The inferno, the deadliest in New York in more than 25 years, roared through the brown five-story building at 2363 Prospect Avenue as neighbors cooked dinner and shopkeepers around the corner closed up at the end of the day. Some said they smelled the smoke before they knew anything was wrong, and others said they were tormented by the sight of a firefighter carrying the lifeless body of a child.

“I couldn’t sleep. I can’t sleep,” said Bernadette Miles from her stoop on Friday. She had feared the young victims would be children she saw every day playing on the street or wheeling by in strollers. “Those images are burned in my head.”

And when the fire was out, it left a soot-black scar on the heart of a certain type of New York neighborhood, one rarely in the news. This stretch of Prospect Avenue, where there is almost no grass and the buildings vary almost solely by shade of brick, sits between the zoo and the Bronx campus of Fordham University. It is a place known neither for luxuries nor high crime, although a measure of crime and violence persists, and residents complain about landlords who are stingy with heat.

Yet it has manageable rents in a borough, and city, that has become increasingly difficult to afford. The building itself was well kept, records shows, if hardly fancy. For long-term residents, the incentive to stay in Belmont has been a sense of community. They describe finding their own small town within a buzzing metropolis, where neighbors keep an eye on one another’s children or, in a moment of devastation like this one, try to figure out some way to help.

“If you need a dollar, a plate of food,” Maria Pacheco said of her neighbors, “that’s how we are around here: We take care of each other.”