Ari Spitzer woke up in his fourth-floor apartment in Manhattan around 2 a.m. on Wednesday to sirens blaring and the smell of heavy smoke.

When he opened his front door, the hallway was so full of smoke he couldn’t leave. “I couldn’t even see,” he said.

He rushed to the fire escape, where the smoke was so thick he couldn’t see far enough to make his way to the ground. From there, fire crews helped him get down.

Firefighters were still on the scene as of 11 a.m., working to extinguish a six-alarm fire in a building in the East Village that began early Wednesday.