Harlem House Where Billie Holiday Lived Is Damaged in Fire

A four-alarm fire on Wednesday evening severely damaged a building in Harlem where the jazz legend Billie Holiday once lived.

The Fire Department said it received the call at about 9 p.m. and extinguished the fire, which spread through all five floors of the building, shortly before 1 a.m. on Thursday morning. No civilians were injured, though four firefighters sustained minor injuries. The cause of the fire is under investigation.

“Due to the structural stability of this building, as it was vacant for many years and the amount of fire, we had to pull our members out of the building and go to an exterior fire attack,” Kevin Woods, the Fire Department’s chief of operations, said in a news conference.

The building is owned by the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which is responsible for maintaining the quality and affordability of housing, among other duties.

“Even before the fire, HPD had been actively working with our partners to plan the complete rehabilitation of this building through our preservation programs, relocating tenants to safer housing as part of that process,” Natasha Kersey, a spokeswoman for the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, said in an emailed statement to The Times.

Valerie Jo Bradley, the co-founder and president of the nonprofit group Save Harlem Now, said in an email it was “a shame to see another piece of Harlem’s incredible artistic history lost.”

In the early 1930s, a teenage Billie Holiday, born Eleanora Fagan, was said to have moved to the building at 108 West 139th Street with her mother. While living in that apartment, Holiday began to develop her exceptional talent.

“We moved into an apartment on 139th Street, and not long after, for the first time since I could remember, Mom was too sick to make Mass on Sunday,” Holiday wrote in her 1956 autobiography, “Lady Sings the Blues.” “For her, that was really sick.”

To earn a living, Holiday auditioned as a dancer at a speakeasy on West 133rd Street. After failing to impress the club’s manager, she tried her hand at singing. “If someone had dropped a pin, it would have sounded like a bomb,” she wrote. “When I finished, everybody in the joint was crying in their beer, and I picked thirty-eight bucks up off the floor.”

Holiday soon frequented other jazz clubs along West 133rd Street, then known as “Swing Street.” In 1933, a chance encounter with John Hammond, a record producer who would later help jump-start the careers of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, led to a recording session with the jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman.

That session led to Holiday’s first professionally recorded song, “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law,” that November. “Benny came up to get me and took me to the studio downtown,” she wrote of the experience. “When we got there and I saw this big old microphone, it scared me half to death. I’d never sung in one and I was afraid of it.”

She went on to record hit songs including “Strange Fruit” and “I’ll Be Seeing You.”

Before Holiday’s death in 1959 at age 44, she had been living in a 6,300-square-foot brownstone with seven bedrooms on the Upper West Side, a far cry from the small apartment she shared with her mother in Harlem.

In 2008, the stretch of West 139th Street where the house stands was co-named Billie Holiday Place.