A four-alarm fire gutted a string of Lower Greenville restaurants this morning.
By this afternoon, business owners had already begun planning their rise from the ashes.
The fire broke out about 5:45 a.m. in the 2800 block of Greenville Avenue. Within an hour, it burned through four restaurants in the 1930s-era building, including mainstays Terilli's Restaurant and Bar and the Greenville Bar and Grill.
Dallas Fire-Rescue spokesman Jason Evans said the fire probably started in one of the two businesses, which were engulfed by the time firefighters arrived.
"The fire got up into the walls and then it got up into that common attic and just shot all the way through the strip," he said.
That forced firefighters to take a defensive stance.
"When that roof came down, we were all pretty thankful we did that," Evans said.
Firefighters brought the blaze under control about 8:10 a.m.
No one was thought to be in the buildings at the time, and the only injury reported was a firefighter who suffered heat exhaustion and smoke inhalation. He was taken to Baylor University Medical Center with injuries that were not life-threatening, Evans said.
Gregg Merkow, who owns the Hurricane Grill and Greenville Bar and Grill, said he has no fire insurance.
"This is the worst possible scenario," Merkow told WFAA-TV (Channel 8).
The fire comes just two weeks before one of the area's biggest moneymakers: St. Patrick's Day.
Even so, Merkow said he plans to rebuild.
"We'll be back, maybe better than ever," he said.
Also burned in the fire was Mick's Bar.
Steve Betzelberger, the former owner of Stan's Blue Note, said the March 13 St. Patrick's Day Block Party will go on - "a little charred, but the spirit's still there."
He said owners of the four burned businesses are talking about putting up a large tent behind the Blue Goose.
"We'll figure something," Betzelberger said. "We'll make it work. We're not going to fold up our tents and leave."
Betzelberger, who is organizing the event for the Lower Greenville Avenue Merchants Association, knows what it's like to start over from scratch.
"It happened to me before at Stan's," he said of an early morning fire that gutted his bar and the adjacent Zanzibar in 1991. "That's when we expanded and took over the place next door."
Betzelberger said he expects the other restaurants there will get a surge of business now and through the party from former patrons curious to see the gutted strip.
Lower Greenville residents, some of them crying, watched in disbelief as more than 70 firefighters battled the blaze.
"A whole bit of history just went up in smoke," said Di McPherson, who lives in one of the homes closest to the blaze.
Because of the roof collapse, fire investigators have yet to determine the cause or origin of the fire, Evans said.
"There is so much debris that we're going to have to wait until we can get heavy equipment in there to get some stuff out so that investigators can get in there and start looking around," Evans said.
No damage estimates were available, but Evans said the building was expected to be a total loss and probably would have to be leveled. He said he did not know if the building had a sprinkler system.
This isn't the first fire to wipe out a piece of Lower Greenville history, said Patricia Carr, president of the Lower Greenville Neighborhood Association.
"This is as bad as the Arcadia going down," Carr said.
In June 2006, a restaurant kitchen fire at the Nuevo Leon restaurant swept through the historic Arcadia theater and other nearby businesses on Lower Greenville. At the time, the Arcadia was being renovated into a club.
The six-alarm blaze gutted the Arcadia, the Syn Bar and the restaurant. The Arcadia and an attached retail strip were later razed.
Carr said today's fire won't stand in the way of one of Lower Greenville's signature events.
"St. Patrick's Day is going to go ahead," she said.
The Greenville Bar and Grill bills itself as Dallas oldest, taking numerous names and incarnations since first opening in 1933. The latest change came in 2007, when the GBG name won out over Merkow's Seafood and Steaks and the owner, who also owns the Hurricane Grill, reopened the newly remodeled bar, according to its Web site.
Terilli's, a Lower Greenville mainstay for more than 20 years, is across Goodwin Avenue from the Blue Goose restaurant and across Greenville from The Dubliner bar.
"It's the end of an era," Lower Greenville resident Andrea Rigsbee said.
