A 72-year-old woman died in a fire in a Harlem apartment building on Wednesday night after firefighters climbed nearly 20 flights of stairs to reach her, according to the Fire Department.
Residents said on Thursday that one of the building’s two elevators had been broken for weeks and that the other one moved very slowly because of the number of floors it served.
The department received a call about a fire in the 35-story building — one of the four Taino Towers, an affordable-housing complex in East Harlem — around 7 p.m. on Wednesday. Nearly 80 firefighters and emergency medical workers responded to the blaze at the building, known as Tower One, officials said.
The woman, who was unconscious when the firefighters entered her 19th-story apartment, was rushed to Metropolitan Hospital, where she was pronounced dead, officials said. Her name has not been publicly released. Two firefighters were also taken to the hospital with minor injuries and are stable, the police said.
Fire marshals are investigating the cause of the blaze, which burned for over an hour on the 19th floor, officials said.
On Thursday, the floor still smelled strongly of smoke. One door was ajar, showing a charred apartment with its walls and floor covered in soot.
At a news conference Wednesday night, Joseph Abbamonte, a deputy fire chief, said it had been “very challenging to get up there, carrying all the gear up 19 floors.”
Even though the public is generally advised not to use elevators in an emergency, New York City’s building code stipulates that in a high-rise apartment building with three or fewer elevators, the elevators must have an emergency mode that automatically returns them to the ground floor when activated. Firefighters can then manually control the elevators and use them, if they choose, to reach the affected floors.
Residents on Thursday said that it was common for one of the building’s two elevators to be out of service.
Effectively, “we have one elevator,” said Virginia Rodriguez, 83, who estimated that the other elevator had been out of service for more than two weeks.
“They said that they fixed it,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “They didn’t do a good job.”
Another resident, Nora Ortiz, who lives on the 17th floor, said both elevators had frequently broken down during the two years she had lived in the towers, and in the decades before when her father lived there.
Ms. Ortiz, 63, said she was in her apartment on Wednesday night when she heard windows shattering and a woman’s screams coming from above. Later, she learned that a woman had died.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I was just thinking about her asking for help: ‘Help me, help.’”
The Taino Towers — four 35-story residential buildings on the block bordered by East 122nd and 123rd Streets and Second and Third Avenues — opened in 1979 after years of delays stemming from arguments between federal officials, community groups and contractors over costs and construction.
Over the last two years, the towers have received hundreds of 311 complaints, and collectively have 122 open violations, including for peeling paint, water leaks, pests and mold, according to the Department of Buildings. The towers have no open violations related to their elevators, which were last inspected in June by the property owner’s contracted inspection agency, according to the department.
A spokesman for the Buildings Department said Thursday afternoon that the agency planned to send its own inspector to the high-rise later that day to investigate the elevators.
A Fire Department spokesman said it was not uncommon for firefighters to take the stairs, rather than an elevator, when responding to a blaze. The Taino Towers are listed as “fireproof” on the website for the Department of Housing Preservation & Development.
Ms. Ortiz said she thought the woman on the 19th floor might have survived the fire if the elevators had been more reliable.
“God bless her,” she said. “But they need an investigation and somebody has to be responsible.”
Anusha Bayya contributed reporting.
Taylor Robinson is a Times reporter covering the New York City metro area.
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