On July 4, Lucy Yu was working at her bookstore, Yu & Me Books, in Manhattan's Chinatown, when she began to smell smoke. She thought it must be from fireworks.
"My neighbor came running through the smoke into the store," Yu recalled one recent afternoon, standing in her darkened storefront. "She was like, 'You have to get out of the building, there's a fire.' " One of the building's tenants, Frank Yee, later died; Manhattan's Chinatown has had a string of deadly or devastating fires in recent months – four people died in a blaze at an e-bike shop, and multiple people were displaced after a fire in the building of the Fu Hao Gift Shop.
