Suddenly, sometimes, in the middle of the day, a fire happens. Abby Goss told me that she saw it was happening while she was on the way to catch a movie. She had a foot in her Uber when she ran into a neighbor, who asked her if she was also smelling the smoke. Goss hadn’t noticed, but on second thought maybe she did. She never ended up making that movie.
It was the fire that took down a three-story building sitting on Central Avenue, knocking out a handful of apartments in the two floors above 242 Gourmet Deli (242 Central Ave.), as well as the apartment building next door, at 244 Central Avenue.
It was just the latest fire to knock down an apartment building owned by Deodat Lowtan, considered by some in the business to be a regional slumlord. He hasn’t returned my calls. Goss—one of his tenants, until recently—did.
“I was really hung over. I had actually gotten locked out of my apartment the night prior when I was out, so I fell asleep at someone else’s house at 5 a.m. and I didn’t want to leave the house at all that day when I got back,” remembered Goss, a filmmaker from Kansas City. She made a movie back then and the reel now gets her gig work on TV shows, while one roommate works for a Midtown nonprofit and a third roommate does “freelance with marketing.”
The fire had started in their next door neighbor’s apartment, occupied by a handful of other local characters, a group that included Lex Walton, a prolific indie guitarist who Sub Pop signed last month, and who has since been on the receiving end of appropriate acclaim for that.
“The wiring in Aidan’s room shorted and started a fire that completely torched his and Sloane’s rooms. No smoke detector went off and I had no idea the fire was happening until our neighbor called me,” Walton wrote on a GoFundMe post shortly after the fire, in aid of funding “the costs of moving, finding new housing, and buying new food and clothes.”
Goss frets to think what would have happened if she hadn’t decided to turn around that late evening.
“I personally saw the fire when it started, and it looked like it was coming from inside the wall, which was pretty crazy. We got our cats out, and luckily, when I came down and had my cats outside, I ran into someone I know whose friend was in the building as well, so then they had a car where we were able to put our cats with the A/C, so they weren’t breathing in all of the polluted air. Really, the community came together.”
The Fire Department has since determined that the fire was “electrical in nature,” but haven’t commented further.
“In the apartment next to us, where the fire initially started, they [the people living there] said that in half of their apartment, the electricity trips all the time,” said Goss. “And that if it were to overload, it would catch fire instead of tripping, which I assume is what happened.”
Like many of Lowtan’s renters, Goss said she had a low opinion of her erstwhile landlord.
“He’s pretty much just a piece of shit, obviously,” she said. Goss described a low-tech operation, run by checks deposited “outside the Sultan Room randomly.” In the weeks since the fire, after the Fire Department issued a vacate order for the rest of the building, he’s begun taking calls from his displaced tenants, telling them, Goss says, “that we’re criminals and we owe him money, even though, I mean, he owes us our deposit back.”
It’s not the first fire to strike the Lowtan empire—Anna Bradley-Smith wrote an article on protests from fire-displaced tenants in 2021—and perhaps it’s not the last either. Across Lowtan’s properties in Bushwick, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development has consistently cited him for inadequate fire alarms and smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, including as recently as June of this year.
When I last checked in with Goss, she was staying with a friend, somewhere else in Bushwick. She says she doesn’t plan on leaving the area.
“I’m attached to the neighborhood because it’s very convenient, and I have a lot of friends that live here,” she said. “I’m in my early mid-twenties, so it’s just, like, I feel like this is the age where people are really living in Bushwick.”
Photos provided by Abby Goss.
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