1245 Eastern Parkway in flames.   (Photo: Seth Gottfried/On Scene Photography)

“I heard someone saying, ‘Fire … fire,’ ” Davis remembers. “It wasn’t loud, just a low, sad cry. Then there was crashing, glass shattering. I ran, took nothing, just ran out.”

That was the beginning of what Davis calls “my displacement,” a journey that currently has her living in the Amboy Street Shelter, a bleak series of low brick buildings in Brownsville where the Department of Housing Preservation and Development has long relocated people uprooted by fire.

“Amboy Street is famous, like the Rikers Island of fire,” says one current resident, still dripping wet in the 100-degree heat after an afternoon dip in the pool at nearby Betsy Head park. “I was living near Bushwick. I knew the landlord wanted the people out. The rents were too low. One day, this guy comes by. ‘Can you fix my ceiling?’ I asked. He told me to shut up or I’d find myself living on Amboy Street. I didn’t know what he meant, but after the building burned, I found out.”

Paranoia—accompanied by myriad conspiracy theories—is striking deep into the heart of what is now routinely known as the “Brooklyn burndown zone.”

Watching Jeopardy! in the kitchen of her modest fourth-floor walk-up at 199 Amboy, Davis continues to pay the $1 a month that the city says will guarantee she can return to 1299 Eastern Parkway when the building is repaired. But she is “not that optimistic.” After the fire, when she went back to retrieve her possessions, a man claiming to be the super extorted $70 from her just to let her in the door. Inside, she found all her jewelry had been stolen. “They even took the bottles of rum I brought back from Trinidad.

“I am not a child,” says Davis. “I go to work every day. I am a responsible citizen, not a drug addict or someone who was evicted. I always paid my rent … Fire is sinister. It spreads inside your mind. It haunts you. The stress I feel now is like that.

“Neighborhoods like mine are changing. The landlords want to attract the tourists, people from Manhattan or wherever. Even if I get back into my apartment, chances are the rent will be much higher. It is the same in Harlem, Bed-Stuy. I am not saying anyone did anything. All I know is my home is gone, and now I am here, like a refugee. Because that is what this place is, a refugee camp right here in New York City.”

Bill Batson has strong views on what’s behind Brooklyn’s fire epidemic. “You can’t compare the Brooklyn burnout of 2006 with what happened in the South Bronx,” he says. “But it is just as insidious because it shows how the city has abdicated public authority to private real-estate interests. This is the politics of overdevelopment in the Bloomberg era.”

Batson first came to Prospect Heights as a Pratt painting major in 1979, and recently could be found in neighborhood hangouts like Tom’s Restaurant on Washington Avenue campaigning for the State Assembly in the 57th district on what he calls “the anti-Disneyfication-of-Brooklyn-through-arson platform.” (Batson lost the primary.) A mixed-race bohemian presence amid the ethnic imperative of Kings County politics (childhood memories include being bitten by blind jazzman Al Hibbler’s seeing-eye dog), Batson, like most “fire activists,” became radicalized in 2003 when the Bloomberg administration closed six firehouses, four of them in Brooklyn. The closings met with a near-universal outcry, including a monthlong 24/7 sit-in at Engine Company 212 in Williamsburg.

As signaled by the whiff of festering feta cheese over grid-blown Astoria, runaway development without the requisite expansion of infrastructure and services is a coming issue for anti-Bloombergians like Prospect Heights City Council member Letitia James, who says, “If you’d told me I’d miss Giuliani, I would have said you were crazy.” When the lack of adequate resources includes fire protection, this becomes “mad-scientist city planning,” says James. “A recipe for disaster.”

With things as they are, the fire committee of Community Board 8, responsible for Prospect Heights, stands ever vigilant. It’s co-chaired by Batson and the five-foot-tall demon letter writer Holly Fuchs Ferguson, a secretary of the Society of Old Brooklynites (SOB), and bolstered by 100 percent engaged, 100 percent enraged old-school activists like Connie Lesold, Josefina Sanfeliú of Latinas Against Fire Cuts, and 72-year-old Doris Heriveaux, who in 2004 was burned out of her apartment of 22 years by an arson at 852 Classon Avenue.

No one was arrested in the fire at 852 Classon, but Heriveaux says that doesn’t matter. “Everyone had to move out. The building needed to be renovated. The idea was, you had to leave.” But Heriveaux did not want to move. “I raised my children in that apartment. It was home.” She took the landlord to court and managed to win the right to move back into the building at the same $800 rent. It took almost two years, but it was worth it, says Heriveaux, since all the new tenants are paying over $2,000 a month more for similar apartments.