City Life, Interrupted

On the night my apartment building caught on fire, I passed Stumpee on the steps. He was running up to the third floor, yelling "Fire!" Sweat dripped from his temples. A thick wad of bills fanned out from his shirt pocket. The fire alarm roared, sirens screamed, and I thought, Who is this guy?

I knew Stumpee wasn't a fellow tenant. I hadn't seen anyone like him—a black guy in a do-rag who wore his money in plain view instead of in the form of a Hummer or an iPod—on the elevator or in the well-equipped gym. I hadn't seen anyone like him on the rooftop deck, which had the kind of skyline view people forgive you for bragging about only if you invite them to see it.

Stumpee wasn't from our apartment building. He was from the neighborhood.

Our building is a renovated brick factory with huge windows and polished concrete floors. Restored relics from its industrial past dress up the wide, skylight-lit hallways where my two-year-old likes to ride her tricycle. "Yah we're spoiled," sneers the large banner on the building's side. "So what!"

The neighborhood has drug addicts and prostitutes and a corner store where young men buy beer and young moms buy milk. It's got a housing project and warehouses, gang graffiti and barbed-wire fencing. A billboard urges locals to check their children's play areas for guns.

Even though I wouldn't take my daughter out in the neighborhood after dark, I still moved her here because I am an optimist. The neighborhood is in a revival, I tell people. Within walking distance—if we did, in fact, feel safe enough to walk—trendy bars and restaurants beckon, and Cleveland's historic West Side Market looms. People come from all over northeast Ohio to visit one shop with hundreds of cool, decorative Buddhas and another with fanciful blown glass.

I like the character of the neighborhood even though some of its characters scare me. Dogsledder gets around in a grocery cart pulled by a half-dozen mutts. War Hero pins ribbons of newspapers on his ratty clothes. Crack Lady smokes in the park where unsupervised children beg me to watch them go across the monkey bars.

There are two different social groups crammed into a single neighborhood. One relatively well-off, mostly kidless, and comfortable. The other poor, carless, and kept out of buildings like mine by black gates and security systems.

To get in, they'd have to break in.

We worried about this even as we congratulated ourselves for making the temporary move to the city while our new house was being built in a far-flung suburb closer to my new job. Even as we looked forward to being spoiled by the view, the T-1 line and the well-landscaped courtyard with grills and patio furniture, we talked about what to do if someone followed us in the gate. Stay in the car, my husband warned. Dial 911 if you have to.

But fear didn't overwhelm us. We have friends in the neighborhood. We happily anticipated the play groups and parties, the free ballet and Shakespeare in the local park.

Then, sometime in the middle of a hot August night, someone from our side of the black gate threw a lit cigarette into a garbage can on the roof deck.

Stumpee saw the fire just after closing his sub shop across the street. By then hell had become our upstairs neighbor.

But the roof had no fire alarm, so no one inside the building knew it was burning. First Stumpee tried dialing tenants on the call box. When no one answered, he broke a window with a garbage can. As he climbed into a first-floor apartment, he worried someone might think he was robbing the place. But no one was home.

So he ran into the hallway and pulled the fire alarm. Then he started pounding on doors, yelling "Fire!"

When we passed each other on the steps, I thought maybe he was robbing the...