Fire devastates four-story apartment in Pilsen

Fire destroyed the top two floors of a building worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in Pilsen Thursday, but no one was injured, a Fire Department spokesman said.

Leaping flames and a tower of black smoke could be seen from blocks away when the building at 1637 W. 21st St. caught fire just after noon.

“I was just walking home and I saw the fire,” said Oscar Nava, 17, who lives next door.

He called his friend Zeus Galindo, who was in the second-floor apartment with his brother.

“I had smelled the smoke, but I thought it was coming from the heater, so I turned off the heater,” said Galindo, 17. After Nava called, Galindo and his brother left. They were the only two people in the building.

Larry Langford, spokesman for the Chicago Fire Department, said the fire likely started on the third floor and spread to the attic.

“It’s not huge as far as fires go, but it is significant,” Langford said. He said it was a still alarm fire, the first level of classification, but was close to the second level.

By mid-afternoon, the Office of Fire Investigation had not determined the cause of the fire.

Galindo said the electricity had gone off unexpectedly on the third floor Wednesday night, but residents had decided to ignore it and tell the landlord Thursday.

“I’m guessing electrical fire,” he said, standing several doors down from the building where firefighters continued to contain the fire at 12:49 p.m., with chunks of the façade falling and continuing to burn on the sidewalk.

By the time the visible flames were put out at 1:09 p.m., the third floor and attic, and parts of the roof, had been destroyed.

Two residents of the destroyed apartment arrived soon afterward. Viewing the blackened shell from the street, they cried and held each other.

Friends had called Gizehl Sandoval, 20, and her sister to alert them to the fire. They lived in the apartment with their mother and two brothers for four years, she said.

“We don’t have anything now,” Sandoval said as she stood with her sister, Galindo, Nava and other friends. “It’s all we had. There’s nothing left.”

The ground floor of the building had been a bar, but has been closed for six or seven years, though its Busch beer sign remained, residents said. No one lived in the fourth floor attic.

Galindo said the building was apparently safe, and they had no problems with their landlord.

Owner Sabino Medrano, who is in his 80s, was asleep in his home several blocks away, his grandson Ricardo A. Sanchez said.

Medrano owns several buildings in Pilsen, Sanchez said. He estimated that the 1637 W. 21st St. property is worth more than $400,000.

Langford said fire investigators would determine what in the building could be salvaged, as well as looking for fire safety measures such as smoke detectors.

“Of the 34 fatalities we’ve had in the city this year, all of them were in homes without working smoke detectors,” Langford said. Local fire stations offer free smoke detectors and hand out free batteries twice a year, he said.

There was also a fire at 3400 S. Kedzie Avenue at an abandoned factory earlier in the day.

“It has been a busy morning,” Langford said.