On the night of January 7, Aidaris Rodriguez couldn’t understand why her 12-year-old daughter was insisting on sleeping in the living room of their three-bedroom apartment, rather than in her own bedroom.  Ultimately, her daughter, also named Aidaris, won the argument and remained in the living room.

Several hours later, on the morning of January 8, Aidaris Sr. noticed that her daughter was awake and tried to convince her to go back to sleep; again, the younger Rodriguez refused to give in, resuming her homework instead of going back to bed.

Ironically, her daughter’s stubbornness may have saved both of their lives. 

Later that morning, as she was showering and preparing to leave for her job as a customer service representative at a Manhattan hotel, Aidaris Sr. was jolted by her daughter’s frantic knocking on the door. “Mommy, you have to get out!” she remembered her daughter yelling. “There’s a fire!”

A little more than a week later, Aidaris Sr. recounted the chaotic events of that morning as she sat in her home at Woodycrest Avenue and 168th Street, taking a brief break from cleaning her apartment of soot, broken glass and other debris—an activity that has consumed much of her free time the past few days. Her completely charred front door sat inside the apartment, a temporary slab of wood the only barrier between her apartment and the hallway.

 Aidaris Sr. said she felt fortunate that her daughter had been awake when the fire started, because she is a particularly sound sleeper. “Had my daughter been sleeping, it would have been a problem,” her mother reflected, “it would have been hard to wake her up.”

As soon as she became aware of the fire, Aidaris Sr. threw on a jacket and a pair of sweatpants and moved immediately to calm her daughter down and evacuate her by way of the family’s fire escape. Next, the older Aidaris herself began to climb out their window, but decided at the last minute to fasten the chains on her front door, not wanting to leave her apartment unguarded in case it proved a long time before she was able to return home.

Approaching her front door, she quickly changed her mind, noticing a ball of smoke coming from the bedroom where her daughter usually slept. “As I saw that,” Aidaris said, “I left the chains and headed for the fire escape.”

Before long, Aidaris and her daughter joined the building’s other residents outside, forced to tears as they watched flames raging on the east side of their building and listened to the sounds of shattering glass from the windows of the complex. They later gathered for several hours in the basement of nearby Sacred Heart Church before briefly returning to their homes to collect belongings.

The press office of the New York City Fire Department did not return requests for information about the fire, but Rodriguez and a neighbor said the blaze began in the first-floor apartment of an elderly woman who lives by herself, and spread to other units by way of the woman’s open door.

Though there were no deaths in the fire, Aidaris and her daughter are one of several families in the building forced to find temporary housing elsewhere, anxiously awaiting word on when they  might return; currently, the Rodriguez family is staying with Aidaris Sr’s sister nearby.

Ines Rivera, Rodriguez’ friend and neighbor, is not so fortunate in that regard. Although the damage to her first-floor apartment was not as extensive as that suffered by the Rodriguez apartment, she nonetheless had to evacuate her home because her five-year-old son, Chrisanthony, is asthmatic and cannot tolerate the smell of smoke that still emanates powerfully throughout the apartment complex. The two now stay with family on Southern Boulevard, which means it  takes Chrisanthony about 30 minutes to get to his school, P.S. 11.

Rivera, who was sleeping when the fire broke out and was awoken by a neighbor screaming “Fuego!” first met Rodriguez about seven years ago, the first time she lived at 1244 Woodycrest Avenue; she later left for Puerto Rico and recently returned. During the summer, the two have played dominoes together.  Rodriguez calls Rivera when she is on her way over to their apartment to clean, and Rivera came upstairs to visit her friend one afternoon. Both Rodriguez and Rivera say that the camaraderie among residents of the building has made a difficult time easier. 

“We get this compliment from every insurance person who comes in,” Rivera said. “That same day, we were cleaning. There was music blasting. We were joking.”   Rivera remembered asking Red Cross officials who tended to residents on the day of the fire if—should it prove necessary to evacuate to a shelter—all of the building’s tenants could be sent to the same location.

While they feel lucky to be alive, both Rivera and Rodriguez have suffered emotional hardship, in addition to damage to their home. Rodriguez said she is still too shaken up to return to work, especially since her customer service job requires constant patience. She hasn’t had time yet to survey all the damage to her possessions, but she knows so far that her crystal collection is broken and that the ink on her daughter’s school papers, which she needs for upcoming midterms, has run to the degree where the papers are illegible.

Still, Rodriguez said, these are just material possessions and can be replaced.

Rivera’s apartment suffered extensive water damage that claimed Chrisanthony’s bed, and Rivera said her floors were also ruined.
“You don’t understand,” Rodriguez mused about her friend, “This woman cleans in the morning and cleans at night.”

Though the charcoal-colored, ash-laden stairwells, boarded up windows, and black walls of 1244 Woodycrest Avenue still offer powerful evidence of the fire that could have destroyed it, Rivera and Rodriguez are both hopeful that they can move back into the building before too long.

“It hurts, because you work so hard for the little that you’ve got,” Rivera said. “But we all want to stay here.”