Article content Vanessa D’Amora was awoken by screams in the wee hours of Friday morning. She owns the Bar à beurre pastry shop and café in Old Montreal, a few doors away from the Notre-Dame St. building that burned down, gutting a restaurant and hostel and killing a mother and her seven-year-old daughter from France.
D’Amora lives above her shop. “We just thought it was someone partying outside,” she said of the noise. “Then we saw the flames.
We grabbed our stuff and ran outside.” She barely slept for the next three days. On Friday, D’Amora stood in the street and let firefighters use her washrooms.
They continued hosing down the building until 6 a.m. Sunday, she said, then started up again that afternoon.
But D’Amora hasn’t had time to dwell on the action next door. Like other shop owners on the street, she has a business to run. And with her block of Notre-Dame St.
closed to traffic, with workers parsing through the ashes and police treating the area as a crime scene, that has been easier said than done. The power was out for the first 36 hours following the blaze. “We lost at least two weeks’ worth of stock,” D’Amora said Monday, listing “croissants, milk, meat, cheese, all that stuff.
” Police are stationed at each corner around her shop, and barricades block vehicles from entering. “Business is way down,” she said, “like 80 per cent down.” Police have told her the street will be closed “for a solid week,” at least.
The Quebe.
