An 80-year-old man is dead and a 52-year-old woman is recovering in the hospital after a fire tore through the third floor of an apartment building at 660 Riverside Drive in Hamilton Heights in the pre-dawn hours. The blaze broke out shortly before 1:30 a.m., sending flames shooting from the windows and forcing about 16 residents out of their homes.
The man was pronounced dead at the scene, while the woman was taken to Harlem Hospital in stable condition, according to ABC7 New York. Firefighters responded to find heavy flames shooting from the windows of the building, the outlet reported, and the cause of the fire remains under investigation.
One resident, identified only as Danilo, described the chaos of the early morning in an interview with the station. He said he smelled something before the alarm sounded, then called 911 after hearing it; he was initially told to stay put before he was able to evacuate using the building's safety staircases.
A Neighborhood Already Familiar With Fire
This is not the first time Hamilton Heights has made headlines for a destructive blaze. A separate fire at 3657 Broadway seriously injured one firefighter, while five civilians and three other firefighters suffered minor injuries, per the same outlet's report. Fire units had responded to that reported roof fire just after 6:15 p.m. on a Sunday, and the blaze was under control by around 7:45 p.m., though its cause was never immediately determined.
Another Hamilton Heights fire, on West 145th Street, displaced almost 100 people, according to CBS New York. That fire started around 2:45 p.m. in a second-floor apartment between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, and a firefighter battling the blaze fell about 40 feet down a shaft and was taken to Harlem Hospital in serious but stable condition. By 10:20 p.m. that night, the Red Cross had registered 94 people from 34 households for emergency assistance. The cause of that fire was still under investigation as well.
A Citywide Spike in Fire Deaths
The Riverside Drive death adds to a troubling citywide trend. Fire deaths in New York City were up more than 60 percent compared to the same point in 2025, when the count stood at 28, according to data reported by CBS New York. By that point this year, 46 people had died in fires citywide, according to FDNY First Deputy Commissioner Daniel Flynn.
That figure sits closer to the tallies seen earlier in the decade — 47 fire deaths at the same point in 2022 and 48 in 2023 — before deaths dropped to 32 at the same point in 2024, per the CBS report. Officials also noted that 12 fire fatalities so far this year were related to incendiary fires, compared with just three for all of last year.
No cause has been determined for the Riverside Drive fire, and investigators have not released further details on how it started. For now, the 16 displaced residents join a growing number of Hamilton Heights neighbors left to rebuild after fire upended their homes.
