(1) January 1, 2005 3 a.m. 901 Washington Avenue An all-hands fire caused by a man’s setting himself ablaze, taking his own life along with a woman and her two children. A fifth victim, who carried her young nephew to safety, dies months later. (2) February 24, 2005 5:42 a.m. 1154 Pacific Street An accidental, all-hands fire causes one minor injury. (3) December 7, 2005 6:50 a.m. 1084 Pacific Street An all-hands fire kills Aubrey Mack, a 48-year-old homeless squatter. The cause is not ascertained. (4) December 11, 2005 10:14 a.m. 658 Park Place The fire chief on the scene determines this all-hands fire not to be suspicious. No injuries reported. (5) December 17, 2005 10:46 p.m. 683 Dean Street An all-hands fire caused by careless smoking injures five. (6) January 5, 2006 10:16 a.m. 530 St. Marks Avenue An all-hands fire caused by a candle; no reported injuries. (7) January 6, 2006 5:20 a.m. 461 Park Place A two-alarm arson fire; no reported injuries. (8) January 7, 2006 10:19 a.m. 600 St. Marks Avenue A two-alarm arson fire guts a brownstone later linked to a $12 million mortgage-fraud scheme. (9) January 8, 2006 6:01 a.m. 784 Prospect Place An all-hands arson fire; no injuries reported. (10) January 29, 2006 12:17 p.m.530 St. Marks Avenue An all-hands arson fire burns the building vacated by the candle fire. (11) February 7, 2006 10:33 a.m. 1198 Pacific Street The fire chief on the scene determines a welding problem to be the cause of an all-hands fire. No injuries reported. (12) February 19, 2006 4:44 a.m. 1440 Pacific Street More than 140 firefighters battle a three-alarm fire for some four hours. All 54 residents manage to escape. (13) February 24, 2006 5:16 a.m. 1033 Pacific Street A three-alarm arson fire kills four and forces a family of seven to jump from their second-floor window.    (Photo: Clockwise from bottom right, Seth Gottfried/On Scene Photography (3); John Fischetti)

In the worst of these, the three-alarm arson fire at 1033 Pacific, a dowdy four-story apartment that had been sold and resold several times prior to the blaze (the deed shifting from 1033 Pacific Partner LLC to the 1033 Pacific Partners LLC), four people died. These included Assita Coulibaly, a 36-year-old immigrant from Burkina Faso, and two of her small children. Also dead was 24-year-old Sherrie Williams, who jumped from the fourth-story window. She landed on the concrete stairwell; another jumping tenant, Kassoum Fofana, fell on top of her, possibly saving his life. Months later, the building remained burned out, Williams’s name handwritten on the still-extant row of buzzers.

This was part of a larger pattern. According to FDNY stats, 2005 was the single busiest year in Fire Department history, with a total of 485,702 calls answered. This beat out the former record of 459,567 calls, set back in 1977.

You remember 1977, right?

That was when Howard Cosell, in pre-hip-hop cadences not unlike those employed by Raymond Burr describing Godzilla’s death march through Tokyo, interrupted the play-by-play of the World Series to declare, “The Bronx is burning.”

Those were the Fear City days, when Fort Apache’s territory was populated by miscreants like Joe Bald, who ran “a fire for hire” service that collected millions in insurance booty for landlords desperate to cash out of dying neighborhoods, and legendary pyro “Gasoline Gomez.” Accused of torching hundreds of buildings throughout Morrisania, Gomez is said to have loved to taunt firefighters with his “signature” blazes. One afternoon, he apparently lit a cigarette too close to his gas can, blowing himself out a third-story window. He survived, after which, according to one story, he was actually acquitted of arson.

“It was like the Khmer Rouge had come to town,” remembers one resident of Fox Street, marching ground of gangs like the Savage Skulls. “I was maybe 8, and this guy was in the lobby of my building with a can of kerosene. I pleaded with him not to torch the place because my parents were upstairs. ‘Okay, kid,’ the guy smiled, patted me on the head, and left. He went across the street and set that building on fire.”

Five kids were saved from fire in February at 1033 Pacific Street by being dropped from a second floor window. Four people died.    (Photo: Charles Eckert/Newsday)

That was the bankrupted nadir of then—the Abe Beame days of “white flight,” disco, and junkies running down the fire escape with your tinfoiled-rabbit-ear TV set. It was a time when arson, the ass-end of the real-estate cycle, seemed the fitting last flare of a fallen municipality.

But this is not then; this is the total fabulousness of now—29 years past Cosell’s comment, after Rudy’s Wyatt Earp–on–42nd Street act, far into the supposed Bloomberg boom. A town as haute as ours is not supposed to be on fire.

Paranoia—accompanied by myriad conspiracy theories—is striking deep in what is now routinely called “the Brooklyn burndown zone.” You hear assertions that the fix is in, that the city and developers have entered into some unholy, unspoken Katrina-esque bargain to clear out those in the way of ever-higher rises and rents. Such thinking was only encouraged by the strange aftermath of the Greenpoint market fire. With many an accusing middle finger thrust at owner Guttman (whose suddenly worth-a-fortune artist-loft properties in Dumbo burned down suspiciously in 2004), the authorities declared they had their man, i.e., one Leszek Kuczera, a 59-year-old homeless alcoholic known in the bars of still-Polish Greenpoint. Cops reported Kuczera had confessed to setting the fire while burning the insulation off copper wire he had hoped to sell for $1.25 a pound—a scavenging practice known as “mungo.”

Amid much guffawing that he’d been fitted for a classic fall guy—one former fire marshal said, “If that’s a mungo fire, its the biggest mungo fire in history”—Kuczera soon unconfessed. According to Sam Getz, Kuczera’s Legal Aid lawyer, his client, who speaks very little English, was “hung over” when questioned and his “confession” was nothing more than a jumbled memory of a different fire that had occurred the year before. Plus Kuczera had an alibi. Zbigniew Sarna, a contractor living in Pond Eddy, a small upstate town, near Monticello, swears Kuczera was working for him the morning of the fire.

This is how it works now, with so much money hungriness,” says June Davis, an “over 40” child-care worker originally from Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. Davis had followed the Greenpoint fire story in the paper but didn’t think all that much about it. She had fire problems of her own. On March 28, a suspicious fire in her building at 1299 Eastern Parkway burned her out of the one-bedroom apartment she’d lived in for eleven years, most recently with her daughter and grandchild.

The three-alarm blaze that required the services of 138 firefighters and rousted some 30 families started near the roof.