 Zooming a little closer and looking past
Wetherole, we find a surviving but star crossed row of stores
that have been hit by a number of fires over the years. A new
public library was built on the block just past them, a couple
of years after the 1972 destruction of the original. The new
library replaced the Shell service station from where my father
and I watched the stores burn across the Drive. The winds that
brutal February afternoon were horrendous and the huge blaze
threatened apartments behind the stores, the railroad just above
the library as well as the then brand new Key Food building across
Austin Street. As it was, at one point, flames blew clear across
Austin, incinerating at least one parked car and lapping Key
Food's walls. That Key Food, however, had a fireproof exterior
and never caught fire. If its predecessor store had still been
there, a bedding shop full of ultra flammable merchandise, not
only would it have gone in a minute, but the old church next
to it would certainly have been next. Just imagine if instead
of flying back and forth from north to south, the flames had
reared westward and hit that Shell station! Boom, bang, no more
Rego Park! My father and I were actually supposed to go visit
his mother that day, and just before the wind shifted again and
sent the blaze barreling into the library, he crossed under the
tracks to phone her from another service station by Alderton
Street. By the time he got back only a few minutes later, the
library, filled to the gills with old oily plastic covered books
and wooden shelving units, had already caved in. Ironically,
the station he called from was an Esso, soon to be renamed Exxon,
and who worked there but the same mechanic who had serviced our
cars in an infamous garage discussed elsewhere on this site,
on 66th Avenue several years earlier; the one who always left
our cars with more leaks than they came to him with. Even he
would have been blown up if that fire had roared up the dead
grass and trees and vaulted across the railroad tracks, so oily
and full of creosote as they undoubtably were. |
