Firefighters doused a blaze that ripped through a popular nursery supplier in Baldwin Hills Friday night.
The flames were burning in the 6050 block of Jefferson Boulevard, near the Culver City border, fire officials said. A call was received at 7:32 p.m, and the fire at the 12,300 square-foot building was finally extinguished at 8:40 p.m, Los Angeles Fire Department said.
The blaze caused a patrial roof collapse at Inner Gardens, a contemporary nursery and garden supplier recently featured in Architectural Digest magazine, after just 12 minutes, with a full collapse occuring 3 minutes later.
It took a team of 140 firefighters to quell the blaze, 135 of which were LAFD personnel, with the remaining five coming from Culver City Fire Department..
"I get a call from my other coworkers, who said somebody called them (to) tell them the building was on fire," said Ernesto Mezquita of Inner Gardens. "The first thing, I started driving down here to see what was going on."
The owner of a dry cleaning business nextdoor said everything looked normal when he left work.
"I closed at maybe 7:20 and I was right around the corner, and I came back five minutes later," Jeffrey English of JB Dry Cleaners said. "It must have went up in flames minutes after I left."
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Aerial video showed fire tearing through the roof of the structure. It was not clear how the fire started.
Firefighters managed to prevent the fire spreading to the adjoining Castelli Art Framing, and the business sustained only limited damage from smoke, heat and water, and was largely unscathed.
