Major Fire on Main Street Guts Building
When the automatic fire alarm inside the J. Crew clothing store building sounded in the early morning hours Friday, fire chiefs and police were summoned to Main Street like they are to the hundreds of false alarms that go off yearly throughout East Hampton. What might have been a routine matter turned out to be the real deal when they discovered the back of the store and a neighboring restaurant in flames. While firefighters were able to quickly extinguish the fire, the damage was already done in what was the first significant fire in the village business district in 30 years.
An electrical malfunction in the compressor on top of an outdoor refrigeration unit in the alley behind Rowdy Hall restaurant is believed to have started the blaze, said Ken Collum, the village fire marshal who investigated the cause. “We can’t be 100 percent sure,” he said yesterday. “It appears one of the units may have failed,” he said. There were three out back for extra storage.
He said it appears the fire spread from the refrigeration unit to “plastic Dumpsters and laundry bins” behind the restaurant at 10 Main Street. “Those got going and that’s what spread over to the building at 14 Main Street on the outside,” where J. Crew is located, Mr. Collum said.
East Hampton Village police and the East Hampton Fire Department were called at 3:19 a.m. The building was already engulfed in flames, Chief Richard Osterberg Jr. said.
The chiefs called for help from the Amagansett, Springs, and Sag Harbor Fire Departments —- about 75 firefighters in all responded and Main Street was shut down. Attacking the flames from the alley and parking area behind the building and from J. Crew’s Main Street entrance, firefighters extinguished the fire within a half hour, a quick stop, the chief said, given the extent of the fire.
The building at 14 Main Street is freestanding but is in very close proximity to Optyx and Rowdy Hall, which share an address next door. “It just started getting into the second floor of the building to the north,” which is 10 Main Street, “but we stopped it from going in there,” Chief Osterberg said. Optyx sustained no damage. Rowdy Hall occupies the back part of the building. Had the fire alarm not sounded, the damage would have been far worse, the chief said.
While the fire started in back of Rowdy Hall, the J. Crew building took the brunt of the damage. Flames destroyed about 20 to 30 feet of the building from the back, fire officials said. “The whole back of the store is burnt off, and the rest of the store sustained heavy smoke damage,” Chief Osterberg said.
Asked why the damage was worse at the J. Crew building than Rowdy Hall, Mr. Collum pointed to the proximity of the two buildings and the fact that the building at 14 Main Street dates to the 1930s. “There’s only about eight inches of distance between Rowdy Hall and 14 Main Street,” he said. Flames from the bins caught the wood shingles on J. Crew’s building and with the old wood frame, the fire traveled fast. By today’s standards, the building did not meet fire code.
Just about a month before Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of summer on the East End, the fire shuttered two businesses. Representatives from J. Crew said employees have been temporarily reassigned to its Southampton location, while a temporary East Hampton location is sought for the summer. Rowdy Hall is moving to quickly clean up its space, which suffered damage to mechanical equipment and heavy smoke damage in the main part of the restaurant, but exactly when it will open remains unclear.
“I’d like to be able to give you a date, but unfortunately it’s one of these very organic situations,” said Mark Smith, a managing partner of the Honest Man Group, which owns Rowdy Hall and the sister restaurants La Fondita in Amagansett, Nick and Toni’s in East Hampton, and Townline BBQ in Sagaponack. “I’m hoping a few weeks, but I don’t think I can say with any amount of certainty an exact date.” After the cleanup, the restaurant will need approval from the Suffolk County Health Department to reopen.
Mr. Smith said he had not heard anything definitive on the cause of the fire and said there are four or so insurance companies, each with their own investigators, involved. “The investigation is still ongoing.”
Robert Ratteni, who has several other properties in the village, owned the J. Crew building under the name East Hampton 14 Main Street L.L.C. The building at 10 Main Street is owned by Parrish Mews Limited Partners L.L.C.
“The good news is nobody was hurt. None of the firefighters were hurt, no employees were hurt,” Mr. Smith said. “The rest of it is just time, aggravation, and money — not that I take any of that lightly, but relative to having to call somebody’s parents. . . .”
As the cleanup began on the backside of the buildings, from Main Street, it hardly seemed like anything had happened at all, save for the trail of soot running down the picture windows at J. Crew where mannequins remained dressed in spring dresses. Signs and white boards have since been hung over the windows thanking the firefighters for their quick response.