Crime and Public Safety | Tenant leader killed in Harlem fire was preparing to move out of state

A longtime tenant leader killed by a fire in her Harlem apartment building had been planning to finally move out of the city to live near her daughter, distraught relatives and neighbors said.

Audrey Quantano, a 66-year-old Army veteran and grandmother, was born and raised in Harlem but was preparing to relocate when she died in the Saturday blaze.

Quantano, a former professional cook who lived on the fourth floor of the seven-story apartment building, was profiled in a 2014 Daily News article when she refused to leave her last home — a squalid, crumbling apartment on Fifth Ave. in East Harlem — during a renovation project.

“I am not afraid,” Quantano told The News at the time. “I am just a tenant in New York who is a victim of gentrification. This is not an easy thing to do.”

Quantano also fought to improve her latest home, records show. She filed a 2021 housing court complaint against the building’s management company describing a list of dire living conditions, from mold to vermin to faulty plumbing and sparking electrical outlets. That led to a judge’s order in 2022 to make repairs.

Quantano, a mother of three and a grandmother to three more, worked tirelessly “uplifting everybody else,” her son said.

“I just want her to be remembered as a happy person,” he said. “She was always there for people. She always meant good by her intention.”

Quantano desperately called one of her neighbors for help about 1 a.m. Saturday as smoke filled the air around her inside her apartment on W. 140th St. near Malcolm X Blvd.

“Neighbors were banging on her door yelling for her to open the door and she was saying ‘I can’t breathe,’” said Daiyaun Muhammad, 27, who lives in the building. “The smoke was coming from the top and bottom of her door. Black and white smoke.”

First responders pulled Quantano out of the apartment and rushed her to Harlem Hospital but she couldn’t be saved.

The fire was put out within 25 minutes, an FDNY spokesman said. The cause remains under investigation.

Quantano was taking steps to finally leave New York and move to Georgia, where her daughter lives, neighbors said.

“She was packing up,” a neighbor who gave her name as Joyce said. “I knew she was gonna be going there soon.”

The building’s super, who didn’t give his name, said Quantano had started bringing items out of storage and into her apartment in preparation for the move.

“She brought a lot of things into her house, so it was more cluttered with boxes,” he said. “The firemen had a hard time trying to get the door open because of so much stuff.”

Firefighters pulled out melted and charred plastic tubs from the apartment. Destroyed furniture and cardboard boxes were scattered down the hallway and in the alleyway below the apartment’s window in the aftermath of the blaze.

“We are dealing with a lot of emotions right now and appreciate your prayers and best memories of our mom,” Quantano’s distraught daughter Shreeta Quantano wrote on Facebook.

When the elevator broke down in her current building, Quantano formed a tenant association in response, neighbors said.

“You have people that are older, they can’t walk those stairs,” Joyce said. “She created the tenant association so if we had issues we would get together and talk about it.”

Quantano got results.

“They fixed the elevator and we haven’t had a problem since,” a grateful Joyce added. “We would do Zoom meetings. She organized it. She started it.”

Audrey Quantano died after a fire broke out inside her fourth floor apartment at 151 West 140th Street in Manhattan on Saturday. (Theodore Parisienne / New York Daily News)Quantano, who grew up in Harlem’s Douglass Houses, served in the U.S. Army from 1981 to 1983, according to her son, Kenneth Michael Quantano.

“She had her roots in the community in Harlem,” said the younger Quantano, 35. “It’s a major loss. She was a lovely lady.”