Photo By Lloyd Mitchell / QNS
South Bushwick Reformed Church stood on Bushwick Avenue since 1853. It survived 173 years, two World Wars, and a full transformation of the neighborhood around it. It didn’t survive whoever set it on fire.
FDNY has now confirmed what a lot of people in that neighborhood already suspected: the three-alarm blaze that tore through the church on June 19 was intentionally set. That’s not speculation anymore. That’s the department’s official determination, and it changes this from a tragic accident into an open criminal investigation — which means every company that responds to a house of worship fire in this city needs to be paying attention to what happened here.
What actually went down
The call came in around 1:20pm on a Friday. Within minutes it had escalated to three alarms, pulling close to 200 firefighters and EMS personnel to Bushwick Avenue near Himrod Street. The steeple — recently restored — went up fast and collapsed live on camera, dropping straight into the roof. One firefighter took minor injuries and refused treatment. Nobody else was hurt. The church was empty at the time, which is the only reason this story doesn’t have a body count attached to it.
Crews had the fire knocked down by 3:35pm, but by then there wasn’t much left to save. This was one of only eight surviving wood-frame landmarked houses of worship left in the entire city — built before steel frame construction, before modern fire codes, before sprinkler mandates existed for buildings like it. When something like that goes up, it goes up fast, and it goes up almost completely. That’s not a knock on the crews who fought it. That’s just what 170-year-old timber construction does once it’s fully involved.
Investigators say a person of interest was seen leaving the area shortly before the fire broke out. No arrests yet. The investigation is being run jointly by FDNY fire marshals and NYPD, which is standard procedure once a fire gets classified as incendiary rather than accidental — and it tells you this isn’t being treated as a one-off.
This isn’t the only one, and that’s the part that should worry you
Here’s what doesn’t always make the news cycle the way a burning steeple does: NYPD has also been investigating a string of firebombing incidents at other houses of worship across the city this summer. A Molotov cocktail was thrown at Iglesia Bautista El Mesias in Ozone Park. Another was thrown at a Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Woodhaven. A suspect connected to those attacks — and to an incendiary device thrown at an ambulance service building in the same area — was taken into custody in July, with investigators working to determine whether that suspect ties back to a total of seven separate arson incidents across the five boroughs this summer, most of them targeting houses of worship.
Whether that suspect connects to South Bushwick specifically hasn’t been confirmed as of this writing. But the pattern is the point: multiple religious institutions across multiple boroughs have been targeted with fire this summer, and at least one arrest has already been made in a related string of attacks. If you’re running suppression or command at any house of worship this year, you are not responding to an isolated incident. You’re responding to a target category that’s actively being hit.
What this means operationally, not just emotionally
A dead pastor’s grief and a neighborhood’s loss are real, and we’re not going to pretend this is only a tactical problem. But since this is a trade publication for people who show up to these calls, here’s the part that’s actually your business:
- Wood-frame historic churches are some of the least forgiving structures you’ll ever work. No sprinklers, dense timber construction, decades of restoration work with materials and voids nobody currently on the job has blueprints for. Know which ones sit in your first-due, and pre-plan them like the special hazard they are — not like a standard commercial structure.
- A fire at a house of worship is now, statistically, more likely to be intentional than it was a year ago in this city. That should change your size-up mentality on arrival — preserve the scene where you can without compromising suppression, note anything that looks like a point of origin or an accelerant smell, and get that information to the marshals before it gets trampled by hoseline and overhaul.
- These buildings often have zero security infrastructure. No cameras, no alarm monitoring, sometimes no occupied hours during the week. If your department has any relationship with local congregations — and if you’re reading this, you probably do — this is the year to have the conversation about cameras, motion lighting, and a fire watch during any unoccupied stretch. Cheap insurance against exactly this.
- Coordinate early with PD if arson is even a possibility. The South Bushwick investigation is a joint FDNY-NYPD job specifically because a scene like this is both a fire scene and a crime scene at the same time. Getting that coordination right from the first alarm, not after the fact, is what actually gets someone caught.
Bottom line
A building that outlasted two centuries didn’t fall to age. It fell to somebody with a match, or worse, and it’s sitting in a pattern with at least six other suspected arsons this summer, several of them also aimed at houses of worship. That’s not a coincidence anyone in this line of work should be comfortable with.
If your department covers a historic house of worship — landmarked, wood-frame, or otherwise — tell us how it’s pre-planned, and whether your local congregations have any security measures in place at all. That’s exactly the kind of on-the-ground information that helps the next company that gets this call.
Sources: CBS News New York; FDNY; NYPD; Patch; Tribune News Service.
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