A Senseless Fire and the Stranger Who Put It Out

NEW YORK — The firefighters were gone, the police were on their way, and all around was the aftermath of whatever had happened a couple hours ago. Sabrina Rudin and her father peered at a video on her phone’s screen for some clue.

Rudin had opened the Spring Cafe Aspen, on West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village, three years ago, a bright corner spot for fresh juices, coffee, and breakfast, lunch and dinner. The cafe had sidewalk seating, huge windows and lots of flowers beneath an aqua awning.

But now, early on the morning of May 17, the place was a wreck.

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A plate-glass window was shattered by the heat, the awning scorched and melted. Flower arrangements, burned crisp. Inside, a film of white chemical from fire extinguishers covered the countertops, the floor, the fruits and vegetables.

The fire, they learned that morning, had been intentionally set by a passerby. There he was on the video; he pulls something out of a trash can, lights it on fire, then holds the flame against a flower box mounted outside the cafe. The fire catches on the box and races upward.

Since the pandemic, things hadn’t felt the same in the neighborhood, where Rudin lived with her husband and young children. And now this.

It’s hard enough having three kids and running a restaurant in 2024, Rudin thought. Now to wake up and find out that someone had set the place on fire.

Maybe, she thought, I’m done with this city.

Carefully Planned Route

The hours before dawn belong to the trash collectors, chugging uptown, downtown, crosstown. Angelo Cruz, 49, had been driving his Classic Recycling truck for 12 years and had pieced together his sprawling route like a puzzle.

The trick, he had learned, was to save Greenwich Village for last. On paper, it made sense to visit that area earlier. But his trash pickups were at bars and clubs that stayed open late, and he would just have to return after they closed anyway.

Timing was everything. Toward his shift’s end, he was in a hurry to get home across the river, outside of Newark, New Jersey. His reason was a year old: a boy named Xavier but referred to by his father as “Little Man” or “God’s gift.”

Cruz already had a son who was 30 and another who was 27, and he and his wife hadn’t seen Xavier coming. He loved his time with the child, but man, he needed to sleep. If he got home early enough, the boy would be at day care, and the house would be quiet.

Shortly after 5 a.m. that Friday, he stopped his truck outside the world-famous Comedy Cellar on MacDougal Street, darkened now. He tossed the heavy bags into the back of his truck, which crushed them to make more space.

On any given night, he collects about 17 tons of trash. But there was always a slight risk that certain kinds of discarded batteries could explode under that pressure, and so his truck was equipped with two fire extinguishers: one household size, one bigger.

He left Comedy Cellar and turned right on West Fourth. Ahead on the right, on the corner of Mercer Street, there was this strange, bright glow on the sidewalk and the awning above.

A Block He Helped Build

In the video, the fire grows. Melted chunks of awning drip to the sidewalk like glowing rain.

Rudin’s father, Anthony Leichter, 86, had helped build up this block in the 1970s, when it was all light manufacturing and this corner of the Village was practically deserted. One store on the block sold appliances for fireplaces. Others sold thermometers, or sewing machines.

When bankers from uptown wanted to inspect the building before giving him a mortgage, he escorted them, avoiding Broadway and its vacant storefronts and homeless people.

Leichter had overseen the merging of nine buildings on the block into one, by opening up the interiors and creating connecting hallways and a main lobby. It was a colossal job. He moved into one of the new apartments upstairs, and he and his wife were married by a rabbi inside.

Then Sabrina was born in the 1980s. When she was a little girl, she would ride around inside on roller skates. She loved to look out through a window at the Empire State Building.

The family left the city in the early 1990s, when Sabrina, the only child, was 6 or 7. New York was in the grip of its record-setting peak for murders, approaching or surpassing 2,000 killings a year for six years. The Village felt removed from the center of the violence, but still. A young child gets you thinking.

They moved to Westchester County, to an old farmhouse. Leichter kept his ties to the city and commuted. Almost 15 years later, Sabrina moved back. Eventually, her parents returned, too.

Leichter could never have imagined it turning out this way, his daughter owning a cafe in this place that had once sold fireplace pokers.

Now, he was watching the video on the phone. There was a sprinkler system inside the cafe, but it did not immediately detect the fire outside, even as flames caught on the awning above. The sprinklers did not engage.

A family with a 2-year-old child lived right above the cafe. On the screen, the fire climbs toward the second floor as another minute ticks by.

‘I Know How That Feels’

Cruz drove toward the glow.

When he was 10 years old, living with his mother in Newark, their apartment was destroyed in a fire. They were driving home when it was happening. He remembers that feeling of realizing all these firefighters were running to his place.

He drew closer on West Fourth, and confirmed what he was seeing. And yet, silence. No sirens, no alarms.

“There’s people living there,” he said later. “I know how that feels.”

Minutes later, a watchman from a nearby construction site would tell firefighters about a garbage truck and the driver jumping out with this big red fire extinguisher. The driver asked the watchman to call 911. Then he was gone again, like it was part of his regular job.

His last few stops in the Lower East Side were waiting. Fire or no fire.

By the time Rudin and her father awoke that morning and arrived at the scene, the fire was long out. Before the worst sort of damage — the “God forbid” damage.

Most businesses would have been closed for weeks. And some businesses’ owners might have made plans to leave for good, as Rudin had threatened.

But Leichter still knew contractors. He would have his daughter’s plate glass replaced in hours. It was as if they still lived upstairs and he was — one more time — fixing something precious for his little girl on roller skates.

Hours after the fire, Rudin knew she wasn’t going anywhere. The restaurant would reopen the next day. Whatever mysterious figure had started the fire, someone else in this big, messy city had put it out.

By then, Cruz was long since done with his route and sound asleep as if it were any other day. His son would be home soon.

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