NHFD photo
Early-morning blaze at 11 Charles. Below: on scene around 9:30.
Thomas Breen photos
A fire in Dixwell left four men without a home.
The pre-dawn blaze took place Friday at a multi-family apartment building at 11 Charles St. just off Dixwell Avenue.
The four apartments in the converted Old Parsonage building at 11 Charles are owned and run by the adjacent Varick Memorial AME Zion Church.
Fire Chief John Alston told the Independent that the department dispatched a team of firefighters at 6:29 a.m. after receiving two 911 calls.
Upon arriving at 6:34 a.m., firefighters found “a working fire in the walls and attic,” Alston said. They had the blaze under control by 7:05, with no injuries reported at this time, but “a lot of water and smoke damage” to the three-story building.
Four adults and three pets were displaced by the fire, with the Red Cross working to find the tenants a temporary new place to stay.
Alston said the cause of the fire is still under investigation.
“It’s very unfortunate,” Varick Pastor Kelcy Steele said about the fire. “We’re going to be communicating with the insurance company and also helping the tenants” salvage what belongings they can from the wreckage.
Chris Hayes (pictured) said he was asleep in his second-story apartment when he heard fellow tenants shouting about a fire and calling for everyone to get out of the building.
“This is catastrophic,” he said. Hayes said he’s lived at the Charles Street apartment building for five years.
Mark Mitchell (pictured) said he too has spent the past half-decade living in one of the Varick-owned apartments.
He too was asleep when the fire started. When he awoke to the sounds of neighbors shouting and leaving the building, he said, “The walls were hot.” And, due to the heavy smoke, “You could barely see.”
This isn’t Mitchell’s first time being displaced from a fire in New Haven.
“The last house I lived in burnt down too,” he said about a former home on Argyle Street.
Mitchell was able to salvage two pairs of jeans from his apartment. He said the roof of the building had burned so thoroughly that the top of the structure was now open to the sky.
“Everything’s charcoaled and smoky.”
Another tenant who identified himself only as Dan recalled the mad rush of getting out of the building at around 6:30 a.m. when he and his fellow neighbors realized there was a fire.
“It was just, ‘Get out! Get out!’” he said. “We’re gonna lose a lot of stuff.” He said he’d lived at the Charles Street residence for 10 years. When asked where he’ll go next, he said, “I’m gonna go where I’ve got to go.”
Reginald Slade (pictured), a steward at the historic Black Dixwell congregation, reiterated that the church is now working with an insurance adjuster and the Red Cross.
Melanie Camacho and Barry Lawson (pictured) don’t live on Charles Street. They were in the area Friday morning in order to get Covid tests at the nearby Cornell Scott Hill Health Center clinic.
They said they’re both homeless and had spent the night at a shelter on Shelton Avenue. They took the bus down Dixwell Avenue, but had to get out before their stop because the road was blocked by police cars and fire engines.
“The fire was all you could smell,” Lawson said about being on the scene so soon after the blaze.
I never really thought about it, but its peculiar to see a widows walk on a building so far from the harbor.