Hoboken Firefighter Remembers Worst Years: 'We Saw People Jump'

Editor's Note: This story was set to run on March 13, 2020, but a memorial event for victims of Hoboken's suspicious gentrification fires, set for that weekend, was postponed last-minute because of the coronavirus lockdown that began the day after. We thought it was worth posting the story so that the memories aren't lost, and because, as we have seen, silence around a tragic trend — no matter how frightening the facts — has a cost.

(The interview with Fire Captain Mike Lisa took place in late winter of 2020.)

HOBOKEN, NJ — In March 2020, the city of Hoboken prepared for a scheduled event to remember dozens of children and adults who perished in suspicious fires during the city's gentrification in the 1970s and 1980s. Local professionals who dealt with the tragedies began sharing memories of that dark time.

Several months ago, in December of 2019, the Hoboken City Council voted to fund a plaque at a 13th Street park to memorialize more than 50 individuals who died in the fires of the 1970s and 1980s as property owners sold land to developers for top dollar.

The Hoboken Historic Museum ran a forum in January 2020 about that time period.

In the last two years, more and more officials and longtime Hoboken residents have said that there should be a plaque or other way to remember the families who perished in Hoboken as the city changed and built up in the early 1980s.

"The vast majority of the victims were Hispanic women and children," wrote members of the relatively new Hoboken Fire Victims Memorial Project after it was founded in fall 2018 by a retired nurse from Hoboken's hospital. "In one arson incident alone, on Jan. 2, 1979, 21 people died at 131 Clinton St. There has been no official recognition or remembrance in the mile-square city …. Residents moved into refurbished condos having no idea what occurred."

Among those who has participated in recent remembrance events was former Hoboken Fire Captain Michael Lisa, who retired from the department in 2007 and had rushed to many of the suspicious blazes.

Lisa was among those set to participate in All Saints Church's "Service of Remembrance" slated for mid-March 2020, the last in their series of events this year to remember the victims.

In an interview Captain Lisa, who turns 70 next year, shared some of his memories of that time. Lisa joined the department in 1978 at the age of 26.

Lisa also had photographed many of the fires, having taken photography courses in college, and his photos now coat the walls of the Hoboken Firefighters' Museum on Bloomfield Street.

What he remembers

Lisa lived uptown in a Hoboken apartment building on Twelfth Street in the early 1980s, near many of the fire scenes. At the time, he was starting his own family.

"I remember the fire at the Hotel Pinter," he said, recalling a blaze on 14th Street in which seven children and six adults died, according to the New York Times (Headline: "Survivors Recall Women Screaming And Falling Bodies.")

That blaze was judged to be arson.

Nurse Rose Orozco had said at a December 2019 Hoboken City Council meeting that someone had poured gasoline in the halls, and that the building was so narrow, it was hard for people to get out.

Retired Captain Lisa recalled, "I was a member of the Hoboken Volunteer Ambulance Squad [in addition to being a firefighter], and I was on duty that night. My partner was Eddie Fitzsimmons. We were dispatched by the Police Department. We jumped in the ambulance. Suddenly we looked at each other because we saw people jump. One of them almost hit [Fitzsimmons]."

He added, "The smoke was so thick and you'd hear the people hitting the ground. Eddie said, 'Someone just hit me.' The smoke was so thick, I couldn't see him."

That was when the fire chief ordered all off-duty firefighters to report to work.

Lisa quickly changed his uniform and changed roles.

Lisa was glad he could help, but sorry for the loss of 13 lives that day. He served on a Hoboken Historical Museum panel in January of 2020 with a woman who had lost several family members in that fire when she was only 10 or 11 years old. The woman had lived nearby in Union City and was not in the fire, but went to the scene the next day.

Bad to worse

Lisa said the fires that stand out to him most were those that resulted in a large loss of life, including a tragic blaze in 1979 on Clinton Street in which 21 people died.

The New York Times said the victims included not only a 33-year-old woman, but also her seven children. (" ‘Inferno’ in Tenement Believed Set," says the headline.)

One would think, with attention paid to the fires, that they would stop — but they continued throughout the early 1980s, taking more lives.

One news story highlighted the racial and economic disparities in who perished, as some have done with the current ongoing tragedy.

The New York Times article, "Fear of Fire Haunts Many," ran in November 1981.

"For most people who live on the clean, tree-lined streets of Hoboken's brownstone revival neighborhoods, life is comfortable," it noted. "But for many residents of the city's less-fashionable tenements, fear, not comfort, is their constant companion."

No one brought to justice

Lisa remembers a fire at 1101 Washington St. in which everyone was rescued, but there was a dangerous backdraft. Lisa's photos of that fire are on the wall of the Fire Department museum.

"The building was full of smoke," he said. "If you look at the photos, you see the smoke out of one window, and then there was a heavy backdraft, and you see the smoke out of all the windows."

Lisa said he isn't sure why no one was brought to justice for the suspicious blazes, as he wasn't involved in the investigations. But he said it's important to remember what happened.

"Since I've gotten involved in the [Memorial Project]," he said, "I think about all the fires and the people we lost, and how we tried to save them. Sometimes conditions didn't warrant it."

He added, "The guys were a bunch of great guys. We really tried."

Today, he teaches fire safety at New Jersey colleges.

But how else does he cope with seeing so much tragedy around him?

"I guess I put it out of my mind," he said, "but I do talk about it a lot. I talk about it with family members, other firefighters. I guess it's a form of releasing post traumatic stress disorder."

The El Dorado Fire

He remembers one significant fire, now called the "El Dorado Fire," which took place at the El Dorado apartment building on Twelfth Street, across from where he lived. Eleven people died in that 1981 blaze.

"I was about to go to sleep because I had to get up early the next day," he said. "My daughter, who's now about to turn 40, was rocking in her crib, making noise. I said, 'Missy, go to sleep.' I heard yelling outside and figured it was from the bar across the street. Then I heard someone say in Spanish, 'Fuego'!"

He said he used the direct line to call the fire dispatcher, Eddie White. "I said, 'Transmit the second alarm,' " he said. " 'They're jumping out the windows.' "

He said when the men in the second truck arrived, one of them got out and caught a woman who had jumped.

"I believe that if they had delayed that second truck, there would have been another fatality," he said.

Lisa said that years later, he was on duty at the fire prevention office, and a young woman walked into his office, saying she had recently moved to that same building.

"She asked me, 'Do you know anything about this building?' " Lisa recalled. "I said, 'Yeah, there was a fire there and a lot of people died.' She said, 'That explains it. I live on the top floor and every so often, I hear crying and things moving around.' "

What happened after Lisa told her?

"She moved out," Lisa says.

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