A smoky, multialarm fire in Somerville’s Teele’s Square raged for around four hours starting at 4:50 p.m,, bringing support from Cambridge, Medford, Boston, Belmont, Brookline, Everett, Chelsea, Malden and Stoneham to the site.
Smoke poured out the upper floor and from the roof of the three-story brick building at 1147 Broadway at Curtis Street. (Firefighters referred to it as 1135 Broadway, one of the addresses for the multistorefront building.) The mixed-use building has apartments on the upper floors over businesses that include a Happy Crab and Masala restaurants and, in a coincidence, a Blue Moon smoke shop. As many as 40 people may be displaced, according to media reports.
Another business at the site is the Teele Square Coin Laundry. The 1135 Broadway building is across the street from “The Pit,” a lot vacant since an Oct. 29, 2011, fire that destroyed the Teele Square Laundromat.
Also burned out at “The Pit” site were a nail salon, the Kee Kar Laue restaurant and West Somerville police substation. The lot has been empty for 15 years, frustrating residents, but on Wednesday, the city’s Zoning Board of Appeals hears a returning plan for an eight-story, 99-room hotel.
Firefighters had gained access to burning apartments by 5:01 p.m. and were trying to control the fire directly with water, according to scanner reports. The battle was tough: Though at 5:48 p.m. the smoke condition had “drastically improved,” a report at 6:04 p.m. described heavy smoke and fire still coming out of holes in the roof.
“My thoughts right now are with them and everyone in Teele Square who’s been affected by the terrible fire this evening,” Ward 7 city councilor Emily Hardt said at the board hearing, referring to the owners of both properties, Laxmi and Jharana Pradhan. The developer at the hotel is Binoj Pradhan.
The fire was stubborn enough that engines left to be rehabbed so they could come back and fight the blaze with fresh supplies, according to scanner reports. The fire went to five alarms, which describes how many engines are needed to knock down a fire.
The building, called The Cliff when it was finished in 1912, has been owned since 1988 by the Pradhans.
“Just from looking from the outside, the fire was throughout the whole roof, it seemed like, and the water was streaming down through all of the apartments and down through the first floor businesses,” Hardt said. “It seemed like the right-hand side, the newer side of the building, might have been saved. On the left side, every floor looked devastated.”
