Northeast Phila. apartment building destroyed by fire

A 64-year-old unemployed restaurant worker and a 21-year-old laid-off salesman were among at least 80 people left homeless by a five-alarm fire that gutted a 41-unit apartment building in Northeast Philadelphia before dawn Sunday.

Nineteen people were taken to three hospitals after some of them leapt out of windows in the three-story Austin Manor Apartments on Rising Sun Avenue near Tyson Street.

A fire official at the scene said three of the people injured were in critical condition at area hospitals.

Tom Foley, CEO of the five-county Southeast Pennsylvania chapter of the American Red Cross, who reported the number of people hospitalized, said "close to 60 people" were also transferred to a temporary shelter at Northeast High School.

As he spoke in a stairwell at the school, Foley said he assumed that others, besides those hospitalized and those at the shelter, had gone directly to friends and families.

Fire Commissioner Lloyd Ayers said that the fire was reported about 4:30 a.m. and was not brought under control until about 6:30 a.m. The cause was under investigation.

The building butts onto Rising Sun and faces another Austin Manor unit across a narrow parking lot. All apartments in the facing building also were evacuated.

Foley said 38 of the 41 apartments in the gutted building were occupied.

Sunday morning, all of the two dozen window frames on each level of the gutted building were blackened and sections of the roof were missing.

Among the residents who went to Northeast High for shelter was Jaime Rodriguez, 21, who said all of his financial assets were consumed by the fire - the $20 in a wallet and the $12 in a debit card, both left behind.

"I lost my job a month ago" as a salesman for a cell phone firm, he said.

Sunday was the seventh birthday of his niece, Cynthia Rodriguez, who was spending the weekend at the apartment he shared with his mother and stepfather, both 45.

Asked what he and his unemployed elders would do, Jaime said, "Whatever God puts in front of me."

The four celebrated Cynthia's birthday Saturday night. Sunday morning the child returned to her mother's home.

Rodriguez said the building's fire alarm jolted his family awake but, when he ran into a hallway, he didn't encounter flames or smoke.

"I didn't see nothing until I got outside. I wasn't planning on waiting," to assess the danger before he left, he said.

Standing across Rising Sun Avenue from the gutted building in the late morning, Robert Brant, 64, said he and his companion also had left the burning building with little.

Awakened by the building's alarm, Brant said, he ran into a hallway to find "flames shooting" from another apartment.

His companion rushed up to him and though "she wanted to go back in for the cat, I said, 'Let's get out of here.'"

The couple said they lost two TV sets, a $600 camera, all of their identification. And the cat.

Both Brant and his companion live only on Social Security, directly deposited into their bank accounts. But the next deposit doesn't happen for a week and a half.

"Now we got to worry about food," he said.

Brant and his companion are among the fortunate.

"I already got an apartment from a friend," Brant said. "I was going to rent it last week."

Austin Manor was the scene of another five-alarm fire in 2001. Foley said two apartment house fires earlier this year affected even more people than today's blaze.

A seven-alarm Jan. 10 fire in the Grange Manor Apartments at 1419 Grange Ave. in the Ogontz neighborhood, Foley said, "displaced 93 people."

And a four-alarm predawn blaze on New Year's Day at the 51-unit Bradford Arms at Bustleton Avenue and Hoffnagle Street killed an elderly woman and, Foley said, displaced 113 people.

Contact staff writer Walter F. Naedele at 215-854-5607