Last Updated on May 31, 2026 by admin
The four-alarm fire at 660 East 187th Street in Belmont, in the Bronx, killed two people on the night it broke out and gutted the upper three floors. The building has been padlocked, cordoned with yellow tape, and posted as unsafe since.
It was twenty-three days later that the cat walked out.
The Apartment That Burned
The fire started in a fourth-floor apartment shortly after 11:00 p.m. The cause is still under investigation by FDNY. Engine 48 and Ladder 56 had units on scene within four minutes. The smoke pushed up the air shaft. The fourth-floor units lost their ceilings. The fifth-floor units lost their floors.
A retired schoolteacher named Esme Catalano lived in 5C with a gray-and-white tabby named Tarragon, six years old, whom she had taken in as a kitten from a Webster Avenue bodega in 2020. Ms. Catalano was found by firefighters in her front room. She did not survive. Her sister Renata, in a phone call to the building’s super the next morning, asked the one practical question she had the energy for: “Did anyone see the cat?”
Nobody had.
Twenty-Three Days
The building stayed sealed. The Red Cross relocated displaced tenants from the lower floors. A wooden barrier went up across the front entrance. For three weeks the Belmont neighborhood walked past the smell of wet ash on Arthur Avenue and assumed, the way you have to assume in a building like that, that anything that had been alive inside was no longer.
On the twenty-third day, a building inspector named Marisol Diaz — sent in with FDNY for a final structural pass — heard a sound from the rafters above what had been 5C. She is fifty-one, has been on the inspection beat for fifteen years, and has, she says, learned that a cat-in-the-walls sound is not like any other sound. She called up. A small gray-and-white face came down a chimney chase, twelve pounds in February, six pounds and change now, eyes shut against the daylight.
What Tarragon Was Eating
The fourth-floor pantry had partially survived. So had a leaking pipe behind what had been the fifth-floor bathroom. Cats can survive on improbable things if they have water. Tarragon, the FDNY veterinarian who examined her that afternoon said, had been holding court in a roughly six-square-foot crawl space at the top of the building, eating what she could reach and drinking from the pipe. She was alive. She was thin. She was, in the vet’s words, “furious in a way that means alive.”
Renata Catalano Drove Up From Queens
Esme’s sister had been preparing to clear out the apartment that weekend. She came that night instead. Renata had her own cat, an eight-year-old black short-hair named Macaroon. She had told Esme over Easter that she could not, at sixty-three, take on a second one. She picked up Tarragon at the FDNY substation at 9:48 p.m. and signed the foster-to-adopt paperwork on the hood of her Subaru with a borrowed pen.
Tarragon weighed in at six pounds eleven ounces. The vet’s notes from her first check-in two weeks later: seven pounds eight, eating well, declines wet food, prefers the kitchen rug to the cat bed, sleeps on Renata’s chest, will not be in a room with a closed door.
What the Belmont Story Actually Is
It is not the fire. It is the building inspector with the hearing for it. It is the FDNY vet who said “furious in a way that means alive.” It is the sister who said “I can’t” at Easter and then changed her mind in twenty-three days. It is one small gray-and-white tabby who waited in a chimney chase for somebody to come back.
Renata posts updates on a private Facebook group for the building’s surviving tenants. The most recent one, posted last Saturday morning, was three words long: “She likes mornings.”
]]>