A Saturday afternoon fire left a halfway house in the Hill uninhabitable.
Firefighters responding to the one-alarm call at the house at 690 Howard Ave. encountered a lot of smoke. But it wasn’t clear at first where the fire was.
“It was a stubborn fire. They had to do a lot of hunting around to locate it,” said Matthew Marcarelli, the department’s new assistant chief.
They eventually found the source of the fire in a room on the top floor of the three-story building, according to Marcarelli.
He said it took about an hour to get the fire under control. Damage from the firefighting effort left enough damage that the halfway house’s 65 tenants needed another place to go. Project MORE, a prison-to-community transition program that manages the halfway house, found beds for the tenants at the agency’s other locations, Marcarelli reported.
The fire’s cause is under investigation.
One tenant was injured, “but it wasn’t related to the fire,” Marcarelli said. ” He may have been trying to tamper with or do something with a light fixture and got cut.” That happened in the area where the fire started.
One firefighter twisted his ankle afterwards when he slipped on the ice.
City records list a limited-liability corporation called X. M.A.G.I.C. as the building’s owner. State records list one-time Republican mayoral candidate and WELI talk-show host Kevin Skiest, now with a Florida home address, as the LLC’s managing partner. Records list the building as dating back to 1940 and having 15,698 square feet of living area.