NeighborhoodAt about 22:30h, Tuesday, 6 April 1999, I noticed a lot on noise and trucks in front-- apparently across the street, 2 houses down from where they knocked that other place down last year, the place was smoking!!
More fire engines and gawking neighbors and drug dealers crowd around to see the smoke and meet old friends.
What excitement!! At least for this house they probably won't have to do all the work of dismantling it-- with any luck there may only be ashes left!! Must be those Joisey contractors at work! Bet the insurance premiums were paid up??
At 22:55 flames began appearing in the back roof.
Smoke fills the streets-- my kitties start pacing back and forth nervously-- the bright search lights make it look like noon-- I stay at my front window vantage point, hoping an explosion don't blow the whole street away!
More flames spring up on the roof!! The spine-tingling excitement mounts.
OK, it's now 2am and everything seems under control.
I went out to see if anybody knew anything. Nopers! BUT,
they did get a body through the back of the place-- where druggies were always going back and forth all night long.
That guy just had to walk in front of the camera when I took the pic-- so I had to alter his bright red jacket to be able to see the loaded funeral home/coroners (?) "shopping cart"!
Nobody seems to know whether it was male or female, or even where the body was found, nor whether they died BEFORE the fire or because of it. Whoever it was certainly was NOT small!
Guess some details may be in the mornings paper-- which I do not get anymore!
[One of the local papers had a short note about the fire, saying that some unidentified person was found dead on the 3rd floor, of causes unknown.]
When they were taking out the body I saw somebody dressed in what looked-like a fireman outfit take off his protective rubber gloves and throw them onto the street. GAWD, even the teachers in the Trenton Public Schools have to languish through a video explaining what to do with potentially hazardous waste!
They were still in the street at 10am. Now some unsuspecting kid can pick them up to play with, since the only other leisure activities for Trenton youth are things like using an aluminum bat to break bottles on the lot across the street or tie a bottomless milk crate to a wire mesh fence and use it to shoot "baskets"!!
The side of the toasted, classical turn-of-the-Century home still bears witness to the glory days of the State Capital, when many ceramic industries flourished in what was called The Staffordshire Of America, and the slogan on the bridge over the Delaware, TRENTON MAKES - THE WORLD TAKES really meant something! In letters, painted over several times, one may be able to make out "USE YOUR CREDIT",
"PRATICO" (a well known jeweler, now in Hamilton), as well as other less intelligible script..
Side view of house with a pile of debris on ground-- which will probably attract more vermin than the inside of that house once did, AND a Trenton version of a "clothes tree" (adjoining tree has clothes hanging from it!)!!
Glass fragments all over the sidewalk. People walk by there all the time, and the kids get out of school at 14:30h. I wonder how many days/weeks/months it will take for the rest of that side of the street to be cleaned up/demolished to make room for GAWD knows what??
This is the house next door to the one which was knocked down last year. That may go next. I see lights on and off at night on the third floor, so there must be some stragglers still living there.
All logic aside, a parking lot for a couple dozen cars will NOT solve the parking problems of the soon-to-be-finished Ice Hockey arena a couple blocks away! And the vibration of the already heavy traffic on this street (and others) is causing structural defects in the adjoining properties, some of which are designated "Historical Landmarks"!!
Trenton needs some tax-paying business to fill this fairly LARGE tract (at least for this part of the city)-- one which will NOT get years of free tax relief while they rake in the bucks!
Someone told me, as I watched the spectacle early this morning, that movie theatres are in the "planning" stages near the arena. Hey, it has been, what, 25-30 years since Trenton had a movie house!! And local "planning" does seem to take a decade or more before any observable action is noted.
A toast to some long overdue urban renewal-- SOON!!
So I called the 2 local newspapers and the mayor's complaint office about the potential health hazard of those gloves which are still in the street. YES, they were still there!! One newspaper said "people see them doing it all the time".
Todays newspaper mentions "Suspicious" about the fire and body, noting that the body apparently did NOT have arms or legs-- YEAH, sounds sort of "suspicious" to me too.
I gave a printout of this report to one of my neighbor/drug dealers (let me call him John, since I really can not remember his name! I assume he deals/uses/whatever, and really do not care if he does or does not-- he always says hello and chats with me, and is kewl -- I mentioned that I was in Tenerife when I returned from the Island last January, and he said "Oh, yes, that was where the Jumbo plane crash was" and gave me the date and other details!!) GAWD!! And this from a light-skinned black 30ish dude who went to school ouside of Trenton (Hopewell, I think) -- the kids I had in the 8th grade in Trenton DID NOT even know who the mayor was -- and a former white neighbor of about the same age from the same Public School system could neither read NOR write!!
Seems as if John has not seen a neighboorhod woman for about 4 days, thinks it may be her, and suggests it was murder, with the arson to "cover up" the killing. Stupid twits-- they really did NOT cover up too much-- like, this woman with no arms or legs made it to the 3rd floor to smoke crack then somehow dropped a match which she was holding with the learned/well practiced folds of her clitoris, starting a fire!!! YUPPERS, sounds right to me!!
Yesterdays paper said it was a female, as yet unidentified.
Homicide was sifting through debris, I assume on the 3rd floor, for clues to the murder. The insurance adjusters were checking out the condition of the place.
Trenton really should do thorough checks of ALL the rental places in the neighborhood, as well as others. Check for fire escapes, code violations (which I am sure would be numerous), illegal aliens and just plain filth.
On South Broad Street a friend lives in a place across the street from the library with the 2nd and 3rd floors rented out, 6-7 smallish rooms -- each occupied by a different person, no fire escape, wires running all over the place (even along floors!), ONE bathroom on the 2nd floor for ALL the roomers, no in-door lock on his room -- so he used some flimsy "eye" bolts with a padlock through them when he goes out!. The ceiling plaster is out in areas showing the wood lathe and allowing dust and stuff from the air space between the roof and ceiling to fall into his room. Using an electrical outlet causes the fuses to blow for the whole floor. And that is in a "nicer" section than where I live!!
OK, so this is unbelievable-- the fire engines-- 4 in all-- are once again in front of the place!! Arrived at around 11h, I think -- heard trucks, but thought they were the normal ones that are always around here! No pics this time because you all can imagine what a fire truck looks like!
Dumb is dumb!! A second attempt to burn the place down/destroy evidence?? I did not see any smoke anywhere, and they did NOT hook up the hoses, so GAWD knows why they were back. UNLESS -- I just saw 2 police or whatever with large flashlights going around the street side of the old meat wholesaler on the corner-- right next door to the burned house. This meat place has been closed for years already, since a fire gutted the interior!! It is the last property on this street theoretically due to be demolished to make way for some "improvement".
Your resident reporter at large,
Sonny