New York City Fire Department personnel work to extinguish the East Village fire on Thursday. Photograph by Cem Ozdel/Anadolu Agency/Getty

In the parochial way of most New Yorkers, I have a few well-trod blocks that I consider my own. I admire them daily, a little in love. Every morning, I walk down East Seventh Street from my apartment, between First and A, to the subway at Astor Place. I love that stretch of Seventh Street intimately and irrationally, in part because of the relative ancientness of its buildings and in part because of the people who live and work in them. It’s an independent little stretch of Manhattan, strongly influenced by shopkeepers, Ukrainians, artists, students, and professors. It’s unmolested by banks and Duane Reades. On the ground level, it’s mostly bars, cafés, cultural institutions, odd little boutiques, and restaurants. In the morning, I see them setting up. At night, on my walk home, I see them in full swing, and sometimes I stop in somewhere, say hello, have some dinner.

The infrastructure in the East Village is both beautiful and scary. The walkup apartment building in which I live is more than a hundred years old, and is lovingly maintained by a ragtag team of several people. In the past six months, it’s had a gas leak, a complete replacement of its gas lines, and an electrical fire. We seem to be doing fine now, but how do you guarantee anything in an old building made of wood, tile, and plaster, with gas running through it? When I left my apartment yesterday morning, it was full of workers who were upgrading various electrical situations in an effort to make them safer. One of these guys regularly wears a T-shirt that says “SHIT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PARTY NAKED,” but he knows more about electrical work than I do.

During our gas-leak saga, I learned that the East Harlem gas explosion a year ago had led to changes in Con Ed and city procedures. There are elaborate new regulations about the placement of elaborate new meters—you should see my living room. Con Ed and the Buildings Department had a backlog of buildings to inspect, and it was a few months before we could use our stoves again. We all hope that these improvements, regulations, and inspections will make us safer. But we’re infrastructure-naïve residents of an old, rent-stabilized building, so our hope is mixed with anxiety, and a feeling that our days are numbered, or that the only safe thing to do is move. But we don’t want to move: we love it here.

Yesterday, I left the workers in my apartment and passed the stores along Seventh Street, as always, admiring this and that. On my way, I passed the building on the corner of Second and Seventh—the former Ramen & Robatayaki—and its little gated-off zone of garbage cans; Village Chinese Therapy Center, a massage parlor with a kindly proprietor, a yin-yang sign, and purple neon feet in the window; and King’s Copies, the biggest of several copy shops on the block, with the most impressive array of signs. My friend Holly, a writer and illustrator, had spent many hours there, photocopying her illustrations and marvelling at its eccentricities. That whole building is gone now. It’s a pile of debris and empty airspace.

After King’s Copies, I passed Standings, a sports bar I’d never ventured into until February, when I realized it was wonderful; Jimmy’s No. 43, the wonderfully dungeonlike rathskeller beneath it; and Burp Castle, whose Belgian beers and murals of cavorting monks I am very fond of. A gap of a foot or two separated their building from the building that collapsed; that gap, apparently, saved it. They’re still standing, but next door is a nightmare, a tragedy.

I saw the news about the explosion that afternoon, while I was at my desk at the office. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on an audio tour of East Village bars, which focusses on the bars of Seventh Street, between Second and Third Avenues. When I saw the news, I was editing its script and its audio, making my way down Seventh Street in my imagination. In the editing process, I had just left Porsena Extra Bar and entered Burp Castle. Then I looked at Twitter and saw that the building next door to Burp Castle was on fire.

Around 3:15, there was what seems to have been a gas explosion under Sushi Park, next to Ramen & Robatayaki, and the resulting fire spread quickly to the whole strip of buildings—those and the one containing Pommes Frites and Sam’s Deli, on Second Avenue. When I turned to face the window at work, looking north from One World Trade, the whole horizon was smoke, mingling with fog and clouds, and it was coming from my neighborhood. Of the many disorientations about working at One World Trade, the layering of place and memory, here was another—to be on a high floor of it, watching my own neighborhood fill the city with smoke. When I took the subway home, the doors opened and the platform smelled like smoke. Even underground, the air was hazy, as was Astor Place. Everyone seemed a little stunned.

Living in New York intensifies the common life experience of having daily pleasures and terrible accidents coexist in close proximity. Terrible things can happen right near you, and chance determines whether your life is changed. Most of the time, incredibly, we remain safe. As a friend put it, “We live in a city of eight million; it's amazing about one million don't die every day.” When our office was in midtown and the Bank of America tower was being built, next door, things were constantly falling off of it—a bathtub-sized steel bucket, a giant sheet of glass—and sailing to the ground. Somehow, these enormous objects didn’t kill anybody. But less dramatic accidents happen all the time, in the forms of cars, tree limbs, bad weather, city infrastructure, right where we live and work, and most of us wander through them unscathed, like Mr. Magoo.

As I write this, at my apartment, the sound of helicopters overhead is constant, and two people who were in the sushi restaurant, Nicholas Figueroa and Moises Locon, are known to be missing. Some two dozen were injured, four critically. And whole buildings are gone. On Twitter, people were lamenting the loss of their beloved Pommes Frites, the late-night standby that made its corner of the world smell like French fries. Other people on Twitter berated the frites lamenters, and still others pleaded for understanding between the two camps. We could mourn all of these losses, they said.

I agree. It’s important not to be glib. It’s important to focus on the missing, the injured, the brave people who escaped and helped others escape, and the people who lost their homes and businesses. The softer losses, the cultural losses, the neighborhood losses, are not as important. But they’re losses, too. They’re things we love—parts of our lives that we take for granted and now understand to be, or have been, vulnerable. They feel like trivial things, but they represent fundamental things: what we love and care about, their permanence and impermanence.