Baltimore’s downtown was thrown into pandemonium yesterday by a five-alarm fire that  apparently started in the building that houses an adult book and video store and spread to at least three other buildings in “The Block,” Baltimore’s seedy/storied adult entertainment district.

As huge clouds of black smoke billowed, a wide swath of downtown city streets were blocked off, Interstate 83 was shut down and office workers poured out of adjacent buildings into the frigid air.

Aided by the wind, the fire blazed brightly, shooting above rooftops and exploding into a fireball at one point, requiring firefighters — “for their own safety,” officials said — to come down from roofs and be evacuated from the insides of buildings, where they had been fighting the fire.

“There are no reported injuries or fatalities” Baltimore City Fire Department chief James S. Clack told reporters at about 5 pm, even as stubborn patches of fire continued to blaze away behind him.

“Firefighters did a great job controlling the fire that had a head start on them . . . they did a great job stopping it from spreading,” Clack said, noting that there was another fire taking place in the city at the same time.

Where strippers and city officials co-exist

Here in Baltimore, the city’s side-by-side subcultures do an amazing job of ignoring each others’ existence, but every once in a while something like yesterday’s fire comes along to toss the whole human salad together.

For example, early reports were that — irony of ironies — Baltimore City Fire Department administrative offices on Fayette Street were being evacuated for a fire there.

Eventually, it became clear that the blaze had started in an adult video and book store, Gayety Show World, at 404 East Baltimore Street. (It then spread to three other buildings on East Baltimore Street, including Crazy John’s sub shop.)

But fire in Gayety Show World actually did threaten Fire Department headquarters because it is, essentially, in the same block as the building housing BCFD top brass, the MECU building. Just a narrow alley separates the two structures.

For that matter, the Hustler Club, Club Pussycat, etc. are essentially right next to all sorts of city government buildings: City Hall and the Police Department, to name just two. It’s all part of the weird geography of the city’s downtown.

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink

It didn’t take long before the thought of fire in the city’s teeny tiny smut district steamed up every genius with a Twitter Account.

“When someone told me The Block was on fire, I thought they were talking about a gonorrhea outbreak.”Ha ha. There were jokes about silicone catching on fire, vibrators sparking, Blaze Starr blazing. And, of course, har har, “def not something to laugh about, but it would be kinda funny watching a bunch of naked stripper running out of a building.”

Nauseatingly, all this was taking place while smoke-filled city streets looked like Baghdad, firefighters were risking their lives in rotten conditions and the safety of the buildings’ occupants was far from certain. (Listen to the first 90 minutes of the city fire department’s dispatch and look at the videos to get a feel for this fire’s intensity and magnitude.)

Amidst all the snickering, it came as a relief to see a Tweet by the Sun’s Julie Scharper, reporting a conversation with one of the women who worked on “The Block” who was concerned if she would still have a job when the smoke cleared tomorrow.

Surely all this business about naked strippers in the street was just sophomoric fantasizing?

Apparently not.

WBAL-TV’s investigative reporter Jayne Miller talked to the dancers and confirmed that, apparently, some of them did have to evacuate in skimpy strip attire.

“We had basically nothing on. We only had our outfits on. We had to run to the back and grab anything we could and run out buck naked. Anything we had on — we just had to go outside,” she said.
“They were pretty much naked as can be. Girls were running out with things jiggling, and they ran across the street to get dressed. Some of them were getting dressed right out front real fast,” one witness said.

Women are “girls” here, it seems, and among the features being exposed by the fire were the internecine tensions among, if not” the girls,” then their employers.

“Classy” stripclubs: ‘we’re not involved!’

With the fire temporarily shutting down Club Pussycat and some other Block establishments, the Sun’s intrepid nightlife reporter Erik Maza went to similar establishments outside of “The Block” and asked if they might be getting some extra business, as a result. Certainly not, he was told!

The Gentleman’s Gold Club serves a “classy clientele,” Cara, the general manager, told him. “Scores” declared that they too have a different class of customer. (Sun reader commenter Mike B wasn’t buying it: “They get the exact same clientele as The Block and want people to think that they get only suit and tie clienetle, there is no suit and tie clientele in Balto.”)