Melvin Felix 
Melvin Felix An electrical fire at the Union Square subway station led to the temporary closing of one block of 14th Street at around 2 p.m.
EV Grieve rounded up photos of the small blaze, which is in a grate beside a subway entrance on the south side of 14th Street between Broadway and Fourth Avenue. The fire was caused by a “service box failure,” a spokesman for Con Edison told The Local. A spokesman told Gothamist, which gathered tweets about the fire, that the cause was “a failure of electrical cables.” No injuries were reported.
Melvin Felix A spokesman for the Fire Department told The Local that firefighters had not responded to the fire — though photos say otherwise. In an apparently unrelated call, firefighters did respond to a report of smoke inside the station at around 12:30 p.m., which was caused by the breaks of a train.
The Con Edison employees who tended to the fire were managers filling in for unionized workers, who have been locked out. Recently union members have staged regular protests outside of Con Edison headquarters on Irving Place, though none were gathered today, perhaps due to the rain.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 20, 2012
An earlier version of this post misstated the reason Con Edison managers filled in. The unionized workers were locked out, not on strike.
