Fire Guts Newly-Renovated Townhouse at 67 Cranberry
A massive blaze that drew over 20 firefighting vehicles to the scene gutted the brick townhouse at 67 Cranberry Street on Saturday morning; the fire is believed to have begun around 9 a.m. and no one was injured. The house had been undergoing a gut renovation as part of its conversion from a two-family to…
A massive blaze that drew over 20 firefighting vehicles to the scene gutted the brick townhouse at 67 Cranberry Street on Saturday morning; the fire is believed to have begun around 9 a.m. and no one was injured. The house had been undergoing a gut renovation as part of its conversion from a two-family to a one-family house since being purchased in November 2007 for $2,800,000.
Fire Guts 67 Cranberry Street [Brooklyn Heights Blog]
Massive Response to Fire on Cranberry Street [McBrooklyn] GMAP
Large photo from Chucktaylor’s Flickr Set via GL; small photo from McBrooklyn.
Good Job Eake way to put a family out on there butt in this type of weather. Dee Dee Dee
Kirak De’ka
Good Job Eake way to put a family out on there butt in this type of weather. Dee Dee Dee
Kirak De’ka
Gowanusadonis-
Indeed, I do love my contractor and it is NOT Metropolitan. I don’t know why the paperwork for this renovation mentions Metropolitan — that’s not the name of the firm doing the job on Cranberry.
(Not that I want people to be upset with my contractor — I just don’t think it’s fair that this accident get pinned on a firm utterly unrelated.)
-Peter
To be clear though, all the original old details were stripped out of this house and replaced with steel and masonry long before this fire, so It’s hard to imagine what could have burned so fast, without additional fuel. I’m glad you like your contractor (PeterSteinberg) but I can tell you Metropolitan are no angels having lived near this construction site since it began…
Hey Peter- most people are shocked to know how quickly a fire can spread. As I posted earlier, within 3 minutes a fire is life threatening, within 5 minutes capable of overwhelming a building. Fire doesn’t move slowly at all- and the smoke can be more deadly than the fire itself.
jnewcleus… you are absolutely clueless on points 1-5. get it straight before you offer your mindless wanderings.
I’m going to have to be careful that I don’t say too much here — not because anyone did anything wrong but because it’s just not my place to state too many of the facts definitively.
I know quite a bit because the contractor renovating my place was also renovating this place — it was one of ~3 gut renovations he has underway (he usually has 3 going at once — each in different stages.)
1. The contractor is an EXCELLENT contractor. He’s been doing almost exclusively gut renovations in Brooklyn Heights for at least 6 years (maybe 10?) and usually has at least 1 house on the annual House tour. One sign of how good he is? Many of his customers are repeat customers. Another sign? A year+ into the process I still think he’s great and have not a single disagreement or quibble with him. How man people can say that about their contractor?
2. It was not an insurance fire. The fire was started (I was told) by a sub-contractor’s tool that malfunctioned. Furthermore, the fire started at 9am, with many people in the building — not exactly a smart way to start an insurance fire.
3. The contractor runs an extremely professional, clean, safe environment. Obviously I don’t know the situation at that house, but at mine there are fire extinguishers on every floor, a first aid kit plainly located, no smoking signs all over. And for the record, in a year of going by the site almost daily, I’ve never once seen anyone smoking.
4. Why couldn’t they put out the fire? Again, it’s not my place to say too much but from the way it was described to me, not only would it have been impossible to put out the fire, they’re lucky to have gotten out alive.
5. In my unofficial opinion, the fire spread more quickly than might be typical because 1) there was no sheetrock/plaster at all, and 2) the fire started on the 2nd floor — which was more or less open to the 3rd floor above.
This situation aside, I’m dismayed that anyone would leap to the conclusion that any house fire was intentionally started. While it certainly does happen, how often? 5% of the time? 1% of the time?
Peter
Not that this really matters, but it was a three family before the conversion — a lower duplex (where the prior owner lived) and second and third floor floor-throughs. In a long-ago life (according to the prior owner who owned the building from 1969 until his death in 2007), it was a boarding house, which you could see from the configuration of the upper floors (the bathroom on the middle floor-through had a separate door out to the staircase, among other things). It was a really wonderful old house — I rented there for a couple of years a while back — full of charm and quirkiness and character. The prior owner took real pride in the place — though anyone who paid 2.8 million for it would want to make lots of changes, I suppose. It may have already been gutted by way of renovations, but I’m sad to know whatever old school charm remained has probably now been gutted by fire.
zeebeeinbklyn- you are very right. Most people mistakenly think there is time to deal with a fire, but in truth there is none.