BY CHRISTINA SANTUCCI
\nTHE QUEENS COURIER\/PHOTO BY CHRISTINA SANTUCCI
\nBruce Davis, the owner of Paradise Bedding, Dinettes & Furniture, sets up shop at 43-23 Bell Boulevard.
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\nParadise was closed for only one day after a suspicious three-alarm fire ravaged the store, which has been open for 31 years.
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Three weeks after a suspicious fire gutted Paradise Bedding, Dinettes & Furniture, the Bell Boulevard store’s owners celebrated a semi-official reopening just one block away from their burned-out location.<\/p>\n
After the three-alarm fire on Monday, August 21 gutted the store, Paradise’s owner Bruce Davis said he walked the span of Bell Boulevard from Northern Boulevard to the Bay Terrace shopping mall, looking into retail space that was for rent.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I was only really closed for one day,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Davis said, while carrying furniture into the new location at 43-23 Bell Boulevard. The furniture shop, which has been in Bayside for over 31 years, also had to restock all of its merchandise after every piece was burned.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153It’s just a rebuilding process,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Davis said, pointing to new furniture and bedding which comprised about 50 percent of the items that had packed the former store at 42-03 Bell Boulevard.<\/p>\n
Davis said that he did have some help – his current employees worked through the night on several occasions helping him haul furniture into the new store which formerly housed the A. Kraus & Son paint and wallpaper store. In addition, former employees did their share to help the furniture store reopen.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Everyone that has ever worked here has come back,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Davis joked.<\/p>\n
To pay tribute to those who offered a helping hand, Davis, and his employees hosted a morning \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Thank you\u00e2\u20ac\u009d party on Saturday, Sept. 2.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Now the only thing left to do is thanking everyone for their thoughts and concern,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Davis said as he straightened chairs around the dinette sets and fluffed couch cushions on a large blue sofa in the new store.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153The community has been unbelievable. There is no place like Bayside,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said Davis, who added that he hopes to stay in the neighborhood. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153When something like this happens, you see how much people really care.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Davis’ 10-year-old son Adam also contributed a key fixture to the new store that will remind customers of the former store between Carvel and Gateaux Bakery & Caf\u00c3\u00a9: a picture of a stick-figure person sunbathing on a lounge chair under the words \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Paradise Dinettes.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153The first thing [Adam] asked was, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcDad I’m really sorry for what happened to you, but did my sign get burned,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Davis said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153And then the same day, he made up this one.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Fire investigators still have not released their findings into the cause of the fire, a three-alarm blaze which was believed to have begun at 1 a.m. in the alcove of the furniture store, and spread to the building on the north side of Paradise and gutted four apartments before it was extinguished at 3 a.m.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BY CHRISTINA SANTUCCI THE QUEENS COURIER\/PHOTO BY CHRISTINA SANTUCCI Bruce Davis, the owner of Paradise Bedding, Dinettes & Furniture, sets up shop at 43-23 Bell Boulevard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-furniture-world-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1863\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}