On Monday, Joshua Gomes went about business as usual. He woke up at 5 a.m. to have his retail store Brand Nubian open by 7 a.m., and when he heard the sound of sirens swell, he didn’t think anything of it. “I thought they were just doing a drill,” he said.
Then Gomes heard glass shatter and smelled smoke, and realized something was wrong.
“I heard the fire department breaking the glass and saw all the smoke coming out. Everybody was, of course, pulling out their phones, and I recorded some stuff. Never seen anything like that,” he said.
On Monday morning, a six-alarm fire tore through the more than 100-year-old Edison building at 72 Warren St. in Nubian Square, destroying several beloved small businesses including Ugi’s Subs, The Handyman Team, and Atlantis Physical Therapy & Chiropractic.
No one was inside the building when the fire broke out, but several firefighters were injured yesterday while they worked for more than 12 hours to quell the blaze. Of the destruction, Gomes said “it’s like somebody dropped a nuclear bomb over there.”
“It doesn’t even look like a fire,” he said. “It looks like it blew up.”
The cause of the fire is still undetermined. A fire department spokesman said Tuesday that officials will begin an investigation once the fire, still smoldering, is fully out.
Youbin Park, the manager at Roxbury Dental, which is located on Dudley Street across from the affected building, was at home when the fire broke out. She received a notification that the Wi-Fi at her office had gone out and, assuming it was from the nor’easter, rushed to see what had happened. On her way there, her lead doctor sent her a video of the chaos.
“We just watched the news every second because our business is next door,” Park said. “Also the physical therapy people — I’m so sorry for them, because the manager and the wife of the owner, she’s our patient, so we just worry about her,” Park said.
Several other business owners in the area also reported power, phone, and water outages yesterday.
“I’ve never watched that kind of thing happen that close, just next door, literally,” Park said. “I was so scared yesterday. I couldn’t sleep at all. I just checked every hour [to see if] the electricity was on.”
Leonard Egerton, who owns Frugal Bookstore with his wife, Clarrissa, also couldn’t sleep last night. Yesterday’s fire hit particularly close to home for the couple, whose shop suffered from a fire in 2022 after a mattress went up in flames in an apartment upstairs.
“I was in [the store] for five or 10 minutes and then I looked and said ‘Oh my goodness.’ The whole ceiling had collapsed from water,” Egerton said. “So I know how they must feel. That’s a hard thing to swallow, especially if it’s your family business, your livelihood, your source of income to survive. So it’s really sad that they’re gonna have to rebuild.”
For Egerton, Ugi’s Subs was a particularly devastating loss, especially to his community.
“I’ve been going to Ugi’s since I was a teenager. I’m 62 now, so that’s pretty unfortunate, especially to the neighborhood, because a lot of people depend on Ugi’s for their lunch breaks. So that’s going to be a big loss,” Egerton said.
Egerton, Park, and Gomes were able to reopen their doors today, but the weight of the fire still looms over the neighborhood. Though all of their storefronts remained unharmed during the fire, Gomes said his car was damaged.
“My car was actually parked right in front of the fire when it happened so it’s a little banged up, little scratches and stuff, but you know it’s not totaled. I’m still driving it,” Gomes said.
There was a mutual hope among community members that, despite the damage, the business owners who lost their spaces to the fire would eventually find their way back to Nubian Square.
“Hopefully, if they rebuild this building, they could come back here, come back to that building,” Egerton said. “Or if there’s buildings opening up around here. Hopefully, they can get something like that.”
