Fire devastated this NYC Chinatown bookshop — community has rushed to its aid
Yu & Me Books was a fairly new business when a fire caused substantial damage to the shop. Now, owner Lucy Yu is working to repair not just the physical bookstore but the community around it as well.
On July 4, Lucy Yu was working at her bookstore, Yu & Me Books, in Manhattan's Chinatown, when she began to smell smoke. She thought it must be from fireworks.
"My neighbor came running through the smoke into the store," Yu recalled one recent afternoon, standing in her darkened storefront. "She was like, 'You have to get out of the building, there's a fire.' " One of the building's tenants, ; Manhattan's Chinatown has had a string of deadly or devastating fires in recent months, and multiple people were displaced after a fire .
