‘I saw my home fall to the ground’
Actress mourns loft lost in E. Village gas blast
ON March 26, 2015, actress Drea de Matteo had a big day ahead of her. The lifelong New Yorker, best known as the tragic Adriana on “The Sopranos,” was in LA getting ready for a party to celebrate her NBC series “Shades of Blue.”
Then the phone rang. It was her friend Ginger calling with devastating news: De Matteo’s Manhattan home of 22 years was up in flames.
“She said, ‘Turn on the TV! Your building’s on fire!” said the actress, speaking about the ordeal for the first time, exclusively to The Post. “I said, ‘You’re out of your freaking mind.’ Then [my children and I] watched our house fall to the ground on television.”
There had been a gas explosion in the basement of 121 Second Ave., the East Village building next door to de Matteo’s. The blast blew out the interior of the Sushi Park restaurant there, killing a customer and a kitchen worker. Immediately, 121 went up in flames, as did 119 Second Ave. and 123 Second Ave. — the circa-1834 structure where de Matteo lived with her daughter, Alabama (then 7 years old), and son, Blackjack (then 3). By the next day, all three buildings were rubble.
“I lived most of my life in that apartment — I made beautiful memories there,” said the actress, 45. “I was a real East Village girl.”
De Matteo was 21 years old and fresh out of NYU when she and two roommates moved into the second-story loft — nearly 2,000 square feet — in 1993. The three split the $2,100 rent (which had gone up to $3,500 by 2015). At the time, heroin dealers were as common in the neighborhood as juice joints are today. Vagrants slept on the cracked sidewalks and graffiti covered the exteriors of the former tenements.
It was pure grit, and the Queens-bred de Matteo loved it.
“I was holding parties there. It was wild,” she said. She put her funky stamp on the space with Gothic tables and chairs from her dad, Albert, who owned a furniture company. She added black lights “so at night it was [like] a discotheque — the whole apartment glowed. It was a little gypsy caravan,” she said.
The apartment, above Sam’s Deli and the restaurant Pommes Frites, saw her through life changes: opening a vintage clothing store, Filth Mart; landing her first big role, on “The Sopranos,” in 1999; winning an Emmy in 2004. As her star grew, de Matteo stayed put — even once she became engaged to musician Shooter Jennings, son of country music legend Waylon Jennings, and gave birth to their two children. (Jennings and de Matteo later split.)
“I brought both of my children home from the hospital to that apartment,” she recalled.
The pad also became a sanctuary at the end of 2014, a year after her father died. De Matteo’s mom downsized from the Whitestone home where the actress had grown up and moved the family’s most treasured possessions into the loft. The pad housed “everything meaningful and valuable” in her life, de Matteo said. She lost it all in the blaze.
“Every single photograph is gone, every videotape of my dad . . . my children’s foot- prints,” the actress sadly recounted. Yet despite all that, de Matteo is at peace. “I can live without all that stuff,” she said. “I am just happy to be alive.”
She and some 35 others who lost their homes in the blast have filed a $17 million suit against the city, Con Ed and companies including contractor Neighborhood Construction Corp., alleging failure to properly test gas lines or to “observe . . . significant ‘red flags.’ ”
Five people — building owners and contractors — were arrested in 2016 on charges including manslaughter, assault and criminally negligent homicide, and charged with rigging the gas-delivery system that triggered the blast.
“I do want to be repaid, mainly because of my heartache, stress and [not] being able to cover the cost of living in NYC,” de Matteo said. “People think, ‘She’s on a TV show, she’ll be fine.’ I’m not one of these actors who’s rolling in money.”
The tragedy has left the family in what de Matteo describes as a constant state of fear. Watching their home burn on TV, they caught a glimpse of Alabama’s bedroom.
“You could see the bed and stuffed animals,” de Matteo said. “[The kids] didn’t deal with it well.”
Now, she said, “every five minutes, it’s, ‘Do I smell something burning?’ If fire trucks are [driving by], we run in the other direction.”
She and the kids, now ages 9 and 5, along with her fiancé, musician Michael Devin, are temporarily renting a downtown apartment and hope to eventually “live in any neighborhood I can afford.”
Prominently displayed atop the diningroom table in the new place is a brick from the old one — a potent reminder of all that the family lost.
“I loved it there more than anything,” de Matteo said. “I just want to be home.”