Taryn: My family is from Peru. I was born here along my brother, my sister, my parents had arrived from Peru back in the early seventies. It’s scary. We were one of the lucky ones. When our family were injured, I mean, we just lost everything. We were an immigrant family. My parents lost everything. I was only 4 years old, and I still remember in flashbacks of what happened. My sister who was a little older at the time will probably remember more, and I think she maybe reached out to you maybe on Facebook or something. My brother was 1 year older, so I was the youngest one. You know, every so often, when I was in my twenties or even thirties when the internet was becoming a thing, I would search for it. There really was not a lot of information. We lived in Hoboken for many years. So this is a funny part, I can’t find…so you know where the McDonald’s is right now. On Washington Street. So we lived, that play land that was there was our house. There’s a play land there right and they extended that. They extended it back in the seventies. It was just McDonald’s. That extension of the McDonald’s that is almost like an adjoining building, that was us. The tenants that were there in the first and second and second floor were vacated. We lived on the 3rd floor. Our house burned down about a year or two years later, and playland was put in.

Azucena: I’ll be the first to speak because I was the first person that realized something was happening. It was early morning. I can’t remember the hour. But I woke to a sound that was like wood. I can’t describe it. But it was strange. So I woke my husband, Jaime. I say something is happening because I hear crunching.

Jaime: And then my wife tells me people are screaming. Yes, people are screaming. So then I ran to the door to go downstairs, but it wouldn’t open. And then suddenly, boom! It burst open as if someone pushed it and came in a cloud of smoke that filled the house. I then ran to where the children were sleeping. I grabbed the youngest first and then the other 2. I tried to escape through the stairs but at that time I couldn’t because it was already filled with smoke. We ran towards the window and I hear the firemen are coming, the firemen are coming! I tried to kick the glass to break the window, but I couldn’t because I was holding the children.

Sussy: The first person to go down was one of my aunts. At the time, we had 2 of my aunts living with us. I must have been 5 or 6 years old. But I remember waking up, and I smelled something like a barbecue, and that’s the first thing that I remember. I woke up because I heard a strange noise, then I specifically smelled barbecue. It’s the only thing that I can remember until I heard my parents screaming. Before the firemen arrived, it was just the 3 of us, my 2 aunts, and my parents walking through the house to see where we could escape. We went to the kitchen, and we couldn’t get out. And the fire escape was there in the kitchen that led to the roof of another house. It was weird. The house was just designed weird.

Jaime: The day before the fire, a real estate woman approached me. She was on the same side of the block, but across the street from me. She came and she said to me, you are all going to have to leave this apartment, and I asked why? And she never gave me a reason. We had been looking for apartments all along, but we kept getting told that owners were not accepting children. But why don’t you accept children if you accept pets was my question. At the time, we were the only tenants left in the building. There was a Chilean family on a third floor who had already left, so we were the only ones there. So the next day after the real estate agent approached me, the fire occurred. After the fire, I returned to the building to find that the stairs have been completely greased in oil. That fire was provoked. So when I entered the apartment, there was a huge hole in the living room as if there had been an explosion. The second floor had collapsed. There were boilers in the 1st floor, but they were in the back of the building, not under the living room. So it was either one of two things. Something happened with those boilers or someone set that fire intentionally.

Azucena: After some time they allowed us to enter the apartment, so we began trying to recover some of our things. My husband had the habit of hiding anything of value inside our pots. Being Peruvian, I had a lot of beautiful Peruvian silver jewelry. So, I kept the jewelry in a box inside a pot. When we returned to the apartment, I saw my pots in the box. So I got excited that my jewelry will be there. But none of the pieces were in the box. It was all gone.

Jaime: On 3rd street, there used to be a pharmacy. And one day, my wife was feeling sick. And so I went down to the pharmacy, and I saw a long line of people waiting. So I said to myself, wow. What’s going on here? They had the gate closed where the people were, but there was also a little window where you could speak with one of the pharmacists. I go to the window, and they take my prescription and read my name. Tapia? And I say, yes. And they tell me to go through the door to come in ahead of all the other people, and I had no idea why? Everyone on the line were Hispanic. And she says to me, you’re Italian, right?

Jaime: Many red brick houses from 12th Street and up towards the tracks were more for Hispanics. A lot of Puerto Ricans live there, but I don’t know what happened to all of them. I used to see kids playing in that area. I don’t know if they were burnt out or something else that made the people have to leave that place. But as time passed, there wasn’t that sense of community that you would see, people playing or whatever, and you saw more Italians on Washington Street. As time passed, I realized that the Italian families had bought up the houses in that area. I noticed more Italian owned companies appearing, mostly in construction and garbage companies.