The smell was unbelievable, I’ll never forget that smell. “Supposedly, this was the well he filled with lighter fluid, knocked on the door, when the guy opened the thing, that’s when it went inside, ” says Jimmy Massacci, owner of Jimani, the restaurant directly beneath the lounge.He was just thirteen years old at the time of the fire, but he still remembers his family discussing the circumstances.In a tour of the inside of the building, he points out the remnants of the blaze, “You can still see some darkness in here, there’s some burnt right here, if you shoot that window sill you’ll see some burnt right there.
Four decades later, the pain and emotions still smolder.”The number one suspect got away with it, nothing was done about it, one person, one guy said he said he was going to burn the place to the ground and he wasn’t even arrested,” says Anderson. The completion of the film coincides with the fortieth anniversary of the fire. The fire was started on June 24 th, 1973 in the stairwell of the UpStairs Lounge. “The second floor, that’s where there was a lot of structural damage from the fire,” says Anderson. NEW ORLEANS (WGNO) – It’s taken filmmaker and educator Royd Anderson 6 years to complete his documentary on The UpStairs Lounge tragedy, an event that claimed the lives of 32 people in the French Quarter. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated.