Island
Living 75: The Fire This Time
by A. D.
Coleman |
|
Strange to find
your neighborhood suddenly in the news, and (given
that it’s generally “benignly neglected”
by the media) all the more unsettling when the spotlight
gets turned on because some bizarre and lurid crime
draws the reporters. Weirdest of all, though, is
when you know the people involved.
I’ve written
before about the former Gelgisser's Hardware store,
located across from the Stapleton Houses at 225
Broad St. My first apartment on Staten Island was
on the top floor of the Gelgisser building, a community
fixture for decades, so I have fond memories thereof.
It pleased me when, not long after that long-lived
emporium closed its doors, the place reopened as
The New Beginning Second Hand Store, the reincarnation
of an excellent and extensive thrift shop whose
original venue -- an equally cavernous space just
two blocks away at 147 Canal Street -- burned down
suspiciously in September 2001.
The Fire Department
declared that conflagration a case of arson, though
they never identified a culprit. The owners and
operators, Christopher and Temitayo Fabanwo, Nigerian
emigrés, ran a lively, often raucous shop
whose running dialogue constituted a theatrical
and oratorical experience in itself, and you never
knew what you’d find there. I have everything
from excellent professional-quality cookware to
an Apple laser printer, unusual folk art, Beethoven
and Living Colour CDs, and signed first editions
of poetry books that I bought from them, always
at good prices. Nothing was ever marked with a sticker,
everything was negotiable, yard-sale style. As a
writer, I have a wide repertoire of distractions;
going in there to browse represented a reward I
used frequently as an incentive to complete some
unpleasant or urgent task. I’d wandered around
its tight aisles, poked through its jumbled shelves,
and made my last purchase, as recently as January
11.
At 1:20 p.m.
on the afternoon of Tuesday, January 14, according
to the police, three of the store’s employees
-- Sandra Sharma, her daughter Maria, and her son
Thomas Therrien, according to the Staten Island
Advance report of the next day, all of them
living just two blocks from me at 300 Van Duzer
St. -- used matches to set fire to a rack of used
clothes in the rear of the store. The police reports
indicate, as the motive offered by one suspect,
that Sandra was tired of folding clothing. To my
surprise, I knew her, though only in passing; I’d
seen her on the street, and she’d stopped me
once to chat about one of my columns for this paper.
Mrs. Fabanwo
was away from the establishment at the time the
fire took hold. When the alarm was given, her husband
Christopher shepherded the customers out of the
place and, with the help of another employee, attempted
to quell the flames with extinguishers. Apparently
that didn’t work well enough; the fire spread,
turning into a four-alarm inferno to which 170 firemen
eventually responded. Not until 4 p.m. did they
manage to contain the holocaust, by which time they’d
discovered that Mr. Fabanwo had gotten trapped in
the rear of the store, and had succumbed to smoke
inhalation.
I heard the
news early that evening, while having dinner in
the Bombay Diner, a new Indian fast-food restaurant
that’s opened up on Wright St., and immediately
walked over to the scene. Broad Street was still
blocked off, partly because it bore a coating of
ice, the result of all that water from the fire
hoses on a freezing-cold day. There were still a
few fire trucks at the scene, and several firemen
-- plus, I now realize, arson investigators -- poking
around inside. The ground-floor store itself was
gutted and scorched. The building next door was
damaged. Smoke streaks smudged the exterior; all
the windows were gone. From the back, I’d seen
that much of the apartment I’d once inhabited
had surrendered to the flames. In a mere two-and-a-half
hours, what had functioned for two-thirds of a century
as a residence and a place of business had turned
into a ruin, and a space for commerce and social
interaction found itself converted to the stage
of a tragedy.
In the night,
with the front bathed in the glare of lights from
the fire truck, I watched the last remaining firefighters
finish their scrutiny of the wrecked interior. They
cut the padlocks from the housing for the chains
that raise and lower the protective metal gates
for the storefront, letting them fall, and I went
home. I drove past the next day, and stopped for
a minute to see it in the daylight, stained and
streaked and suddenly a sorry sight in the bright
sun.
The building
has now been evacuated, and will probably have to
come down. If it does, it will be the first of all
the buildings in which I’ve ever lived -- in
three of the boroughs of New York, on Martha's Vineyard,
in San Francisco, and in Golfe-Juan, France -- to
vanish.
What’s
saddest, of course, is neither that nor the destruction
of a useful and thriving local business that brought
some jobs and money into this neighborhood, but
the senseless death of a decent man, Christopher
Fabanwo, an industrious and likable guy. I saw his
distraught widow and family on the Channel 11 News
the night after the fire. The Sharma family’s
now under arrest, charged with arson and probably
facing murder charges (as well as an inquiry into
their possible connection to the earlier fire).
It’s peculiar, as I said, to find people you
know in everyday life suddenly on your TV screen
-- as if they’ve somehow stepped from one reality
into another. Mrs. Fabanwo, clearly at a loss to
explain this senseless act, blamed it on the Devil.
I don’t have anything more rational than that
to offer; given the contortions to which the human
psyche is subject, that may be the best explanation
we’ll get.
Mrs. Fabanwo
and I chatted whenever I came in and she was behind
the counter, and we had a running joke. I never
quite understood how she calculated her prices on
whatever I bought. Usually -- by thrift-shop standards
-- they were reasonable, but sometimes they struck
me as high (though rarely so much out of line that
I declined the purchase). If that was the case,
we bargained. Occasionally, we reached an impasse.
Whenever that happened, we had an arrangement; we
alternated. Some days were her days, and I paid
what she asked without haggling further; some days
were my days, and she accepted my lower bid. Last
Saturday, January 11, the last time I went in there,
it had been her day. January 14, clearly, was not.
I want to offer
my deepest sympathies and condolences to the Fabanwo
family for their several losses -- the death of
Christopher Fabanwo, and the ravaging of their family
business. These are also serious setbacks for this
community, and they’re noted, and mourned.
Stapleton needs its residents, and its entrepreneurs.
I hope that they will recover, and stay, and reopen.
I hope it will eventually be Mrs. Fabanwo’s
day again.
(Photo credit: "New Beginnings,
January 2003," © Copyright 2003 by A.
D. Coleman. All rights reserved.)
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©
Copyright 2003 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved.
By permission of the author and Image/World
Syndication Services,
P.O.B. 040078, Staten Island, New York 10304-0002
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