THINK 3 VIDEO NEWS: A neighborhood gutted

By the time I got back to Albany from work last night a torrential rainstorm had made the State Street hill below the Capitol look like a waterfall. By the time I got home to Dana Avenue I had no thought of going back out, and with the AC running and the TV on I never heard any sirens that night. But just a stone's throw away part of the 400 block of Madison Avenue, just east of the busy Lark Street intersection, was burning. To give regular readers a sense of location, the house with all the anti-Trump posters in its windows that I showcased a while back is a few doors further up the street and apparently was undamaged by the fire.

I only found out about the fire the old-fashioned way, by reading about it in this morning's paper. On my way to work I took a very slight detour to inspect the damage.

Approximately twelve hours later I was back in Albany, and this was the same block after four 19th century row houses had been torn down.

For now, investigators don't consider the fire suspicious, but still have no real idea how it started. About a dozen people were displaced by the blaze, and the Center Square neighborhood will be scarred for some time, perhaps for years to come.