Howard Szalavetz’s phone buzzed around 3:15 a.m. on August 1, startling him awake. It was news no landlord wants: a retail building he owned was on fire. Nöam, the kosher restaurant that anchors it, was burning.
He threw on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and hopped into his daughter’s Ford Bronco. The drive was only five minutes, but each one felt like an eternity. Police and fire crews had cordoned off several blocks around Montreal’s Décarie Boulevard, forcing him to abandon the car and run the rest of the way on foot. Eventually, they let him through.
“It was insane,” he recalled in an interview the next day. “There were 80 firemen.” The building he’s owned since 1987—home to a car wash, an auto repair garage, and Nöam—was engulfed. The restaurant’s section, a wood-frame extension, “went up pretty quickly.”
