Fire At NYU Medical Center Sends Smoke Across Manhattan, Injures 1

MURRAY HILL, NY — A two-alarm fire erupted from the fifth-floor roof of an NYU Medical Center building on the east side of Manhattan on Wednesday afternoon, sending thick, black smoke pouring into the sky over New York City. For real-time alerts on the NYU fire and more local news, subscribe to your neighborhood Patch newsletter.

Firefighters rushed to 560 1st Ave., between 31st and 32nd streets in the Murray Hill neighborhood, just after noon, an FDNY spokesman told Patch. It burned out of control for about an hour Wednesday afternoon before the FDNY declared it under control around 1 p.m. Temporary street closures were lifted, but some residual traffic delays remained.

The fire burned through an under-construction section of the sprawling medical center, NYU Langone Medical said on its Twitter account. The tweets identified the site as the future home of Kimmel Pavilion, which will be a "state-of-the-art, 830,000-square-foot" medical facility, according to the NYU website. The new wing was scheduled to open in 2018.

No patients were injured during the blaze, NYU said, and just one minor injury had been reported as of 12:45 p.m., fire officials said.

Dramatic videos uploaded to Twitter showed flames pouring from the building's roof:

A woman named Jennifer, who did not give her last name and said she was in the operating room when the fire broke out, told Patch, "We stopped everything that we could" when the fire broke out, but the situation was resolved quickly.

"Everything was safe, everything was good," Jennifer told Patch. "It kind of was overwhelming. I think I deserve a bottle of wine right about now."

Alexander C. Kaufman, a reporter with the Huffington Post, said he was at a hospital next door in the complex with his girlfriend when the fire broke out. On Twitter, he painted a picture of chaos, then calm, inside NYU Langone.

Other witnesses, many stuck in office buildings across NYC in the middle of an otherwise uneventful workday, flooded Twitter with photos of the fire.

Lead photo courtesy of the FDNY

Cam Luttrell and Simone Wilson contributed to this report.