklyn Bridge lands in Manhattan when Mark got paged to go to a three-alarm fire up in Harlem. News reports on the radio made it sound pretty big with 140 firemen on the scene. As we exited the West Side Highway, Mark pointed out the shoe repair store that used to deal heroin to users who would come up from Jersey, loop around Amsterdam Avenue and get back on the highway a block uptown. He used to live in the neighborhood.

The street was closed down, so Mark pulled to a stop in the middle of it. I saw the angered look on a fireman's face, looked to my left and saw that we had parked next to a fire hydrant two lanes away. Even though it far enough away that there was no chance it was going to be used to fight the fire, I told Mark not to chance it. He moved the car down the block.

Walking up the block revealed the scene gradually. Firetrucks blocked the street and the intersection was filled with more than a hundred firemen staring up at the six story building. There was nothing for them to do but stare, as the fire had been contained to a single window. Two cranes hovered at the roof of the building, where firemen with large saws were at work cutting off the decorative edging.

Mark's photographer met him and they went to work. Mark asked if there were any wounded. The photographer said that they were up the block in a bus. He talked to the fire commissioner for awhile and then we walked up the block. I looked to the left and the right for a bus. Mark walked directly to the nearest ambulance. I'd made an honest mistake: I'd never heard the term used before, and I imagined the very large building sending a busload of people to the hospital.

Mark didn't get very far talking to two kids with oxygen masks on, so he walked over to the other ambulance. Inside was a woman, two children, and an older man and woman. Mark talked to the kids and the ambulance driver. As he turned to the older man, I heard him say "Since 1955? Really?" I started talking to the driver.

-There's not much hope in a case like this, is there?
-No. These people are poor. People like this don't have insurance. They don't have anywhere to go. Their whole family lives with them. I see things like this way too often.

We walked back to the pack of police and fire officials and press people skulking around gathering quotes, but not much was going on.. Mark's friend Angel from the New York Times walked up from his house around the corner. He told the group that his wife had grown up in the building that had just burned down: "We used to make out in those hallways. And that Chinese restaurant just opened this week too."

Mark went off to look at somebody's new customized van and I stood there with the photographer. Someone asked to see my press pass. I felt for one in my pockets, and finally just pointed at the photographer whose name I didn't know. The cops walked along. The photographer told me about the police line: once it goes up, it's illegal to cross back over, so the key is to be inside and stay inside. They were unrolling the tape, which was really strange because the fire was already out and most of the crowd had gone home. A really arrogant police officer pushed us behind the line. He had a lot of ribbons on his uniform and was strutting around like a peacock. All of the other officers there were content to simply ignore us, but he had to boss someone around and it wouldn't have been worth jailtime to object.

Mark and Angel came back with Francis from the Times. She didn't remember that I told her I was Nobody at the Swissair crash, but did remember meeting when an ambulance run by Orthodox Jews ran a red light and collided with a fire truck and a laundromat that was passing through the area. We stood and watched as some of the building's trim came down the side of the building and crashed into the sidewalk. A reporter from the Times walked over after talking to some officials and joined us. "Too bad it's not a story. This one could have been good," which was met with unifrom agreement from the group: "It's a non-story." There were no deaths or injuries, but just a couple of people being treated for smoke inhalation.

Because of the police line, we had to walk the long way around the block to the car. We drove up to 125th Street and across the Triboro Bridge. By the time we crossed Northern Boulevard on the Grand Central, the story was being reported as "a fire on two floors of a building in Harlem." By the next morning, it was no longer being reported.