On Fire Island, Blaze Destroys Hub of the Gay Social Scene

[w8liftinglady]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/nyregion/blaze-destroys-pavilion-gay-dance-hall-on-fire-island.html

The Pavilion dance club, the locus of the social scene in gay-centric Fire Island Pines, was destroyed Monday night in a spectacular fire that illuminated the eastern horizon opposite Long Island.

On Tuesday morning, the fire was still exhaling ghostly trails of gray smoke into the dank sky above the Great South Bay. On the muddy ground in front of the charred skeleton of the Pavilion, a soot-stained male mannequin dressed in a black swimsuit was the only recognizable survivor of the mayhem: the building — sealed, closed and hurricane-proofed for the off-season — was unoccupied. Its contents were incinerated.

Jon Wilner, a Pines resident whose real estate office was in the Pavilion building, said that besides patronizing its parties, he had twice brokered its sale: “I watched this building when it was being built, and last night I watched it burn down,” he said. “It’s a horror. For anyone who lives or rents here, they feel like it was their building, too. It represents their lifestyle, and the Pavilion was the place where they could celebrate it.”

Forty-three Long Island fire companies responded to the blaze, which began around 8 p.m., with 400 firefighters working in shifts through the night to try to contain the damage to a tinderbox of a summer community that, like much of Fire Island, is defined by a series of wooden structures connected by boardwalks that snake through groves of pines and bamboo hedges.

[DURHAM D]

1. How sad...

In the mid-70s I was at the Pavilion with my partner and six other couples. I asked my partner if she smelled something bad - she did. It was nasty and we thought it smelled like dirty socks. We kept moving but it seemed to follow us. The dance floor was packed and we kept looking around for the source but everyone was clean, buffed and beautiful.

Hours later as we walked home with our house mates (all men) we asked if they smelled the strange odor. They all burst out laughing. For the remainder of the week they made fun of us silly naive girls from Okie Flats because we didn't know Poppers when we smelled it.

On Edit: For perspective - All but one of the twelve men we shared a house with that summer is gone. And yes - from AIDS.

[xchrom]

2. oh. no. very sad. nt