One Year Anniversary Of 6-Alarm Fire That ‘Punched A Hole In Heart Of Queen St.’

It was an event that forever changed the face of old Toronto – and we’ll never know why.

It was exactly a year ago that a busy part of the downtown core was lost to the flames of a six-alarm fire on Queen St. W. at Portland near Bathurst. The blaze is believed to have started at 5am in a store that sold audio equipment and spread through the old buildings with incredible speed.

Randall Duke lived and worked on the iconic strip, renting an apartment above Duke’s Cycle with his wife. One of the city’s best known bike shops had first opened its doors there 94 years earlier.

“I worried about what I was going to wear,” remembers Duke.

“What was I going to wear to work tomorrow. And then I realized I don’t even have any work.”

He and his wife left with only the clothes on their backs.

“There’s more of a sadness. Not just for things that you lose, but that things are so temporal and fragile,” he added.

By the time crews arrived, half the block was fully engulfed, sending 150 firefighters and 30 trucks to try and contain it in the bitter night air. By sunrise, it was still going, with an unusual mixture of roaring flames on the street and ice glistening in the sunshine, as the water used to try and extinguish the inferno froze in the midst of an Extreme Cold Weather Alert.

It raged for hours, with crews unable to contain it, forced to continually fall back to a more defensive position as the fire consumed everything in its path. 

No one expected it would spread as far as it did.

“I remember getting that panicked phone call and rushing down here just in time to see the building collapse,” describes Duke’s store manager Michael Cranwell.

“It was a pretty frightening day.”

There were also worries about the possibility the thick black smoke, which could be seen across the city and even permeated some downtown subway stations,  might be toxic. But officials soon ruled that out.

One survivor recalled that “it looked like the sky was on fire,” as the relentless flames stubbornly resisted taming. By 9:30am, firefighters finally got the upper hand, but hot spots continued to burn and the busy intersection was closed to traffic for days.

The fire took more than just the buildings. It also robbed Toronto of some heritage properties, structures that had stood on the spot since the 1860s.

“It’s tough to see a landmark like [Duke’s] gone,” sales manager Mark Newman lamented as he surveyed the ashes. “It’s probably the longest-standing bike store in North America that is continuously owned and operated by the same family and same location without moving. So it’s devastating.”

A year later, Cranwell reflects on the changes. “It’s been an interesting year, yeah, one filled with lots of challenges,” he muses. “But no, we’re feeling pretty comfortable here, pretty confident about the coming season.”

He’d like to be back on Queen West for the store’s 100th anniversary in 2014. However, it would cost $3 million to rebuild and they were insured for $1 million.

Since the blaze, they’ve been in business at a new location at Richmond and Spadina. On Saturday, they will commemorate the fire at the store.

Suspect Video, a popular eclectic movie rental outlet, also once stood on the spot ravaged by the fire. Manager Daniel Hanna lost not only all his inventory but many collectible and irreplaceable films. “I’m just absolutely amazed, stunned, dumbfounded. I’m in awe,” he told CityNews.ca as he arrived to survey the damage.

He’s back in business now elsewhere, too, opening Eyesore Cinema six months later.

And the list of losses went on: a used clothing store, a furniture outlet, a record place, a restaurant supply company, a pizza joint, an antique dealer and even a head shop, all gone in just a few hours.

So were the homes many tenants lived in above those businesses. Most had no real idea where they would go. “I lost my clothes, my valuables, my pictures, everything,” revealed a devastated Pamela Badour, pointing to her winter jacket. “This is all I got.”

Councillor Adam Vaughan would later call it the day that “punched a hole in the heart of Queen St.”

All that remains now is a giant pile of block long rubble, testimony to the fire’s all consuming fury.

As terrible as the devastation was, questions about the origins of the blaze may be even more frustrating. Despite a lengthy investigation that took months, fire officials concluded there was simply no way to tell what started it. The cause of the combustion is officially listed as “undetermined” and will forever remain a mystery.

Still, the news from the scene that day did have one miraculous aspect to it. While the properties involved were all write-offs, there wasn’t a single injury or death from the fire, beyond forever destroying a large part of irreplaceable Toronto history. 

See our original video and coverage here.

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