SMOKE ON THE WATER: Tourists and a Shark boat retreat from Pier 17 fire. (Mark Doyle)
SMOKE ON THE WATER: Tourists and a Shark boat retreat from Pier 17 fire. (Jennifer Weisbord, Mark Doyle)
This wedding party was smokin’!
A happy couple snapping pics of their nuptials near the Brooklyn Bridge yesterday gained a fire-hot addition to their wedding album — a huge column of billowing fumes from the South Street Seaport.
Newlyweds Melissa Fortunato, 24, and Rocco Deserto, 25, both of Brooklyn, were en route to their reception when they stopped by Brooklyn Bridge Park to take some family shots at about 4 p.m.
They didn’t count on a three-alarm fire that broke out across the East River at the South Street Seaport.
The blaze, which appeared to start beneath a pier’s oil-soaked wood, sent scores of patrons at the Lower Manhattan shopping area fleeing as smoke billowed.
A bartender at the nearby Beekman Beer Garden said the watering hole was soon engulfed in smoke.
“Fire! Fire! Get the hell out of here!” yelled Laura Matte and others.
“We needed to get everyone out of the restaurant because the source of the smoke seemed close,” said Matte, 23.
Customers enjoying beers toward the end of the pier joined crowds of other visitors fleeing the smoky scene.
“I just heard screaming and then the smoke just engulfed the entire sky,” said John Tran, 27, a Manhattan engineer. “People were running everywhere screaming, ‘Fire! Fire!’ ”
About 150 firefighters responded to the three-alarm blaze, which burned about a 100-foot stretch of Pier 17.
It took two hours to bring under control, FDNY officials said. Firefighters cut holes in the pier and sent in fireboats to get at the flames.
“The fire was pretty bad,” a security guard said. “Everything looks brittle and black.”
He predicted that most of the closed businesses would reopen sometime today, but officials said a few establishments will be closed for several days to test the pier’s structrural stability.
The cause of the blaze remains unknown, but “everyone is saying that it was a Coke machine that caught on fire,” Matte said.