Up in Smoke

The Balcoses gathered the next morning at Manny and Ophelia’s town home. Eric had already gone back to the big house to see if he could salvage his 1964 Volkswagen convertible, which had been stored in the double garage at the side of the house. The car was covered with a tarp, and the garage had not collapsed on top of it, “so I cleared a path through the debris in the driveway, fired it up, and drove out,” Eric said with a grin several months later. “The firefighters then said everything was going to be torn down, so if we’re going to get anything else from the house, we’d better be quick.” Eric called the family at the town home, “and everybody came over.”

What they found was a rank-smelling nightmare vision of what had once been their home. The roof and one of the walls had come down. Water was dripping from the skeletal remains. Virtually everything was coated with ice. Because most of the fire had been concentrated in the house’s sturdy walls, much of the visible contents hadn’t burned. Most of the house was inaccessible beneath the collapsed roof. But, luckily, given their central position in thirty-two years worth of family life, the three rooms in the best shape were the living room, dining room, and kitchen. The fire department had ordered a demolition, but one of the officials on-site happened to be the son of a patient of one of Manny’s colleagues and granted the family some time to salvage what they could. “Disbelief” was the overriding emotion, but, said Edwin, “we were in a salvage mode, not trying to think about much else.”

“We pretty much cleared out the kitchen and dining room,” Eydie said later. “Silverware and glasses—we took it whether it was valuable or not, because it was Mom’s.” Other recovered items included a china cabinet, several antiques, some artwork from the Philippines, and the large mahogony dining room table, around which Manny, Ophelia, and all of the siblings except Ethan sat on a summer afternoon talking about the fire. Everything they recovered had to be cleaned and restored, but at least a few precious possessions remained. Even so, more than seven months after the fire, family members could not talk about their loss without tears. “I still expect to drive by and look up at the house,” Eileen said, her eyes shining.

The strangely vacant lot had drawn a great deal of attention in the weeks and months after the fire. The sun had scarcely cleared the horizon on the morning of December 1 when Bruce Birkeland, a real estate broker who lives nearby, received the first of several calls inquiring about the space. Birkeland, various Realtors, and other neighbors have since acknowledged widespread concern about the site’s future—more specifically, in Birkeland’s words, the fear that “something inappropriate, something significant but not tasteful” might be built there. Because it was a double lot, some callers were nervous about the prospect of two possibly “inappropriate” structures. Because there was no Historic District restrictions, almost anything within residential zoning parameters was possible. Whatever would go up on such a prominent point on the parkway would be noticed, for better or worse.