Valentine’s blaze a day to forget for small biz owners
Six-alarm fire at Badminton and Racquet Club hits Yonge and St. Clair flower, card shops hard
It was a rotten Valentine’s Day for many businesses near a blaze that devoured a building in midtown Toronto.
Especially hard hit were the flower and card shops that rely on sales from the holiday.
“Yesterday was Valentine’s Day and I’m a greeting card store, so you can only imagine that it definitely hit us hard,” said the Papery owner Marla Freedland, whose business sells cards and stationery.
The six-alarm blaze, which ignited Tuesday morn- ing, tore through the historic Badminton and Racquet Club of Toronto until firefighters contained it in the evening. They stayed on-scene all night and the fire was under control as of 5:45 a.m., said Chief Matthew Pegg of Toronto Fire Services.
“The two days of Valentine’s Day take care of the month of February.
“It’s not quite like Christmas, but for two days it’s like that,” Freedland said of Feb. 13 and 14.
Her business, at St. Clair and Yonge St. was closed at 11 a.m. on Tuesday and didn’t reopen until 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday.
The area has been “quiet” since the fire, she said, adding that “people have avoided the area.”
Across the street, Eden Flower Shop was also feeling the pang of a Valentine’s Day gone awry.
Owner Pam Cho was facing the pressure of selling unsold flowers off before she had to throw them out.
Her business was open on Valentine’s Day, but customers weren’t able to come to the store due to the road closures. “We opened, but no business,” she said. Over at Paperboy Cards & Gifts, Valentine’s Day had proved similarly disappointing.
Though the road closures hadn’t affected them, and they were able to stay open, it wasn’t business as usual.
“I’d say business was probably half of what it should have been,” said longtime employee Rebecca Griffith. “It certainly wasn’t like a normal Valentine’s.” Still, there was an upside. Griffith said though their regulars weren’t able to make it to the store, many new faces showed up because pedestrians were directed their way after Yonge St. was closed.
Despite poor business, many owners were feeling the love from the firefighters who battled the blaze.
“The fire department was fantastic and the police were great, they escorted us out,” Freedland said.
And on the bright side, she added, “no one got hurt and the store’s standing and kudos to (the firefighters) we have no smoke or water damage so I feel lucky.”
Deputy fire chief Jim Jessop praised the firefighters for their work battling the blaze.
“When you look at the voracity of this fire and how close it was to the surrounding buildings, the job that the women and men of Toronto fire did is nothing short of spectacular,” he said.
“We had no thermal damage and no fire damage to the condominium literally a couple feet across from it and if it wasn’t for the efforts of our crews this could have been a lot worse.”
The club’s parking lot was also flooded as water from the firefighters’ hoses poured from the building’s front doors. More than 120 firefighters helped douse the flames.
“Everybody’s exhausted,” Pegg said, praising crews for their tireless efforts.
The cause of the fire wasn’t clear Wednesday, nor was the location where the fire started and the cost of damage.