A fire that started late Saturday morning destroyed at least two businesses and multiple apartments at the corner of Courtlandt Avenue and E 151st Street in Melrose.<\/p>\n
The FDNY says that the call came in around 9 a.m. for the location, which has a flower shop and grocery store on the ground level.<\/p>\n
“All of a sudden, we heard something exploded,\u00a0almost like thunder,” said Maude Smallwood, who works in the hair salon next door.<\/p>\n
Jimmy Ayala’s wife was working in the flower shop when the flames started. She also told him it was like a boom, and then the fire started like “one, two, three.”<\/p>\n
Another worker told News 12 off camera that the flames spread almost immediately from the flower shop, which is in a small area at the front, back into the grocery store, and then up into the apartments above.<\/p>\n
FDNY says\u00a0it took over an hour and a half to get under control.<\/p>\n
“Everybody was screaming, shouting,” said Chris Quintro, who lives in the building. “(The flames) started coming into the building, so we all ran outside.”<\/p>\n
The Red Cross was seen up on the second and third floors It told News 12 that it was helping nine adults and a child, who are from three different apartments.<\/p>\n
“Some of my neighbors from the top, they told me they lost their belongings. They can’t stay there,” Quintro said.<\/p>\n
FDNY says there were no reported injuries.<\/p>\n
Smallwood’s salon had almost no damage besides the window.<\/p>\n
“We could have been gone.\u00a0It’s like a dream,” Smallwood said. “I’m going\u00a0 [to] cry again if we start talking about it, because I’ve never seen anything like that.”<\/p>\n
A cause of the fire was not immediately known.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A fire that started late Saturday morning destroyed at least two businesses and multiple apartments at the corner…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":148705,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[128,195,32307,9,24,63,62359,129,131,130],"class_list":{"0":"post-148704","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-the-bronx","8":"tag-bronx","9":"tag-firefighters","10":"tag-melrose","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-city","13":"tag-nyc","14":"tag-store-fire","15":"tag-the-bronx","16":"tag-the-bronx-headlines","17":"tag-the-bronx-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148704"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148704\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/148705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}