I had intended to run down South Avenue, maybe to Elmwood, and come back through Mount Hope, cross the Ford Street Bridge and head back on Exchange and then Broad.

But on the corner of MLK, across from the ESL building, I heard the screaming of the sirens.

It was chiefs’ trucks, SUVs, from the fire department. You can tell by the sound. The ambulances sound a certain way, the RPD cars sound a different way, the fire trucks and engines have their air-horn roar, and the chiefs’ trucks scream their own special get-the-hell-out-of-the-way warning. And this was that.

And sure enough, making the bend from Monroe, there they came. Car 2 and Car 99, flying like a bat out of hell, up Chestnut, left on Woodbury and right on Clinton, past the big Civil War monument that Benjamin Harrison and Frederick Douglass dedicated.

Not far behind them came Engine 1 and Truck 10 from The Alamo, the firehouse on Monroe, with an urgency that let you know this wasn’t a fender bender or a flooded basement. It stuns you in a way, the speed and agility of apparatus in a hurry, like a left tackle who can do 40 yards in 4.4, and here they came, heavy metal, hot on the heels of the chiefs.

I wanted to go where they were going. I’ve been a reporter for 40 years, but that is my excuse, not my reason. I wanted to go where they were going because I’m curious, because I’m nosy like everybody else, and I don’t wonder where passing emergency vehicles are going, I find out.

I was past the Civil War monument and Main Street and almost to the Transit Center before I found out that they were on Seibert Place, to the west of Big Momma Rose’s, on the north side of Don Samuel Torres Park, within sight of where I saw the chief deputy save some lady’s life with NARCAN at a vigil for a murdered guy a couple of years back and where the city let a bullet-riddled car sit abandoned at the curb for more than a year.

It was up by there.

And from before the Tops plaza at North Clinton and Upper Falls I could see it, the flashing lights, the blocked off street, and lined up red apparatus, trucks and engines from across the city, on Clinton and Siebert, all focused on a story and a half now extinguished and damp in the cold winter air.

There were hoses of different colors, attached to hydrants and pumpers, running a block in one direction and two blocks in another, a confusing maze to me, but a choreographed efficiency discernible and obvious to the firefighters. I stepped over the hoses and walked around the spray from a hydrant and finally stood across the street from the charred house.

I had been too slow to catch the fire, but here were the men who had beaten it, maybe a couple dozen of them, walking around in the fatigued reverie of a hard fight won. A trio at the back of Engine 2, one with his helmet under his arm and an ax in his hand, his hair mussed from the webbing inside his helmet. Car 2, in his white coat and white hat, overseeing and debriefing, a man whose joy is fishing with his kids. A representative of the department, talking to a woman whose home the charred wreck seems to have been, his hand on her shoulder. Men with tanks on their backs and facemasks dangling at their sides, their names on the back of their coats. Blaesi and Neale, Ortiz and Gardner, Hudson and Aponte, Leary and Snyder, Saunders and Gefell, Compton and Vallegas. American mixed. The backbone and bread and butter of the Rochester Fire Department. Blue-collar heroes who bring brains and brawn and bravery to any damn problem fate can throw at them.

They gathered in a circle, pike poles in their hands, laughing and talking -- accomplishment, camaraderie and grime on their faces.

In front of Father Tracy’s house.

They used to call Siebert Place “Heroin Alley,” and when the Rev. Lawrence Tracy came to minister to Rochester’s Puerto Ricans a generation ago, he chose to live right in the middle of it, where things were worst, in the very house the firefighters tried to save. It was open to everyone, day or night, and many came to counsel, cry and crash, the mothers and the pimps, the fiends and the faithful. He would feed them and pray for them and the neighborhood would gather for meetings of hope or sorrow.

Father Tracy is long since passed, and his work is mostly forgotten, and now his longtime home, his hardscrabble temple, is burned, and as the firefighters began to break down and clean up, I ran back to Clinton and up past St. Michael’s to Clifford, where I turned east. At Joseph, it came to me that I should run north, to check on the Fried Fish Shack.

It’s where Jack’s Fish Market used to be. Jack sold fish, fresh or fried, with that Auschwitz number on his arm. He was there for years and years and then one Thursday morning at opening time they tried to rob him, at opening time, with nothing in the till, and they shot him when he didn’t have any money, two guys whom he’d fed repeatedly for free when they were little boys. It’s kind of like how Bob Morgan got in the wheelchair. The big real estate developer. His mom and dad came out of the Holocaust and opened a fish market in Rochester and one day when he was working a guy fresh out of jail walked in and wanted money and fired his gun to get it.

But it came to me that I should run north, and check on the Fried Fish Shack.

A guy named Mark owns it. He’s got a dream. Him and God. He wants to be a businessman, to make something, to build a stake for his future. And it’s been hard. He works an overnight job to keep his fish market afloat, he started it with money from a second mortgage, last summer he was afraid he was going to lose his house. And last fall when I ran through one day there was a handwritten note on the door that said he had had to close for a while.

And I ran up Joseph Avenue to see if that note was still there.

A couple blocks south I thought I saw someone walk into the building, and as I got closer I saw the red OPEN sign illuminated and when I got there I walked in and there was Mark. We hugged and I asked him questions and I took a picture of him and he showed me an electrical connection outside the building that had required the last of his saved money and the promise of $500 from every paycheck over the next several months. He told me it had been hard and it was hard, but that he felt God would help him through, God and every bit of sacrifice and effort he could put into it.

We said our good byes and I said I would come back the next day for some haddock or grouper. I ran Joseph back downtown and a couple of hours later was at home and posted the picture of Mark on Facebook, saying that he was back and that people ought to stop by.

Facebook is the grapevine of today, the way the city of Rochester spreads it news and communicates with itself. It brings power and information to people who live real lives in real places. And the Rochester grapevine embraced Mark and his dream, and 24 hours after it was posted his picture had been reposted more than 1,700 times, by people from his city, from his neighborhood, from his community.

His sister was working the cash register the next day. I wrote about her 35 years ago when she went to the Gulf War. She held up a double fist full of tickets, each one an order and a customer, nine more hanging above the friers as Mark worked to serve customers. It had already by far been the biggest day in their history, and a steady stream of people were coming in, to such an extent that they had to be turned away until later in the day.

And that’s the story of my Thursday run.

Bob Lonsberry