A Cambridge community broken up by fire
CAMBRIDGE — Twenty-four years ago, Luz Flores got a first look at her family’s new home in St. Patrick’s Place and couldn’t believe her good fortune: an airy three-bedroom apartment in a former Catholic church, stained glass and chandeliers still accenting the entryway.
Flores, then a 46-year-old Filene’s Basement warehouse worker, soon fell in love with her new neighbors in the affordable-housing complex, too, a quiet and supportive group of working-class families from diverse backgrounds. “I never want to move from here,” she told a reporter in 1994.
Now 70, Flores was still living there last Saturday when she spotted a fire consuming a neighboring building from her corner-unit window. Before any smoke alarms went off, Flores’s shrieks alerted her neighbors, all of whom made it out safely before St. Patrick’s caught fire, too.
They lost nearly everything: photo albums and immigration papers, laptops and baby blankets, early Christmas gifts and prepaid money orders, too. Keith Griffin, a 44-year-old father of six and junk-removal worker, wished he could run back inside for the urn holding his father’s ashes.
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