Written by FRANK PEEBLES
Citizen staff
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Tuesday, 19 August 2008 |
Conrad Van Oord was asleep in his office at the Generator Cabaret when firefighters burst in to clear the building.
Next door, the Columbus Hotel was on fire. Van Oord was not found, and when firefighters emerged without him, his two sons, Chris and Dave, were beside themselves.
"I don't know why they didn't find me the first time," said Conrad once he was outside.
"They couldn't find him but we knew he was in there," said Dave Van Oord. "We contacted (a police officer we knew) and he agreed to help us get inside again. We told them he was in the office so they went in and found him."
The near-tragedy helps ease the sting of loss that might follow the burning of the Columbus. The Generator may have been exposed to a great deal of smoke even though the flames never came through the firewall. The damage appeared to be minimal, Dave said later in the day, but until insurance investigators were done their assessment they didn't have any answers.
On the other side of the hotel, the same is true: no fire but the smoke damage is possibly significant for H&R Block tax accountants and Terra Cognita Software Systems.
"We will have to get plywood put up over the front entrance," said H&R Block district manager Remo Stoll, looking at the gaping wreckage where firefighters forced their way in to get at the next-door blaze. "We are actually lucky because we have another location at the Redwood Square that we can use, and this is not tax season so the impact should not be significant for us."
Garth Frizzell, owner of Terra Cognita, was actually at work at 6 a.m. when the fire broke out and saw the flurry of guests escaping the hotel.
"I heard some shouting from time to time on Third Avenue, but in this neighbourhood it is not uncommon to hear shouting even at 6 in the morning," he said "Then I started to hear thumps on the sidewalk."
That is when he went to get a closer look.
"The thumps I was hearing were suitcases falling out the window. Some people had jumped out of the windows onto my roof," Frizzell said.
Two of the suitcases were owned by one of the exotic dancers who had arrived only minutes before. She had checked into the hotel, said Columbus staff, and the night clerk had escorted her to her room. The clerk then went back downstairs for a coffee and a bathroom break. It was then the alarms went off. Only a few minutes had elapsed, but the building went from a state of normalcy to being fully engulfed in flames.
The dancer hadn't even had time to unpack her bags before she was throwing them out the window to the safety of Frizzell's adjacent building. Many other hotel guests were doing the same.
According to Columbus staff, there were about 20 people sleeping in the rooms, many of whom were longtime guests or permanent residents.
The hotel and bar employed 11 people. The most senior staff person was 18-year bartender Linda Roughton, who came to watch the blaze bundled up in a blanket because she had been at home feeling ill when she heard the news.
"It is a workingman's bar," she said, taking offense to someone in the crowd who referred to the hotel as seedy.
"It was a really good bar to work in. To me it was like an extended family. It just feels so strange and I feel so sorry for the regulars. I wonder where they will get together to meet, now. One guy I remember well was there seven days a week and helped do things around the place. I am really worried about where some people are going to live. Our maintenance man was a great caretaker and he's lost everything because he lived in the hotel."
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 19 August 2008 )
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