After a fire broke out in neighboring restaurant Community Food & Juice at 9:40 a.m. on Friday, residents of 600 West 113th St.—the Nussbaum dorm—were evacuated from their building.
The fire was contained by 11 a.m., and FDNY firefighters left within the hour. At around noon, Columbia Housing Services sent an e-mail to the Nussbaum residents, saying that the residents of two suites should expect to move temporarily. Though Housing had not yet been able to assess the full extent of the damage, the e-mail reported “smoke and water damage, as well as some broken flooring and windows.” The Nussbaum building houses undergraduates and graduate students, as well as private tenants.
According to chief firefighter Thomas McKavanaugh, the flames originated from a “grease fire in the kitchen.” McKavanaugh confirmed that it was “all put out” by 11 a.m., adding that the fire was fully contained to the restaurant and that “only smoke, and very little” spread to the dormitory. McKavanaugh said he was grateful that the building was concrete, a factor that, he said, made the scene easy to be controlled.
According to Roberto Juárez, who works in the Community Food & Juice kitchen, the fire “started on the grill.”
“Something was cooking, and then the fire suddenly goes up,” Juárez said. “All the time, you see fire, but that was just crazy.”
Two days later, the fate of the restaurant and Nussbaum residents remains uncertain.
Yujie Zeng, SEAS ’11, lives in room 1 of Nussbaum Suite 2B, which faces the shaft. Firemen broke through both of her windows, tore up the floor boards, hacked through the walls of her room, and shoved the desks in the middle of her room, which is a double.
She and her roommate, as well as another girl who lives next door were all forced to leave the building and move to singles in Broadway, where they will live for the rest of the semester.
When the fire alarm first went off, “It was very scary. I was putting my contacts in, and I saw all this smoke coming from the radiator. I thought the fire was coming from our room,” Zeng said.
“My stuff was fine—the biggest problem was trying to get smoke out of everything. That took a long time,” she added.
Silvia Puma, CC ’10, who lives in Suite 2C, said the floor still smells of smoke. Though little damage was done to her room, Puma said she is still waiting for her locks to be fixed since the firefighters broke in.
According to Scott Wright, vice president for student and administrative services, students living in the B and C suites on the second floor of Nussbaum were relocated, and many are currently staying in Broadway.
A Schapiro guard, who declined to give his name, said that three people had temporarily moved in this weekend, adding that one would be moving back to Nussbaum on Sunday night.
Malik Nawaz, the superintendent for Nussbaum, could not be reached by press time, and Vice President for Public Safety James McShane declined to comment.
According to fliers posted in the dorm, the gas will be off and one elevator will be out of order for several days. In the meantime, Nussbaum residents must go across the street to 601 West 113th St. to do their laundry.
Community Food & Juice representatives could not be reached for comment, but a sign posted on the door said the restaurant would be closed for several weeks to “repair the damage done.”
When the fire first broke out, smoke spread through both the restaurant and the dormitory, so Columbia Public Safety officers and firefighters were initially uncertain of the origin of the flames.
Matthew Hoine, CC ’10, said there was a significant amount of smoke on the 11th floor of the dormitory.
“I thought it was a false alarm, and then I saw that there was a fair amount of smoke in the hallways, and I thought I’d better leave,” Hoine said.
“A lot of people thought it was a drill, so they were slow to come out,” said Journalism School student Randall Mah, who also lives in the building. “When we were running down, we could see the smoke.”
James Tyson contributed reporting to this article.
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