The Astor Fire, Part 1: The Gift of Life

Astor was always bustling with customers who liked the store for its bargain basement prices on household merchandise and clothing.  The department store, also seven stories high, typically papered its windows with large colorful sale signs advertising the latest slashed prices.

I remember Uncle Enrique and Aunt Meche’s home very well, as our family visited them often when we lived in Mexico City and even after we returned to live in the United States. I had also stayed with them for several weeks during Christmas break in 1973.

Enrique’s linen embroidery business, Sábanas y Manteles Huesca, was on the fifth floor in the same building, making his commute an enviable one in the crowded metropolis.

In 1978, the office building housed only two families on the uppermost floor: the Huescas and the Estradas.  Eduardo Huesca, about to be married soon, still lived at home with his parents, his three brothers already having left to start families of their own.

Enrique and Meche Huesca’s apartment had two rooftop terraces.  The central terrace looked down into a square interior courtyard, called the “cube,” and outer terrace overlooked Venustiano Carranza Street and the busy financial district.

To reach the outer terrace, you had to exit through either the living room or one of the bedrooms.  The building was by no means the tallest in the area, but it offered a spectacular view of the financial district. Being so high up also provided a feeling of safety and serenity.  It lifted you from the noise and chaos of people and traffic, allowing you to take it all in on your own terms and affording an enviable anonymity that was hard to find in a city of some 8 million people.  It was like being on top of the world.

On Friday evening, May 12, 1978, Enrique Huesca and his two eldest sons, Enrique Jr. and Eduardo, arrived home from delivering merchandise to the National Teachers’ Union, some five miles away. Although Enrique, Jr. wanted to get home to his wife and young daughters, he stopped upstairs for a short visit.  Meche set the dining room table with coffee and platters of pan dulce, or Mexican sweet bread, for a late-night snack, and the family sat down to plan the weekend’s activities.

When the family finished eating, my mother called my father, Gilbert Huesca, at their home in California.  She excitedly told him that Enrique, Meche, and the family were taking her for the weekend to Valle de Bravo, a picturesque lake resort situated in a valley about a two-hour drive southwest of the capital. Everyone took turns on the phone, including my uncle.  “Hermano – brother,” he said, “we miss you here, but you can rest assured we’re taking good care of our sister Joan.”

It was almost 11 p.m.  Enrique Jr. kissed everyone goodbye for the night,  promising to return with his family at seven the next morning to pick them up for the drive to the country. (1)  As he left, Meche and my mother cleaned up the kitchen while Enrique Sr. and Eduardo headed off to bed.

My mother and Meche loved to sit up late and talk way into the night, and tonight was no different. Undeterred by the early wake-up time only seven hours away, they moved their coffee and cigarettes to the living room, turned on the TV, and curled up on the couch to continue their earlier conversation.  

My parents had much in common with Enrique and Meche.  Both couples had married in the month of August, exactly 10 years apart. The brothers were 12 years older than their respective wives.  Each couple were the parents of four children. Meche and Enrique had four sons, while my parents had four daughters. Both couples enjoyed successful businesses. Enrique and my father thought and acted alike. They were deliberate and precise in word and action. They shared the same tastes and mannerisms and often completed each other’s sentences.  Even their wives frequently were surprised to find themselves interacting with them similarly.

Sometime around 12:30 a.m., deep into one of those conversations that gives words wings in the stillness of the night, they seemed so oblivious to anything else that it was a surprise when one of them smelled smoke. Thinking they had forgotten to extinguish a cigarette in the kitchen, where they had been a short time earlier, Meche got up to investigate.

Reaching the kitchen, she noticed nothing unusual except the odor, which was becoming stronger. She followed the smell to the center terrace and saw black smoke rising through the cube.

The La Galia building was burning.

“She started yelling, ‘Fire! Fire!’, ” Eduardo would later recall.  “Her cries woke us up – the neighbors, my father, and me.” (2)

Still groggy, Eduardo grabbed the fire extinguisher and rushed downstairs to try to find the source of the fire.  There was so much smoke when he reached the third or fourth floor that he could hardly see, much less breathe.  Perhaps in shock – he did not know why –  he dropped the fire extinguisher on the ground and raced swiftly back to the seventh floor to warn his family of his findings.  He did not know how to break the news to them that there was no way out.

The Huescas in more serene days:  left to right:  Brothers Enrique and  Gilbert Huesca, Dr. Jose Felipe Franco (a longtime family friend), Joan (Schiavon) Huesca, Mercedes (Formento) Huesca, and Mrs. Jose Franco.  July 7, 1975, La Fonda del Recuerdo Restaurant, Mexico City.

(1)  Huesca, Enrique.  Telephone interview.  April 6, 2013.
(2)  Huesca, Eduardo.  Telephone interview.  April 7, 2013.