![\""New](\"http:\/\/74.220.207.133\/~nearbyca\/foodandtravel\/islandliving\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/fire.jpg\" "\\"Coleman_225_Broad_St_fire\\"")
<\/a>"New Beginnings after fire, January 2003," \u00a9 copyright 2003 by A. D. Coleman.<\/p><\/div>\n
I\u2019ve 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 \u2014 an equally cavernous space just two blocks away at 147 Canal Street \u2014 burned down suspiciously in September 2001.<\/p>\n
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 emigr\u00e9s, ran a lively, often raucous shop whose running dialogue constituted a theatrical and oratorical experience in itself, and you never knew what you\u2019d 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\u2019d wandered around its tight aisles, poked through its jumbled shelves, and made my last purchase, as recently as January 11.<\/p>\n
At 1:20 p.m. on the afternoon of Tuesday, January 14, according to the police, three of the store\u2019s employees \u2014 Sandra Sharma, her daughter Maria, and her son Thomas Therrien, according to the Staten Island Advance<\/em> report of the next day, all of them living just two blocks from me at 300 Van Duzer St. \u2014 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\u2019d seen her on the street, and she\u2019d stopped me once to chat about one of my columns for this paper.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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\u2019d discovered that Mr. Fabanwo had gotten trapped in the rear of the store, and had succumbed to smoke inhalation.<\/p>\n I heard the news early that evening, while having dinner in the Bombay Diner, a new Indian fast-food restaurant that\u2019s 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 \u2014 plus, I now realize, arson investigators \u2014 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\u2019d seen that much of the apartment I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019ve ever lived \u2014 in three of the boroughs of New York, on Martha’s Vineyard, in San Francisco, and in Golfe-Juan, France \u2014 to vanish.<\/p>\n What\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s peculiar, as I said, to find people you know in everyday life suddenly on your TV screen \u2014 as if they\u2019ve 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\u2019t 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\u2019ll get.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 by thrift-shop standards \u2014 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.<\/p>\n I want to offer my deepest sympathies and condolences to the Fabanwo family for their several losses \u2014 the death of Christopher Fabanwo, and the ravaging of their family business. These are also serious setbacks for this community, and they\u2019re 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\u2019s day again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. 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\u2019ve ever lived \u2014 in three of the boroughs of New York, on Martha’s Vineyard, in San Francisco, and in Golfe-Juan, France \u2014 to vanish. 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