Finalist: Staff of The New York Times

‘The numbers are horrific,’ Mayor Eric Adams said after the city’s deadliest fire in decades.

At least 19 people, including nine children, were killed in a fire in a Bronx apartment building on Sunday morning, in what officials described as one of the city’s worst fires in recent memory. Mayor Eric Adams said it was likely caused by a malfunctioning space heater.

The fire started just before 11 a.m. in a duplex apartment on the second and third floors of the building, on East 181st Street, according to the Fire Department.

Firefighters arrived within three minutes and encountered smoke that extended the entire height of the 19-story building, said the fire commissioner, Daniel A. Nigro.

He added that “the smoke conditions in this building were unprecedented,” and that victims had suffered from severe smoke inhalation.

Crews entering the building found victims “on every floor” and were taking them out in “cardiac and respiratory arrest,” he said.

Fire officials said the number of fatalities is likely to climb.

“The numbers are horrific,” Mr. Adams said at a news conference on Sunday afternoon outside the apartment building, adding, “This is going to be one of the worst fires that we have witnessed during modern times.”

More than 60 were injured, and those with life-threatening injuries were taken to five Bronx hospitals. Roughly 200 firefighters battled the blaze, officials said.

Commissioner Nigro said the fire started in a bedroom on the third floor where a space heater was being used. Once the fire spread in that apartment, individuals ran out and left the door open, which helped fuel the fire and allowed the smoke to spread. “We’ve spread the word, ‘close the door, close the door’” to keep a fire contained, he said.

The fire only spread in the apartment where it started and in the hallway, but the smoke made its way through the whole building.

The 120-unit building, at 333 East 181st Street near Tiebout Avenue, was built in 1972, according to city records.

About 25 windows facing Webster Avenue were blown out. Sheets hung from some of the windows, billowing in the wind.

Kelly Magee, a spokeswoman for the property owners, said that the fire alarm system was working and that there were no known problems with the smoke alarms. Commissioner Nigro said one of the first calls about the fire came from a neighbor who heard the smoke alarms going off.

Some firefighters ran out of oxygen but kept up the effort to rescue people. “It certainly is traumatizing when we can’t save lives,” the commissioner said.

The city Department of Buildings said in a statement that a preliminary investigation determined the building remained stable and that displaced residents were offered relocation assistance by the American Red Cross.

A city official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the fire was still under investigation, said fire marshals believe the space heater had been running for several days uninterrupted. The residents were using the heater to supplement the building’s heat, which was on, officials said.

Gov. Kathy Hochul and Senator Chuck Schumer joined Mayor Adams at the news conference in what they called a show of unity among city, state and federal governments.

“We are indeed a city in shock,” Governor Hochul said. “We will not forget you. We will not abandon you.”

Apartment doors left open during fires have featured in some of the city’s worst blazes, including a Bronx fire in 2017 that left 13 people dead. The fire was started by a young boy playing with the stove in his family’s first-floor apartment and quickly tore through the building.

The building where Sunday’s deadly fire occurred is in Fordham Heights in the West Bronx. Built in 1972, it has no fire escapes, like most modern high-rises, and residents must rely on the stairwells in the event of an emergency.

Officials said the fire called to mind the fire at the Happy Land nightclub in 1990 in the Bronx, which killed 87 people. The club, which operated illegally, had no sprinklers, and several exits were blocked off with roll-down security shutters.

Chelsia Rose Marcius, Eduardo Medina and Matthew Haag contributed reporting.

— Azi Paybarah and Jeffery C. Mays

‘We were just trying to breathe,’ says resident who survived fire in Bronx apartment building.

Wesley Patterson was in the bathroom just before 11 a.m. on Sunday when his girlfriend knocked on the door to say that she saw flames coming out of another unit.

It took only moments for the apartment to fill with smoke, said Mr. Patterson, who has lived in the building for 20 years.

“We were just trying to breathe,” Mr. Patterson, 28, said. He rushed with his girlfriend and her brother, who lives with the couple, to a back window.

He tried to open it but the frame was so hot that he burned his hands. When he got the window open, he started screaming to firefighters who were helping a family in apartment 3M. The firefighters couldn’t get to them just yet, he said.

Mr. Patterson said he had to keep opening and shutting the window to keep smoke from pouring in as he called for help.

“I was yelling, ‘Please help me! Please come get us!’” he said.

The family tried to open the door, but the apartment flooded with even more smoke.

“I was thinking about my son, and I was wondering if I was ever going to see him again,” Mr. Patterson said.

It was around 11:20 a.m. that Mr. Patterson said he and his family were pulled out of the window by firefighters.

“I’m glad we made it out safe, but I still can’t believe it happened,” he said.

Dana Nicole Campbell, 47, was at a nearby park, working as a groundskeeper for the city, when one of her four teenage children called to say that smoke was coming into their apartment on the third floor. Ms. Campbell said she told them to put damp towels by the foot of the door to prevent more smoke from entering the apartment, and to barricade themselves inside the apartment.

Then she raced to the building and got there in time to see her children jump out of a third-floor window. They landed on a mattress and garbage bags that people had put there as a makeshift landing pad. Later, Ms. Campbell said she was grateful her children were unharmed.

“You can be here tomorrow with broken legs,” she said. “You can’t be here tomorrow with smoke inhalation.”

Firefighters helped Cristal Diaz escape with her two aunts, aged 49 and 65, and three cousins from their smoke-filled apartment on the 15th floor. Ms. Diaz, who moved from the Dominican Republic two years ago, took only her phone and identification with her when she left. “We don’t know what to do right now, and tomorrow I’m supposed to work,” said Ms. Diaz, who works as a cashier. The family is currently staying with friends.

Ms. Diaz said she was drinking coffee, as she does every morning, when the disaster struck.

“I thought, ‘Is this going to be the last time I enjoy coffee with my family?’ Ms. Diaz, 27, recalled, still in shock.

Members of the Wague family stood on the corner of Tiebout Avenue and Folin Street, huddled together, some under a blanket, after escaping their third-floor apartment.

Mamadou Wague was awakened by one of his children. “I get up, and there’s smoke in the kids’ rooms,” Mr. Wague, 47, said.

As the family rushed out of the apartment, one of Mr. Wague’s children cried that their sister, Nafisha, 8, was missing. Mr. Wague sprinted to her room and found her sitting on her bed, screaming, he said. Mr. Wague grabbed her and ran out.

Ahouss Balima, 20, lived on the ninth floor of the building, along with his three younger sisters and parents. He and his family had been asleep on Sunday morning when he was awakened by the sound of someone screaming for help.

Mr. Balima went to wake up his family, and they rushed downstairs, only to be told by firefighters on the 6th floor that they couldn’t go down any further because it was too dangerous.

After eventually being rescued by firefighters, one of his sisters was taken to a hospital, and she was still in critical condition on Sunday night.

By 3:30 p.m., the fire was under control, and a faint smell of smoke lingered in the air. Several residents stood nearby. Some wore sneakers, others had winter coats, and a few had blankets wrapped around their shoulders. A few people huddled under nearby scaffolding to escape the biting wind. Several held their phones close to their faces to assure concerned family members that they were alive.

— Chelsia Rose Marcius, Eduardo Medina, Azi Paybarah, Giulia Heyward and Alexandra E. Petri

A space heater is blamed for the deadly fire in a Bronx apartment building.

A malfunctioning space heater caused the fire in a Bronx apartment Sunday, and an open door to the apartment allowed thick, black smoke to quickly fill the high-rise building, Fire Department Commissioner Daniel Nigro said.

The blaze started just before 11 a.m. in a duplex apartment on the second and third floors of the building, on East 181st Street, according to the Fire Department.

At a news conference on Sunday, Mayor Eric Adams and Mr. Nigro said that the fire was caused by an electric space heater that malfunctioned, but they didn’t give additional details. The Commissioner said he believed the heat was working in the building and that the heater was being used to supplement the heat.

The fire started in a bedroom of the apartment, Mr. Nigro said.

“The door to that apartment, unfortunately, when the residents left, was left open. It did not close by itself,” Mr. Nigro said. “The smoke spread throughout the building, thus the tremendous loss of life and other people fighting for their lives right now in hospitals all over the Bronx.”

Because the door was open, the fire reached the hall, Mr. Nigro said, but it never extended anywhere else in the building.

One of the first calls about the fire came from a neighbor who heard the smoke alarm, the commissioner said.

The building had 120 units, including studios and four-bedroom apartments. The building had internal stair wells, not external fire escapes, and residents should have known where escape routes were located, Mr. Nigro said. However, the volume of smoke likely obstructed people’s ability to escape, he added.

The Department of Buildings sent inspectors to conduct a structural stability inspection of the building.

The building, named Twin Parks North West, is home to working-class families, many of whom depend on Section 8 rental assistance. Several residents said that the fire alarms were heard so frequently, they were often ignored. Dana Nicole Campbell, who lives on the third floor, said the fire alarms in the building go off five or six times a day. When they do, she said, “I roll my eyes.”

Kelly Magee, a spokeswoman for the property owners, said that the fire alarm system was working and that there were no known problems with the smoke alarms.

Some victims were found trapped in the stairwells and others in their apartments, and one man narrowly escaped when the elevator arrived as he was losing consciousness, Mr. Feliz said.

The specific vouchers they use in the development are not transferable, Mr. Feliz said, adding that it would be difficult for them to find permanent housing.

“It’s a tragedy,” he said. “We’re talking about some of the poorest New Yorkers.”

The Bronx building is owned by a group of investors, LIHC Investment Group, Belveron Partners and Camber Property Group, who bought it as part of a $166 million deal in early 2020 for eight rent-regulated buildings in the borough.

Camber Property Group, which operates affordable housing properties across New York City, most of which are in the Bronx, is one of the fastest-growing developers of affordable housing in the city.

Camber’s co-founder, Rick Gropper, was named as a member of Mr. Adams’s transition team for housing issues before Mr. Adams took office this month.

“We are devastated by the unimaginable loss of life caused by this profound tragedy,” the property owners said in a statement. “We are cooperating fully with the Fire Department and other city agencies as they investigate its cause, and we are doing all we can to assist our residents. Our thoughts are with the families and friends of those who lost their lives or were injured, and we are here to support them as we recover from this horrific fire.”

Azi Paybarah contributed to this article.

— Matthew Haag, Ashley Southall and Jeffery C. Mays

Heavy smoke likely prevented residents from escaping.

A fire at a Bronx apartment building on Sunday that killed 17 people, including eight children, started in a duplex apartment on a low floor but sent heavy smoke throughout the building, which likely prevented residents from escaping.

Daniel A. Nigro, the fire commissioner of the New York City Fire Department, said at a news conference on Sunday evening that the cause of the fire started from a malfunctioning electric space heater. But officials were working to investigate why the smoke spread so rapidly throughout the 19-story building and how it traveled.

The fire started just before 11 a.m. in a duplex apartment on the second and third floors of the building, on East 181st Street, according to the Fire Department.

Commissioner Nigro said that the fire consumed the apartment with the space heater and part of the hallway. When the residents of the apartment fled, the door to the building was left open, and it did not close by itself, he said.

Leaving the door open likely helped fuel the fire and quickly send smoke throughout the building, preventing residents from escaping, said Daniel Madrzykowski, a director of research for the Underwriters Laboratories’ Fire Safety Research Institute.

Dr. Madrzykowski said when a door is left open, like in Sunday’s fire, it provides a source of air that can help fuel a fire, which “essentially acts as a pump.”

“So as people open up the building in trying to escape, the smoke keeps blocking their path, blocking their egress,” Dr. Madrzykowski said. “The smoke is hot. The smoke is toxic. Limits visibility. It’s irritating to the eyes. It will sting your eyes, and make your eyes water. It’s a very difficult situation.”

Commissioner Nigro said the building did not have fire escapes, only interior stairways, leaving the residents with only a short window to flee as smoke made its way throughout the building.

“The smoke spread throughout the building, thus the tremendous loss of life and other people fighting for their lives right now in hospitals all over the Bronx,” Commissioner Nigro said. “I think some of them could not escape because of the volume of smoke.”

According to the Fire Research Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, when oxygen mixes with heated gases in a building, energy levels can increase, which can cause a fire to grow rapidly.

When the oxygen level in a structure drops or is depleted, a fire decays, and heat from the fire and temperatures drop, according to the research division.

“Closing the door limits smoke spread and limits the oxygen that is available for combustion,” Dr. Madrzykowski said.

— Jesus Jiménez

A large African community found a home in the Bronx apartment building.

The high-rise in the Bronx where 17 people died in a fire on Sunday was home to many African immigrants who chose their apartments for the close-knit community and proximity to local mosques.

A significant number of the building’s residents were practicing Muslims and originally from Gambia, Mayor Eric Adams said at a news conference on Sunday.

He spoke about respecting cultural and religious needs, especially related to burial rites, and emphasized that support would be provided regardless of immigration status.

Gov. Kathy Hochul reassured residents of the building, on East 181st Street, that she would not forget them. She announced plans to establish a victims’ compensation fund to help secure new housing and pay for burials and other costs.

“Tonight is a night of tragedy and pain, and tomorrow we begin to rebuild,” she said. “We rebuild their lives and give them hope. Especially those who came all the way from Africa. Gambians in search of a better life right here in this great borough, the borough of the Bronx. They’re part of our family.”

Smoke traveled throughout the 19-story building and victims suffered from severe smoke inhalation, said Daniel A. Nigro, the city’s fire commissioner. More than 60 residents were injured.

Hassane Badr’s family, a total of 11 people from Mali, including his parents and siblings, lived in a three-bedroom apartment on the third floor. Two siblings, both children, were killed, he said, adding that a 25-year-old cousin remained unaccounted for.

At Jacobi Medical Center, Mr. Badr waited for news about his 12-year-old brother, who was suffering from serious smoke inhalation. A 5-year-old sister, who was also injured, was at another hospital.

He said there was no time yet to grieve or even think about burials.

“I’m thinking like I’m dreaming, this is not true. You hear people crying, my goodness,” said Mr. Badr, 28. “To be honest, I’m not believing it right now.”

He said his family had lived at the high-rise for at least six years, drawn to it in part for its African connection and the availability to nearby mosques.

Ahouss Balima, 20, who lived on the ninth floor with his parents and three younger sisters, who are all from Burkina Faso, said that the building’s community was “very close.”

“We meet up all the time, apartment to apartment,” said Mr. Balima. “We all know each other.”

At St. Barnabas Hospital, Musa Kabba, a local imam, said he was waiting with anguished relatives for victims to be identified. Several residents attended his mosque on Webster Avenue, the Masjid-Ur-Rahmah, he said. The mosque is a four-minute walk from the building.

“We know that people died,” Mr. Kabba said. “We don’t know who they are.”

Salim Drammeh, the president of the Gambian Youth Organization, said that the nonprofit’s center was blocks away from the apartment building and had opened to collect donations and provide emotional support to the community. He said that contributions, both in person and to an online fund-raiser, just started “flooding in.”

“This is how our community is; we love this community,” said Mr. Drammeh, 26. “Every time anybody is in trouble, we show up for each other.”

Ana Ley, Eduardo Medina and Sean Piccoli contributed reporting.

— Christine Chung

These are some of the deadliest residential fires in recent U.S. history.

Jan. 5, 2022

A dozen people, including eight children, were killed when fire overwhelmed a crowded rowhouse in Philadelphia, in one of the deadliest residential fires in the nation’s recent history. Investigators are looking into the possibility that the fire was caused by a child playing with a lighter near a Christmas tree, according to a warrant application that was filed in state court.

Aug. 26, 2018

Ten children died when a fire broke out in an apartment building in the Little Village section of Chicago. The children were attending a sleepover at the time. The building’s owner was cited with more than 40 building code violations.

Dec. 28, 2017

Thirteen people died when a five-alarm fire engulfed an apartment building in the Bronx, the deadliest blaze in New York City in more than a quarter of a century. The fire started when a 3-year-old boy was playing with the burners of a stove, the authorities said at the time.

March 21, 2015

A hot plate warming food for the Sabbath sparked a fire that tore through the Brooklyn home of an Orthodox Jewish family, killing seven children. There were no smoke detectors on the first floor of the home where the fire broke out or on the second floor where the family members had been sleeping.

April 3, 2008

Ten people, including eight children, were killed when a fire swept through a home in Brockway, Pa., a rural town about 100 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. The victims ranged in age from 4 months to 40 years old.

March 7, 2007

Ten people, nine of them children, died after a fire, sparked by the frayed cord of a space heater, gutted a four-story rowhouse in the High Bridge neighborhood of the Bronx. The victims were members of an extended family of immigrants from Mali.

Dec. 24, 1989

A Christmas Eve fire at a high-rise hotel that had been converted into apartments for seniors in Johnson City, Tenn., killed 16 people, including 14 residents. The fire, which started in the living room of one of the apartments, injured 30 people, including 15 firefighters.

March 22, 1987

Seven people were killed, including three trapped by flames in their 33d-floor apartment who jumped to their deaths, when a smoky blaze raced up a garbage chute and raged through the top floors of a 35-story building at the Schomburg Plaza apartments at the northeast edge of Central Park. Fire officials said the sprinkler system in the chute failed to function, apparently because the water had been turned off.

May 13, 1985

A police helicopter dropped a bomb on a rowhouse in West Philadelphia where members of the communal, anti-government group MOVE lived, an action that the City Council apologized for in 2020 after decades of intense criticism. Eleven people, including five children, were killed, and more than 60 nearby homes were destroyed by the fire.

July 5, 1982

A man with a lengthy criminal record and a history of mental illness intentionally started a fire in an apartment building in Waterbury, Conn., after an argument with a niece who lived there. The fire killed 14 people and displaced more than 100 residents. The man was sentenced to two consecutive life terms for the deadly arson.

— Neil Vigdor

New York governor ‘horrified’ by deadly fire.

A deadly fire Sunday in the Bronx shocked officials, with Gov. Kathy Hochul saying she was “horrified” by the fast-moving blaze, and Representative Adriano D. Espaillat saying he was heartbroken and praying for the victims.

The fire’s thick, choking smoke quickly engulfed the apartment building, making the evacuation difficult. Many of those killed were children.

Governor Hochul said on Twitter on Sunday that the “entire State of New York stands with New York City.”

Many of the fire’s victims appeared to be immigrants, some from Gambia. Mr. Espaillat, a former undocumented immigrant himself who represents the parts of the Bronx, Harlem and Upper Manhattan, said on Twitter that the “scale of this tragedy is unimaginable.” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York also said on Twitter that he was praying for the victims, adding, “I stand with everyone in the Bronx.”

The fire was also devastating for Mayor Eric Adams, who described it as “horrific.”

By Nicholas Fandos

The 17 people killed in a Bronx fire this week all died from inhaling smoke that poured through a single malfunctioning door and billowed to the top of the 19-story building, New York City officials said on Monday, as they investigated how a fire that barely spread beyond one unit became the city’s most lethal in three decades.

The fire’s origin appeared straightforward: A space heater that had been left running continuously burst into flames, officials said. A day later, though, residents remained stunned by the speed with which the smoke inundated the building, killing and critically injuring so many people in broad daylight, even as firefighters arrived within minutes.

The tower, considered a model affordable housing project when it was constructed in 1972, did not have a building-wide sprinkler system, as was allowed under the law. But it was deadly smoke sucked into an internal stairwell, not flames, that overcame residents as they fled the building.

As the fire burned, the smoke was drawn through the broken door on the third floor toward an open stairwell door high above on the 15th floor.

“If you have that door on the upper floors open, that’s really going to give you a flue effect, like a chimney, and that’s what occurred,” said Jim Long, a spokesman for the Fire Department.

Fifteen people remained in critical condition on Monday, officials said. Mayor Eric Adams revised the official death count, saying that the city now believed that 17 people had died as of Monday afternoon, eight of them children, down from the 19 initially reported on Sunday.

“It was the smoke that took these lives, not the fire itself,” Mr. Adams said in a radio interview on 1010 WINS. He added that any maintenance issues related to the self-closing door remaining wide open would be part of the investigation into the fire.

With fire marshals and cleaning crews in white protective suits still combing the singed and smoke-stained tower, brutal images of the scene rippled from East 181st Street through the Bronx and New York City, and as far away as Gambia, the small West African nation from which many of the victims had emigrated.

Most of the deceased had not yet been publicly identified, as the city medical examiner labored to contact grieving relatives who could confirm their identities virtually because of ongoing health concerns around the coronavirus pandemic.

Shocked neighbors, family members and friends hunted for those still missing after the fire, with some traveling from hospital to hospital. Schoolteachers mourned the children missing from their classrooms, and the dozens of families displaced from the tower, Twin Parks North West, fanned out across the Bronx into temporary shelters uncertain when — or if — they would be able to return.

“We are calling 311, we are calling the hospital, we are calling the police department,” said Musa Kabba, the imam of Masjid-Ur-Rahmah, a storefront mosque on Webster Avenue, which serves a largely Gambian population. “We have no information, nobody is giving us nothing since yesterday.”

He feared that several members of the mosque had died.

Dawda Docka Fadera, Gambia’s ambassador to the United States, traveled from Washington to New York to see the site for himself.

“We are a very small country of about less than two million people, and we are all related,” he said. “Everybody knows everybody, so our country is currently in a state of shock.”

City, state and federal leaders said they were moving as quickly as they could to provide an accurate accounting. At a news conference just outside the tower Monday afternoon, they vowed to provide immediate financial support and housing for those affected by the fire, and to look at possible legal changes to address any deficiencies in the city’s fire code uncovered by investigators. President Biden called Mr. Adams to offer assistance.

The mayor, in only his second week on the job, vowed to “double down” on a decades-old campaign by the city to raise awareness about the importance of closing doors during a fire, starting in schools.

“Muscle memory is everything and if we can drill that in, we can save lives by closing doors not just in New York City but across the entire globe,” Mr. Adams said. He also began raising money for victims through a city fund.

Even with the revised death count, the fire was believed to be the deadliest in New York City since 1990, when 87 people died amid a fire intentionally set at a Bronx nightclub.

The city’s fire commissioner, Daniel A. Nigro, blamed the numeric error on “a bit of a double count” by authorities trying to locate missing residents who had been scattered around the city. He cautioned that the fatality count could yet rise again based on those evacuated from the building still in hospitals “fighting for their lives on Monday.”

Space heaters, particularly older models, are a well-known risk. Nationally, the use of space heaters has been linked to about 1,700 residential fires a year, resulting in roughly 80 deaths and 160 injuries, according to estimates by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.

The commission opened an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Bronx fire, including looking into whether the space heater had been defective, said Patty Davis, a spokeswoman for the commission. Officials did not name the model of the heater.

In interviews, residents of the tower said such devices were a fixture in many units during cold snaps, like the one currently gripping New York, to supplement built-in radiators. A New York City housing survey found that low-income neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn and northern Manhattan that are historically home to communities of color have a higher percentage of residences that rely on supplemental heating sources.

“Every winter we would always have space heaters or use the oven or boil water,” said Fatiah Touray, 38, whose family was among the first Gambian immigrants to move into the building in 1983.

Commissioner Nigro said that the fire that broke out on Sunday from the “faulty” heater did not spread much beyond the unit itself. But, crucially, when the residents in the unit fled the flames, they did not shut the door to the hallway behind them. And though the door had a self-closing mechanism required by New York City law, it did not function properly.

“The door was not obstructed,” Commissioner Nigro said. “The door when it was fully opened stayed fully opened because it malfunctioned.”

Smoke spread quickly into the hallway and then into the building’s internal stairwells, the main means for residents to evacuate. Commissioner Nigro said that another door was also left open to the stairwell on the 15th floor, pulling “dangerous” fumes up through the building. He noted that the 15th floor in particular “became quite untenable.”

Fire alarms in the building went off immediately, but false alarms were routine, and many residents said they had become accustomed to ignoring them. In the end, the commissioner said, people would have been safest if they had stayed in their apartments themselves, rather than seeking to evacuate.

City officials have not yet said where residents died in the building, but residents and their family members suggested in interviews that the stairwells had proved particularly lethal.

“There were people that I understand, from talking with my neighbors, they were trying to go down the stairs, and they were tripping over bodies,” said Renee Howard, 68, who was sheltering Monday afternoon at nearby Monroe College in the Bronx after evacuating her home of 30 years. “Oh! Jesus. Help us, God.”

One family of five appeared to have left their apartment on the top floor in an effort to flee to safety, only to be overcome by smoke, officials told the family’s relatives. The family, the Dukurays, had three children between age 5 to 12, and the relatives said they now believed all five were dead.

“I wish I could do anything to tell them not to come out from the house,” one of the relatives, Hawa Dukuray, said. “I think they maybe tried to escape.”

She said she was told that by the time they reached “the middle,” they could not see through the smoke.

Problems with the self-closing doors do not appear to have been an entirely new issue for the building. Between 2014 and 2019, the city housing department had issued violations for problems with self-closing doors to four different apartments and one stairway. Records show another complaint about a problem with a self-closing door to an apartment in 2021. All had been resolved.

There had been complaints over a lack of adequate heating, including three in 2021. Those were also resolved, according to city records, and Mr. Adams said on Monday that there had been no outstanding complaints about heating.

The building has been owned since early 2020 by a trio of investors: LIHC Investment Group, Belveron Partners and Camber Property Group. One of Camber’s executives, Rick Gropper, served as a housing adviser to Mr. Adams and contributed $400 to his mayoral campaign, the maximum amount allowed for those doing business with the city. He and other business associates have donated to other Democrats as well.

Judith Goldiner, attorney in charge of the civil law reform unit at the Legal Aid Society, a nonprofit that is helping some tenants of the building find new homes, said that deadly fires in New York City have generally occurred in older buildings with many problems, such as a lack of smoke detectors or blocked fire exits.

But whereas most of the city’s housing stock was built before World War II, the Bronx high-rise was only built in the early 1970s and was said to be in a state of relatively good repair.

“That’s why it’s so surprising that this happened,” she said. “That makes you think there’s something that happened here that you would not have expected.”

Ms. Goldiner said there may have been other problems identified in state and federal inspections of the building, which have not been made public.

Reporting was contributed by Ali Watkins, Ana Ley Ashley Southall, Jeffery C. Mays, Chelsia Rose Marcius, Matthew Haag, Lola Fadulu, Sarah Maslin Nir, Michael Gold, Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, Sean Piccoli, Jazmine Hughes, Corey Kilgannon, Mihir Zaveri and Winnie Hu.

When the building where they made their home became a smoke-filled death trap, hundreds of residents had to make life-or-death decisions as rescue workers raced to save them.

By Corina Knoll and Chelsia Rose Marcius

The fire lieutenant’s voice over the ambulance radio sounded strange and chilling. “We need help!” he barked — a startling plea from a man with decades of experience.

Christian Marte, a Fire Department paramedic, had never heard the lieutenant speak with such urgency.

It was about 11:15 a.m. on Jan. 9, and Mr. Marte and his partner barreled toward East 181st Street in the Bronx, where a 19-story apartment building in the Fordham Heights neighborhood was burning.

They arrived to find firefighters battling smoke so dark and dense that it seemed as if it could be scooped up by hand. A sickly smell hung in the air, a mix of charred wood, plastic and chemicals.

“Yo, we’re coming to you, we’re coming to the ambulance with a baby!” a voice shouted over the radio.

Mr. Marte, 25, had been with the department for five years. The afternoon would test him in ways he would not forget.

By day’s end, 17 residents — eight of them children — would be dead, with dozens more injured.

A week later, on Sunday, a mass funeral drew hundreds of mourners to a nearby mosque. The service for the 15 victims who hailed from West Africa illustrated the unfathomable hole that the disaster left in a small, intimate community.

For the survivors it has been a week of reliving a moment of impossible choices.

Inside the 120-unit structure, each apartment had a unique view of the chaos, and every tenant was faced with a personal set of circumstances — forced to stake lives on an uncertain decision. Some fled to the stairs, ushering their family down a black hole of smoke. Many sheltered in place, terrified that their own home could become a death trap. A few took to the windows, clinging to the lower ledge before letting go.

The fire had begun on the third floor, in apartment 3N, where a space heater had sparked a roaring blaze around a child’s bed. Soon, smoke was surging out of the home, the apartment’s malfunctioning front door left wide open after the family fled. A turbulent mass of smoke, thick with carbon monoxide, choked the hallways and forced itself into every room, every crack, even seeping in through the electrical outlets and light fixtures.

High above, on the 15th floor, another open door was sucking smoke up the two stairwells. Located next to each other in the center of the building, those stairwells had turned into a giant chimney.

Up in apartment 12P, Anthony Romero, a tattoo artist who had lived in the building for nearly a decade, was roused from his late Sunday sleep by the fire alarm, but he thought nothing of it.

The shrill, repeating beep was considered the soundtrack of the building, setting off at random times so often that tenants had learned to dismiss it with a roll of the eyes — “like the boy who cried wolf,” Mr. Romero, 40, said.

But when he looked outside, he saw flames in a window below.

“Two minutes later, a big ball of fire comes out of the window — a mini explosion like a boom, and you hear glass being blown away,” he said.

He ran to shove wet towels against the crack beneath his door. But after seeing the acrid black cloud just outside his apartment, he thought that walling it off would be a futile act.

His wife, Jeannie, cried. She was seven months pregnant and could hear firefighters in the hallway saying there was too much smoke for people to leave.

“It’s going to kill everybody,” she said.

Mr. Romero looked at his wife carrying their unborn child, his 19-year-old son, Anthony, his 7-year-old daughter, Jlana, and summoned soothing words. “We’re here together. We’re going to be all right.” He said nothing about the fear ramping up in his mind.

Next door, in 12N, Tatiana Strahn, 28, grabbed a sweater and held it over her mouth, then charged out of her apartment. Her 2-year-old son, Owen, was three floors up at her aunt’s home, and nothing could stop her from going after him. Not so long ago, she had lost two family members in a fire in the Dominican Republic.

Her eyes stinging from the smoke, Ms. Strahn felt for the staircase walls to guide her up through the dark. On the 15th floor, she bumped into a boy about 8 or 9 years old who was on his way down. “What are you doing here?” she shouted. “Where’s your mom? Get into an apartment, get out of the stairs!”

His eyes were big and confused. “She’s coming down,” he said, then turned and scurried back up.

In the hallway, Ms. Strahn called out to her aunt: “Maria!” A door flung open. Her aunt rushed out carrying Owen, his face pressed into her neck. The three headed down the stairs.

Back inside her home, Ms. Strahn began to panic. Smoke was flowing in, and now she had six people to worry about. Aunt Maria who suffered from anxiety. Owen and her 4-year-old daughter, Leilani. The children’s father, Efrain Sifuentes, on his usual weekend visit, who had a broken leg and was on crutches.

Charely, her older sister from Connecticut, was also here, having surprised her for the weekend to tell her she was pregnant. She had brought her 11-year-old daughter, Yoriely. And then there were the two golden retrievers.

Ms. Strahn ordered everyone into the least smoky bedroom while she wedged blankets at the entrance to their duplex and attempted to seal the door’s edges with packing tape. Mr. Sifuentes filled pots with water to drench the area, hobbling back and forth from the sink.

Then Ms. Strahn went to the window, waved a T-shirt and started to shout. “Help I’m 12N, I have babies! Apartment 12N! I have babies!” It was all she could think to say, and she screamed it again and again.

“My entire family was in my household, every person that I loved, and I couldn’t do anything but just sit there,” she said.

A deadly escape route

Down in front of the building, as shattered glass sprinkled from above and cries for help punctuated the air, the battalion chief, Jeffrey Facinelli, was making quick decisions. Crews inside radioed about residents trapped or unconscious or worse.

It would not be the flames that killed and injured so many, but the toxins in the smoke, inhaled by those who tried to escape through the stairs.

Farooq Muhammad, a deputy E.M.S. chief, was tracking people who emerged from the building in critical condition — those in need of the most intensive medical care. The tally was three when he first arrived. It quickly became 16. And there were more to come. He scrambled to coordinate who did what, who went where. He called dispatch for more help, tried to get patients to hospitals swiftly. The stress reminded him of working triage 20 years earlier, in Lower Manhattan, on Sept. 11.

Firefighters appeared at the front of the building, their faces slick with sweat and soot. The compressed air in their tanks was running low, but they made it out with victims in tow.

One boy was placed on a stretcher. An E.M.T. used a bag valve mask to flood his lungs with oxygen. Mr. Marte, the paramedic, and his partner, Cullen McGraw, administered hydroxocobalamin and sodium thiosulfate, treatments to reverse the effects of cyanide, the poisonous chemical compound found in smoke.

It was not the first time Mr. Marte had seen death up close, but he noticed that a thin band of discoloration had formed across the boy’s eyes.

“I don’t think I’ll ever forget how his eyes looked,” Mr. Marte said. “I’ve never seen that, and I never want to see it again.”

After transporting the boy to Bronxcare Hospital Center and handing him off to an emergency medical team, Mr. Marte yelled to a doctor, “There’s going to be more!” Then he and Mr. McGraw headed back to the scene, hoping the other patients would not be so young. But soon they were transporting another boy. And then another.

Bronxcare would quickly be at capacity. Among the victims it received were three children with no vital signs. St. Barnabas Hospital and Jacobi Medical Center also found themselves inundated with patients.

At 11:38, additional ambulances were requested. Ten people with life-threatening injuries and four walking wounded were waiting to be transported.

By noon, the fire had been knocked down, but crews continued to report patients with serious injuries. During a brief reprieve, Mr. Marte took a minute to look around at a surreal landscape of desperation. He felt his emotions stir, until a firefighter called out, “We have another one, we need your help.”

Nearby, an unconscious man’s chest was being repeatedly compressed. “Get up man, get up!” a bystander urged in hope as much as frustration.

Some tenants who managed to make it down the pitch-black stairways unscathed stood outside or huddled in cars. They watched the rescue efforts, unable to grasp how devastation came to find them here where families have lived for generations, where neighbors knock on shared walls to check in with one another or offer a plate of food, where everyone’s face is familiar.

Stephan Beauvogui, 67, safely escaped from 4W with his wife and two sons, 9 and 6. The journey for Jose Soto, 40, was longer. He and his girlfriend and her three children walked down from the ninth floor. His ears still rang with the muffled cries of families he passed along his way. “Help us!”

He wondered if the mothers’ screams would ever leave his head.

More residents were escorted out, their trek down the stairway lined with despair. A child’s body slumped against the wall was scooped up by a firefighter. On the eighth floor, a dog lay covered in ash, his eyes still open.

Mr. Romero, the tattoo artist, made it out with his family. He, like most residents, carried no personal possessions, just their two dachshunds. “The only important thing was something that was breathing and had a soul to it,” he said.

His next-door neighbor, Ms. Strahn, also managed to get out. She waited for a glimpse of her children’s father, who had fallen behind as he limped on crutches. Twenty minutes dragged on until he appeared.

Four members of the Touray family, relatives of the man considered to be the unofficial patriarch of the Gambian community in the building and nearby area, made their way outside with the help of firefighters. When the dead were counted, most were found to be of Gambian or West African descent. The Tourays knew all of them.

utside, the growing crowd of survivors stared at their building’s doors, waiting for others to emerge. Some talked on the phone to those trapped inside. A son looked up to the 18th floor in search of his mother, who was waving a towel to show that she was all right.

Another mother, Fatou Sankanou, searched for her 2-year-old son. “Where is Ousmane?” A patient care technician at Jacobi, Ms. Sankanou often pulled double or overnight shifts to support her four children. The three older siblings were in Gambia visiting their father. But she had left Ousmane in the care of a friend in 19V.

A relative took her to St. Barnabas. There, Ms. Sankanou had to be restrained as she tried to push past staff to find her boy. She would learn later that he had died, the smallest to be taken by the fire.

A chance to breathe

As the smoke continued to clog the halls and firefighters carried out victims, families all over the building hunkered down, left with few options.

Inside 6H, Nikeya Gonzalez and her family had turned their duplex into a bunker for more than an hour. She and her husband, Anthony, had waved in six neighbors from higher floors who had walked down only to find they could go no further.

She also had her two nieces and 9-month-old nephew, Kai, to consider.

Her sister, Quianni, left them in her care as she worked a housekeeping job at a nursing home. She had called Ms. Gonzalez in hysterics about her children, begging them to try to get out.

Ms. Gonzalez, 45, fretted over the lives in her hands. “I gotta get them back to their mother safe,” she said.

But already, smoke was slipping into their masks.

Ms. Gonzalez began to cut up bedsheets from Kai’s crib, dousing them in cold water. Everyone held a wet rag over their mouths.

She funneled the children into the bathroom’s walk-in closet, praying that its lack of windows would save their lungs. Then she lugged oscillating fans up and down the stairs of her duplex, turning them on and off in various locations, in search of the best place to push away the smoke.

“I gotta get these people we invited into our house out safe,” she thought. “You don’t invite them in to die.”

All the while, Ms. Gonzalez coughed, her asthma flaring.

“You have to sit down, you have to breathe,” her husband said.

“I’ll breathe when everybody gets out,” she said.

Ms. Gonzalez’s niece, Aaliyah, a funny and bubbly second-grader, grew quiet. “I want my mom,” she said.

When the firefighters finally knocked on the door, Ms. Gonzalez snatched a handful of diapers, a baby bottle and a can of formula. Everyone was still in their pajamas, wrapped in winter coats. Someone grabbed the two dogs, a Yorkie and a Pomeranian.

Inside the stairwell, firefighters aimed flashlights at the ground to guide the way along steps soaked with water. Other firefighters pushed past them, holding victims. Aaliyah, 8, had forgotten to change into her shoes and shuffled down in her slippers.

Finally, they could see the lobby, and then, the sky. Outside, a leftover layer of snow glimmered.

Aaliyah spotted her mother, started to run and was scooped up into open arms. “I thought I was going to die,” she said, and all the tears spilled out.

Her mother kissed her and cried. “It’s OK, I got you,” she said. “I got you. I got you. Mommy got you.”

Ms. Gonzalez watched. Her body softened with relief. She wept, then lifted her head up to the sun and drew a breath of air.

Reporting was contributed by Ali Watkins, Anne Barnard, Sharon Otterman, Robin Stein, Eduardo Medina, Azi Paybarah and Lola Fadulu. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

Abdoulie Touray is believed to have been the first Gambian to move into 333 E. 181st Street. He drew scores of compatriots to the building where 17 died in a fire.

By Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura

When Abdoulie Touray, then a 41-year-old Gambian diamond trader, settled in the Bronx in the 1970s, the area was blighted by crime and the West African community was tiny. There were no restaurants serving okra stew, no funeral parlors providing proper Islamic rites and no nearby mosques.

An erudite Islamic scholar by night, Mr. Touray moved into a third-floor apartment in a new 19-story building known as Twin Parks North West. Soon, he was offering a place to stay, food, contacts for jobs and the occasional verse from the Quran to newcomers from his homeland.

Virtually overnight, an entire community sprouted around him. And the building became a kind of homeland-in-exile for Gambians fleeing oppressive dictatorship and crushing poverty.

Visitors to Mr. Touray’s apartment later became tenants of the building at 333 East 181st Street. A dozen mosques opened. Hair braiding salons popped up, as did supermarkets selling varieties of fufu, bottles of Vimto, a soft drink popular in West Africa, and canned eggplant.

Twin Parks North West gained a new nickname: Touray Tower.

Then on Sunday, in just minutes, what had been a haven for many Gambians quickly turned into a deathtrap, as smoke from a fire killed 17 people, including eight children.

“This community has grown to what it is today because of that building, and that is why it’s very special to us,” said Haji Dukuray, 60, who arrived in 1988 to study business administration, with a single suitcase and knowing just one address, the one in the Bronx. “When they said on the news, ‘Fire at 333—,’ I said, ‘It’s the Touray Tower!’”

Nearly all the victims were of Gambian or of West African descent.

There were the Drammehs — Fatoumata and her three children. There were the Dukurays, Hajie and Haja and their three children. There was Fatoumata Tunkara and her 6-year-old son, Omar Jambang.

The Touray family knew nearly all of the victims. Several were their cousins.

The Touray family had grown since the patriarch first arrived on the scene — his 20th grandchild was born in 2021.

Although Mr. Touray died in 2019 at age 81 of heart failure, about 50 members of the immediate and extended family were living in the building at the time of the fire, according to one of his sons, Suleyman Touray, and Mariama Touray, who is married to one of his nephews. Following the norms of his culture and religion, Mr. Touray had three Islamic-law wives who still lived in the apartment on the third floor. Two of his widows were placed in hotels; the third had been visiting Gambia at the time of the fire.

Born in Sotuma Sere, a village in Eastern Gambia, Mr. Touray moved to the country through a program for young democrats, his daughter Fatiah Touray, 38, said.

Mr. Touray was well-traveled and spoke at least nine languages — English, French, Arabic, Soninke, Mandingo, Fulani, Wolof, Lingala and Sierra Leonean Creole. On arriving in the United States, he started a nonprofit called the Pan-African Islamic Society out of his apartment and offered Islamic services to celebrities such as Muhammad Ali and Cicely Tyson, according to family members.

“He realized that there was no real place where West Africans could get their proper funeral rites as Muslims, and he was really instrumental in getting that started for the Muslim community,” said Magundo Touray, 41, one of his daughters.

“If someone got arrested and they didn’t speak a language, the 46th Precinct always used to knock on our door and say, like, ‘Hey, Mister, we got someone that’s lost. Maybe you can help us.’”

Gita Sankano grew up in a nearby building but spent much of her childhood visiting or being babysat by relatives there. “We all knew 3G,” Mr. Touray’s apartment, she said. “When my mother came to the U.S. she stayed at 3G. My naming ceremony was in 3G. It is our own village. That’s how deep it is. It’s our own community. This is a tragedy for the whole Gambian community.”

At Twin Parks North West, neighbors and residents saw Mr. Touray in the courtyard handing out dollar bills to children. People went in and out of his apartment, which was often filled with the fragrance of jollof rice, plantains and okra stew. On Eid, throngs of people would crowd the hallways of the building. “They’d come from the mosque down the block and then straight to the house,” said Magundo Touray.

“We would all congregate there for morning prayer, and everyone would stop by the house — a hundred people — even during the pandemic. They would all come with their masks,” she said.

To many, Touray Tower, as so many called it, felt like an extension of family back home, and it was easy to understand why: Gambia is the smallest country in continental Africa with fewer than 2 million people living on a strip of land squeezed inside Senegal, with just the tip jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. Just 8,000 or so Gambians live in all of the United States, according to U.S. embassy data, many of them in New York City.

In Gambia, “everybody is related, everybody knows everybody,” said Dawda Docka Fadera, Gambia’s ambassador to the United States, who met with survivors a day after the blaze. “So our country is in shock.”

Mr. Touray, like many of his successors, arrived to New York just as large-scale immigration from Gambia to the United States took off in the 1970s, following independence from Britain in 1965 and after it became a republic in 1970. The United States and Gambia have ties going back to World War II, when Gambian troops fought with the Allies in Burma, and Banjul, the capital, served as a stop for the U.S. Army Air Corps and a port of call for Allied naval convoys.

In the mid-1980s, a series of economic deregulation policies and severe droughts and the collapse of the price of peanuts — a main staple — in international markets further spurred an exodus to the United States.

A wave of asylum seekers crested again in 1994, when a young army lieutenant, Yahya Jammeh, seized power and launched a 22-yearlong dictatorship marked by extrajudicial killings, torture and rape.

Many of them filled up Touray Tower and raised their families there, despite worsening conditions.

Residents said that the heating often did not circulate well in the apartments, especially in the more spacious living rooms, so they resorted to leaving the oven on or boiling water so that the steam would create some warmth. And almost every household uses space heaters, residents said.

“All the Africans have them — the heating is not enough and it comes on temporarily, you don’t know what time it comes,” said Mamadou Wague, who moved from Gambia in the 1990s and now runs Halal Meat & Fish Market a couple of blocks away from the apartment building. His sister is a tenant there.

City officials said a space heater that had been left running malfunctioned in a third-floor duplex. The apartment had multiple space heaters, authorities said.

The apartment’s self-closing front door also failed to close, and another door on the 15th floor that was open created a flue, officials said, sucking smoke upward so thickly through a stairwell that some of those who tried to flee down its steps collapsed and died.

Mariama Sankara, who married into the Touray family, said she too used three space heaters in her apartment.

“It’s very cold. You have to put extra heat,” she said, standing in the hallway of one of the hotels where the city has placed survivors. She looked tired. “That building, it was just so crazy. No security, no heating, the maintenance was bad,” Ms. Sankara said.

Heat complaints filed with the city by tenants in the building had been resolved, according to city records. A spokeswoman for the building’s owners said the door of the apartment where the fire broke out had been repaired last summer.

Mr. Touray’s apartment, the one that began the wave of immigrants who settled there, was just two doors down the hall.

The Touray family said authorities have told them that it would take them six to eight weeks to be able to return and retrieve their belongings, even valuable paperwork.

Touray Tower, they said, is no more.

“A lot of people don’t want to move back, you know, they’re traumatized,” said Magundo Touray. “It’s not going to be the same, and that makes me sad.”

Lola Fadulu, Anne Barnard and Amy Julia Harris contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

By Sarah Maslin Nir, Lola Fadulu and Chelsia Rose Marcius

Muhammad Drammeh’s 12th birthday was on Saturday. He celebrated with his brother and sisters at an indoor trampoline park in Queens.

The day after, Muhammad, his mother and two of his sisters were killed in a fire at a Bronx apartment building that left at least 17 people dead. His 16-year-old brother remains hospitalized, in stable condition.

His father and another sister, Fatima Drammeh, also survived. Neither was home when fire-fueled smoke swept through the building.

On Tuesday, Ms. Drammeh, 23, recalled her final moments with her mother and one of her younger sisters, before she left the apartment for Muhammad’s birthday party. “I just said bye to them, because we were leaving the house,” she said. “I didn’t think it would be my last time seeing them.”

Her father, Ishak Drammeh, 57, had been away on business in Columbus, Ohio, when the fire killed his son, his wife, Fatoumata Drammeh, 50, and two daughters, Fatoumala, 21, and Nyumaaisha, who went by Aisha, 19. He confirmed their deaths.

Mr. Drammeh stood outside the mosque where he worships, Masjid-Ur-Rahmah, on Webster Avenue, on Tuesday and remembered his children. Fatoutmala, he said, was about to graduate from a college in Buffalo, where she was studying international economics.

“She was a very good girl,” he said. “Muhammad was a good boy too. Nyumaaisha was a good girl, she finished her high school; next month she is supposed to start her college.”

As he spoke, Mr. Drammeh was embraced by community members and a police detective. He had barely eaten or slept in three days, he said, and had not yet seen their bodies.

“It’s not easy, your own child,” Mr. Drammeh said. “Now they just go; you never see them again until the day of judgment.”

Like many of the fire victims, the family had West African roots: Mr. Drammeh is from Gambia; the couple married in 1994.

Musa Kabba, the imam of the mosque, where most congregants are Gambian, said that about a dozen of his members may have died in the fire.

The authorities released a partial list of the victims on Tuesday night. In addition to the Drammeh family, it included: Sera Janneh, 27; Seydou Toure, 12; Haouwa Mahamadou, 5; Haji Dukuray, 49; Haja Dukuray, 37; Mustapha Dukuray, 12; Mariam Dukuray, 11; Fatoumata Dukuray, 5; Omar Jambang, 6; and Fatoumata Tunkara, 43. The Police Department gave a different spelling for the Dukuray family name, but relatives spelled the name as Dukuray in interviews with The New York Times.

The day of the fire, more than 60 fire victims were taken to four different hospitals in the Bronx. Seventeen of them died within hours, all from severe smoke inhalation. By Monday, the city said that 15 of the injured remained in critical condition.

City officials said that the fire started in a third-floor duplex, where a space heater that had been on continuously for several days malfunctioned late Sunday morning.

The apartment’s self-closing front door failed to close and another door on the 15th floor that was also open created a flue, officials said, sucking smoke upward so thickly through an internal staircases that some of those who tried to flee down its steps collapsed and died. The 19-story tower was constructed in 1972, after city regulations no longer mandated exterior fire escapes and the building was not required to have a sprinkler system.

As smoke crept up to their sixth floor apartment, the Janneh family rushed into the stairwell, hoping to flee to safety. But as they ran down the smoke-choked staircase, one of them, Sera, 27, collapsed, her sister Mareama Janneh said.

Sera had been a student at Lehman College with an effervescent personality. Her family spent Tuesday arranging her funeral. A sister, Isatou Janneh, 18, remained hospitalized, still battling the effects of smoke inhalation.

Mareama said that Sera had been active in the Gambian Youth Organization, a Bronx-based nonprofit that focuses on youth leadership, where she helped distribute food to community members and helped organize the Ms. Gambia pageant.

Sera was studying to become a social worker because she believed “we needed more of that in our community, especially in the African community,” Ms. Janneh, 31, said. “She was just a good person to be around.”

On Tuesday, Breanna Elleston, 27, was mourning Sera, whom she described as having been her best friend since the two were students at the High School for Health Professions and Human Services in Manhattan.

“Every milestone that I’ve ever had in my life, she’s always been there for me,” Ms. Elleston said, choking back tears. The two enjoyed visiting museums, she said, and attending concerts by Sera’s favorite musicians, like Tyler the Creator, Playboi Carti and D’Angelo. “Even if it was hard, she would drop everything and be there for me.”

Above all, Sera was her cheerleader: When Ms. Elleston was displaced from her home by a fire last summer, she shared her harrowing experience on social media. Sera praised her for being so open. “You’re a soldier,” Sera wrote in a message Ms. Elleston shared. “The life transitions are so unimaginable but we’re still holding on.”

At around 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday more than two dozen students poured out of the Angelo Patri Middle School, next door to the fire-damaged apartment building, and streamed across the street, trailed by teachers and school staff.

Over their winter coats many wore laminated badges with pictures on both sides of an eighth grade classmate, Seydou Toure, who died in the fire.

The students tacked a white poster board with a smiling photo of Seydou to a wall, above a cardboard box shielding prayer candles from the wind. They quickly filled the poster with colored handwritten messages and drawings of broken hearts.

“They wanted to do this, and for me it’s all about, ‘What they want to do? How they want to express their emotions?’” the principal, Angel Ortega, said. “I give them the space and the freedom to do that because that’s really important, validating their voice.”

Mr. Ortega recalled an interaction with Seydou, on the last day before the December holiday break, when the school was reeling from Covid, with infected teachers out sick and many classes being canceled. “He was a little bit upset because they weren’t going to have gym,” Mr. Ortega said. “But then I said, ‘No, no, I’m going to make it work. I’ll make sure that you guys have gym.’”

“‘You better,’” Mr. Ortega recalled the boy replying. “His friends were like, ‘What are you doing? You don’t say that to Mr. Ortega!’” Seydou quickly apologized, his principal said.

“I loved him dearly,” Mr. Ortega said, looking at the boy beaming from the poster. “He always had that smile.”

Three days after the fire, Fatima Drammeh also clung to memories — of her little brother’s birthday celebration at the Launch Trampoline Park in Queens.

“We were all just jumping around, racing, we were trying to race on the obstacle courses,” she said. “It’s a sweet memory that I have.”

Sean Piccoli and Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.

Photographs and Text by David Gonzalez

I still can’t watch the news about the fire on East 181st Street in the Bronx.

The minute I saw the texts from friends with the initial reports and images, I put down my phone, drove to Orchard Beach and just sat there. I relived how my father carried me down five flights of stairs one night in 1969 when a fire broke out on the floor below us: the light flickering on the window, the heat from the narrow hallway where the fire burned, me hugging my father’s neck.

That fire was on East 181st Street and Mapes Avenue, a mile east on the same street as the Twin Parks fire and a few blocks north of the Happy Land Social Club blaze in 1990, where 87 people died.

The most recent fire, where 17 people died, is horrific, but not without context in the Bronx, a borough whose very mention still conjures images of fire and decay. Five decades ago, as the flames spread — month after month, year after year — thousands of families were displaced, having to raise children and juggle low-paying jobs just to survive in this burned-out landscape that some compared to a war zone.

Those of us who grew up in the South Bronx during the 1970s and ’80s have been defined by the fires that incinerated our neighborhoods, which had already been set up to fail by disinvestment, redlining and eminent domain — which resulted in a trench gouged through the community by Robert Moses’ Cross Bronx Expressway.

Instead of intergenerational wealth, we inherited trauma.

My generation defines itself differently: We are the internally displaced children of the Bronx, uprooted every few years because of fires, decrepit apartments and absent landlords. Our lives were defined by impermanence.

Many of us have the memories: firefighters tossing mattresses out of windows; the stench of charred wood and dead rats. We played in rubble and basements and tossed bricks at TV sets. I remember standing in a friend’s apartment, looking up at the sunshine streaming in through the broken roof, making the place glow.

As children, we didn’t have much choice, but neither did our parents. Yet our families were often blamed for the borough’s decline, while policymakers and planners reduced entire communities to cold statistics and map lines. The neglect from city officials played out on the dirty streets and inside the inadequate schools.

We were not resilient, we were resisting death. At the worst of it, we had only one another.

But growing up, we didn’t know any different. A landscape of half-collapsed buildings lined many streets in the South Bronx. Scenes of entire blocks reduced to rubble endured — for years — in mute testament to decay, from Mott Haven to Fordham.

It wasn’t the flames that endangered us. It was the indifference.

The blocks around where I grew up — in the neighborhood we called Crotona — were alive and the buildings packed with families from Italy, Puerto Rico and Ireland, as well as Holocaust survivors from Germany. Behind each door was a life, another family.

Venturing to other blocks sometimes involved calculating the risk of being jumped by a gang or a mugger, but the block where I grew up on East 181st and Mapes felt safe. People looked out for each other, shared food and helped one another through hard times with, for example, word of a job. Heat was sporadic, with a balky boiler that belched black smoke. We warmed ourselves with open ovens, pots of boiling water and space heaters, brown boxes with a lattice of strips that glowed a mesmerizing orange.

No matter how safe one tried being inside, the fires came. We noticed it slowly, with two-family homes and small apartment buildings emptying out, then stripped for pipes and wires, and finally torched — there was more money in insurance than rebuilding. Arsonists working for landlords would at least warn tenants of impending fires so they would not be asleep at home. Some people took no chances and slept with their clothes on.

This was home.

And then it crumbled, building by building, house by house. In the early ’80s, the block across from my old building was an empty lot. By 1983, Astin Jacobo and his neighbors in Crotona had had enough. During a town-hall meeting with Mayor Edward I. Koch, Jacob — as he was known to everyone — stood up and said, “All politicians are liars.” He was done with failed promises to provide basic services, like enforcing sanitation laws or getting landlords to make repairs and provide heat.

Jacob, a former baseball scout in the Dominican Republic, had been the custodian at St. Martin’s, my old school, running sports programs and counseling students. The school was a haven, even if the lessons taught us nothing about discrimination or social unrest. The only thing we learned about Puerto Rico was that the United States seized it in 1898 as spoils of the Spanish-American War. In eighth grade, new construction started nearby, where we heard the toot of the safety whistle before the muffled explosion of dynamite blasting the foundation of what would become Twin Parks.

That school and the church that ran it helped neighbors mobilize to challenge the policies of lenders, developers and governments that left many of these communities vulnerable to speculative real estate investment. The Catholic Church — alarmed by the exodus of parishioners — inspired many of these efforts, especially the South Bronx Vicariate, where Cardinal Terence Cooke told the Rev. Neil Connolly to focus on community organizing in the 1970s, encouraging other clergy who had been invigorated by the theology of Vatican II and its “preferential option for the poor.”

Father Connolly was close to cops and firefighters, celebrating Mass for them, sometimes in a storefront. They gave him tips about the fires, which he suspected were set by landlords conspiring to collect insurance money. He said city officials didn’t want to hear it.

By the 1980s, activists and nonprofit housing groups in Crotona took to rebuilding the community, putting up affordable two-family homes, turning empty lots into community gardens and transforming abandoned buildings into affordable cooperative apartments. The lot that had been a dump was now a busy ball field.

Then came the Happy Land fire, which took place a few blocks south of where I once lived and which left dozens dead, most of them Honduran immigrants. I remember that Jacob, upset by the deaths, started a soccer league on an empty field that decades earlier had been seized by the city for a hospital that was never built. His group also pushed for a new community center, which among its activities now houses a traditional Honduran dance troupe.

In 1998, the year of New York City’s centennial, Jacob stood at Mapes and 181st, right by my old building and near another his group had saved. “This corner is historic,” he told me, beaming. “We started with these two buildings, and from here we renovated the whole neighborhood. And to think we started from ashes.”

Decades before a global pandemic emptied our streets, long before the buildings crumbled into fetid piles of brick, plaster and garbage, we felt love inside them. We had our families, our parents often had work, even if well-meaning people pitied us for having to live in such conditions. A lifetime later, where are we?

Entire neighborhoods were reclaimed from the rubble in the final decades of the 20th century, turning city-owned properties into housing, gardens, playgrounds and ball fields. Affordable two- and- three-family townhouses became the norm.

The borough’s fortunes and image have rebounded in recent decades, thanks to the efforts of organizers like Jacob and coalitions of neighbors and clergy. Private investors and equity groups have been buying groups of apartment buildings that are home to working families and others who receive guaranteed rent subsidies under Section 8, where by law they pay only a third of their income. The Twin Parks complex was among those in private hands: It was sold to its current owners, a group of investment companies, in 2020. Housing advocates, who saw homeownership decline in communities of color already during the subprime crisis in 2008, were worried about so many units being controlled by private investment groups. The majority of Bronxites — 80 percent — are renters, which increases competition in housing lotteries.

And in addition to the Bronx’s being ranked the state’s least healthy county and having the state’s highest rate of unemployment, tenants there spent more than 35 percent of their income on rent in 2019, the highest rent-to-income ratio in the city, according to the New York City Rent Guidelines Board. Half the borough’s households earn less than $42,140, some 40 percent less than the citywide average, according to NYU’s Fuhrman Center. A family of four, for point of reference, would be considered as “extremely poor” if making less than $35,790, according to the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

The once-desolate streets of Port Morris continue to be transformed, with glass towers touting luxury housing and new night spots — at least before the pandemic. It wasn’t that long ago that the developer Keith Rubenstein tried renaming the area the Piano District, a nod to a long-gone industry. He also hosted an A-list warehouse party in 2015, “The Macabre Suite,” which featured an installation of crushed, bullet-ridden cars and a flood of celebrity selfies with the hashtag #thebronxisburning, and a photo of the director Baz Luhrmann warming his hands over an trash-can fire.

Among the party people that night was the Bronx borough president then, Ruben Diaz Jr., and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, the two most influential Bronx Democrats at the time.

Jacob and a lot of the activists from the ’70s and ’80s have died. The priests and nuns who accompanied their parishioners during funerals and fires, and celebrated alongside them at baptisms, weddings and home blessings, have also moved on, retired or died. The Rev. John Flynn, Jacob’s partner in reclaiming the streets, died in 2012, lamenting in his final years that today’s conservative priests dismissed his lifelong ministry as “social work.” The field they got from Mayor Koch is now a full-block city park and baseball field named after Jacob.

It was hard to feel joy looking at pictures of Crotona just days after a fire about which I know almost nothing. I can fill in the rest. So can my friends. We hope the children who lived through this — who, along with their parents, endure the daily indignities of never having enough money or time — heal and move forward with the support of family, friends and faith communities, too.

We were a generation raised with our noses pressed against the windows of home, wondering why it looked nothing like the pristine white suburbs we saw on television. Yes, hip-hop arose from this pain and chaos, but I sometimes wonder if it was worth it. Some of us tell our children stories about those days and they respond with disbelief.

As do I: How was a generation of children in the Bronx — not to mention other neighborhoods like Williamsburg, East Harlem and the Lower East Side — consigned to live amid such squalor? Many of our homes were spotless inside, smelling of King Pine and Café Bustelo, but we had no control over the economic, social and political forces that shaped our destinies.

Tales of trauma do not help. You can look at my generation and feel sad. We do, sometimes. We wonder about friends lost, buildings destroyed, neighborhoods gentrified. But the melancholy gives way to an angry disbelief that has festered for decades.

My generation — like the children and the families who survived the most recent fire — knows the fear that gnaws at us at night. We can achieve all we want in life and work and still feel powerless to control the social and economic crises that shaped the borough of our birth.

Decades after fleeing down the stairs of a burning building, I still wonder how far we’ve come.

Audio produced by Jack D’Isidoro.