![]() ![]() The three-story Romanesque edifice was home to the city’s oldest continuously operating gay bathhouse, a haven for gay men at a time of rampant prejudice. But it wasn’t the inferno that kept this story in the papers for days so much as the building itself. It left 9 dead, as well as 12 injured, including 2 firemen. In 1977, the New York City Fire Department recorded 129,619 fires. They weren’t moving.”Īn article about the fire in the Daily Item newspaper “When we went in, we found more on the stairs,” Captain Barry Goldblatt later said to the New York Post. By the time the fire engines rolled up, around 25 men were perched on ledges or dangling from windowsills. Once inside, he told the New York Times, “I grabbed a bar outside the bathroom window and swung to the other roof.” For the 80 to 100 men trapped at 28 West 28th Street on May 25, 1977, panic quickly took hold.Īgosto remembered where a restroom was and made a run for it. A moment later, a deluge of smoke engulfed the corridor. He heard people screaming, “Fire!” Elsewhere in the building, voices shouted, “This way down! This way down!” But 18-year-old Agosto had no time to find the stairs. Miguel Agosto looked out the door of his tiny rented room at the Everard Baths in New York City and saw men across the hallway wrestling with a burning mattress.
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