A fire in old Silver Spring

Thank God for late-night, weeknight drinkers. If it wasn’t for them, things could have been a lot worse in downtown Silver Spring early Thursday morning.

As it was, things were bad enough. A fire broke out some time after midnight at the corner of Georgia Avenue and Bonifant Street. It was noticed by the patrons of the Quarry House, a venerable, low-ceilinged, subterranean dive bar that is now a sodden, smoky mess.

Sodden, smoky, but not burned. The same can’t be said of two street-level businesses above it, the Bombay Gaylord Indian restaurant and the Mandarin Chinese restaurant.

I live in Silver Spring, eat at Bombay Gaylord, am in bands that play at the Quarry House. Silver Spring has sprung, as they say, with high-rise apartment buildings, “mixed-use” development and a glittering new public library on the way. But I’ll always have affection for the old Silver Spring, and nothing epitomizes it more than that little corner of town. Bonifant may be the single most interesting street in Montgomery County, home to a tattoo parlor, a used book shop, a gun shop, a Domenican hair salon, a Burmese restaurant, an African restaurant and a Thai restaurant.

Not a Starbucks among them. Instead, next to the Quarry House, there’s Kefa Café, a coffee shop that opened nearly 20 years ago. Inside is a pile of books under a sign that reads “Local Authors.” (A lot of George Pelecanos.) It smelled of smoke but was unharmed.

“I’m just incredibly sad,” said Abeba Tsegaye, who runs Kefa with her sister, Lene. “I know how hard they work.”

She meant the people at the gutted Bombay Gaylord, but she could have been talking about any small business entrepreneur, any family that toils together in a high-pressure, thin-margin endeavor.

When I went by around 8 a.m. there was a curious buzz in the air, that frisson available only to those of us who experience tragedy at a remove. It wasn’t our livelihoods that had gone up in flames. The storefronts facing Georgia Avenue were smoky and smudged. Pedestrians stepped over shards of broken glass that littered the sidewalks. Curious artifacts adorned the pavement: a shattered chair, a round-topped table, its surface puckered by the flames.

A kitchen shelving unit had been upended, its contents fused into an abstract still-life. It was hard at first to tell what it was made of. Ah, towers of nested plastic cups and piles of plastic forks.

We passersby could look through the broken windows and into Bombay Gaylord, a modern Pompeii. The tables were set for a meal. The silverware was dusted in soot. Inside each water goblet was a neatly-folded napkin, now melted and crispy.

“Is this where the fire was?” a driver asked after slowing to a stop and rolling down his car window.

Um, yeah, I said gesturing to the soot-covered facade and burned furnishings.

More than one person came up to me and asked if I owned the building. These were ambulance chasers, of a sort: representatives of restoration services, those folks who clean up after fires and floods. I couldn’t begrudge them their determination.

“In this business, you can’t sit waiting for the phone to ring,” one told me.

(In fact, the building belongs to the family that owns Washington Music Center in Wheaton, known to musicians far and wide as Chuck Levin’s.)

Around 9 a.m. a truck pulled up from Minkoff Company, the outfit tasked with the clean-up. Workers started sweeping up the glass and arranging plywood to board up the windows. A generator roared to life.

“A million dollars,” I heard someone say, tallying the damage.

Quarry House owner Jackie Greenbaum promised to rebuild and reopen as quickly as she could, though she said that would probably be contingent on the tenants above her and the structural integrity of the building. She and partner Gordon Banks had toured their bar, where water still dripped on the cases of beer and the bottles of single malt.

“The inventory’s a total loss,” Jackie said. “We should have a whiskey-drinking party for people who don’t mind that the bottles are smoky.”

Gordon joked that they could say the scotch was from Islay, the Scottish island that produces whiskey of a notoriously peaty aspect.

Later, I called Mathew Hluch, who manages Jackie’s eponymous restaurant a few blocks away and who was in the Quarry House when smoke started pouring from the overhead light fixtures.

“It happened really quickly,” he said.

No one knew what was going on – a smoke bomb? – but bar manager Kate Campagna yelled for the 15 or so patrons to evacuate.

“Within 30 seconds everyone was out,” Hluch said. Bar employee Kevin Kleinhuis ran back down the stairs to make sure no one had been left behind. When he emerged, his face was black with soot.

An Indian restaurant. A Chinese restaurant. An old-fashioned dive bar. How uniquely American. I hope it won’t be too long before we’re raising a toast to all of them.

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