Nov. 15--A man jumped from a third-story window during an extra-alarm fire Saturday morning on the West Side.
He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where his condition had stabilized, said Chicago Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford. Three other people suffering from smoke inhalation were taken to area hospitals. Many occupants were rescued by firefighters.
The blaze erupted about 7:25 a.m. in a third-story room of the JR Plaza II Hotel and spread to the hallway. "It burned the hallway up pretty good," Langford said.
The hotel is a single-room occupancy at Jackson Boulevard and Sacramento Avenue.
Many of the 25 people displaced were rescued. None were children.
"They did rescues out the window," said Chicago Department Cmdr. Frank Velez. "We had ladders down and they did exterior window rescues."
A blaring fire alarm could be heard as a woman who answered the phone there said, "Everyone is OK."
At 7:55 a.m. the alarm was canceled. As of 8:20 a.m., crews were still on the scene "overhauling," Langford said. "There was no real structural damage to the building," he said.
In the hours after the fire, officials arranged for a CTA bus to park outside the hotel, and the evacuated guests were instructed to wait in the bus to stay warm. Firefighters dug out debris from the third floor and tossed it out the windows, where it fell into a heap of wooden frames and broken glass.
Hotel guests David Lundy and Marysol Santana, both from the West Side, had been staying at the hotel for two weeks when they were startled by the alarm.
Lundy said he was grateful for being awake at the time, as he opened their hotel room door and saw smoke, and instantly realized he and his wife needed to evacuate.
"We didn't hear nobody yelling 'fire,' we didn't hear any screaming, we didn't hear anything," Santana said. "So I thought it was a false alarm.
"I put on my pajama pants, grabbed my coat, grabbed my purse and I almost ran out barefoot," she added. "I was startled, I didn't know which way to go."
The couple's room was near the stairwell, so they were able to head down to the first floor and exit the building. Lundy said upon leaving the building, he saw "people hanging out the window, trying to get to safety."
Lundy and Santana said they have no family or friends to stay with, and think most of their belongings, including a laptop and important documents, were destroyed by water damage. Though grateful to be alive, they said they're worried about what's next.
"It's a messed-up situation. We don't know what's going on, it's wintertime in Chicago, it's kind of rough," Lundy said.
The cause of the fire is being investigated.
