Quite possibly my most read and most controversial piece to date was my article on suspicious fires in Brooklyn and their amazingly conventient result of helping developers. This was based on an initial reaction I had to fires (some deadly) near the controversial Atlantic Yards fire, and partly based on the statements of politicians like Eric Adams, Bill Batson and Wellington Sharpe who were sounding the alarm on these fires. The Williamsburg warehouse fire was the largest and most suspicious of the lot where mere days before a hearing on whether it should be given landmark status (thus ruining the developer's plans to develop it) the whole thing burned down.

A couple of homeless men were blamed for the Williamsburg fire and Guttmanm, the owner of the warehouse who now no longer has to worry about challenges to the development of the site, is off the hook. I wrote an article pointing out that Bill Batson also predicted that this would happen, that they would round up the usual suspects and it would all die down. This is exactly what happened. Of course it turned out the homeless men weren't anywhere near the site the night of the fire, but it all died down anyway.

I took some crap for those articles, and I knew I was going out on a limb. But New York has seen this before, long before I moved here. And now, it seems the idea that it may be happening again is hitting the mainstream.

From the Sept. 25th New York Magazne:

Brooklyn Is Burning
In the midst of the building boom, a fire epidemic of a kind not seen since 1977 is raging. Do development and arson go hand in hand?

* By Mark Jacobson

The [Terminal] market blaze was only one of the many, many “suspicious” fires to hit the Brooklyn development zones of late. Within three months, from December 7, 2005, to February 24, 2006, there were eleven such fires along Prospect Heights’ “Pacific Street Corridor,” formerly home to single-story factories and flat-fix establishments but now part of the realty zone sandwiched between the escalating rent sprawl of Williamsburg and Fort Greene and the proposed Atlantic Yards megaproject to the West.

Location, location, location. The proximity of the afflicted Prospect Heights addresses raises eyebrows: 1033 Pacific, 1084 Pacific, 1198 Pacific, 1440 Pacific. Other fires were around the corner, at 530 and 600 St. Marks Avenue. Two more occurred at 461 and 658 Park Place, with another at nearby 683 Dean Street...

This was part of a larger pattern. According to FDNY stats, 2005 was the single busiest year in Fire Department history, with a total of 485,702 calls answered. This beat out the former record of 459,567 calls, set back in 1977.

You remember 1977, right?...

With things as they are, the fire committee of Community Board 8, responsible for Prospect Heights, stands ever vigilant. It’s co-chaired by Batson and the five-foot-tall demon letter writer Holly Fuchs Ferguson, a secretary of the Society of Old Brooklynites (SOB), and bolstered by 100 percent engaged, 100 percent enraged old-school activists like Connie Lesold, Josefina Sanfeliú of Latinas Against Fire Cuts, and 72-year-old Doris Heriveaux, who in 2004 was burned out of her apartment of 22 years by an arson at 852 Classon Avenue.

No one was arrested in the fire at 852 Classon, but Heriveaux says that doesn’t matter. “Everyone had to move out. The building needed to be renovated. The idea was, you had to leave.” But Heriveaux did not want to move. “I raised my children in that apartment. It was home.” She took the landlord to court and managed to win the right to move back into the building at the same $800 rent. It took almost two years, but it was worth it, says Heriveaux, since all the new tenants are paying over $2,000 a month more for similar apartments.

This is fairly typical in torched buildings, say Community Board 8 fire-committee members. “The buildings burn down, and the rent goes up,” says Lesold. Many of the fire committee’s meetings concern seemingly prosaic FDNY operational issues like “response time”—the duration between when a company gets a call and the time it arrives on the scene.

So, Bill Batson and I are not the only people to think something isn't quite right in the heart of Brooklyn. But you might have heard it from us first.

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