Twin Parks North West, Site 4, opened in 1972 as part of New York State's ambitious Urban Development Corporation program. It was hailed as the "cutting edge of urban design," a bold experiment in providing affordable housing that also embodied progressive architecture. But the UDC operated outside normal building codes, issuing its own certificates of occupancy. As early as 1977, the New York Daily News reported that the building had inferior electrical wiring posing potential fire hazards. Inspectors found "building violations of an electrical nature" at 333 East 181st Street. The promise of the building's design never fully materialized for its residents, and the gap between architectural ambition and lived reality would prove fatal decades later.

By the 2020s, the building housed a tight-knit Gambian community, many of whom traced their roots to Allunhari, a town of roughly 5,500 people in the Upper River Division of The Gambia. Gambians from Allunhari had begun settling in the building around 1980, drawn by word of mouth and family connections across an ocean. They built a community within the concrete tower, one where neighbors shared language, customs, and the particular kind of solidarity that comes from being far from home. When the fire struck, the losses were not spread anonymously across a large building. They were concentrated within families, within a single diaspora community that knew every victim by name.

Just before 11:00 a.m. EST, the space heater caught fire. The building's alarm system triggered immediately, but false alarms were so common that many residents did not take the warning seriously. Smoke cascaded out of the open apartment door and filled the stairwells with disorienting darkness. Residents who attempted to evacuate found themselves unable to see, stumbling through lethal corridors. One survivor recalled "tripping over bodies" in the stairwell. Rescuers found victims in cardiac and respiratory arrest on every floor. Around 200 firefighters responded, many continuing to push through the building even after their oxygen tanks ran out. The incident was ultimately classified as a five-alarm fire, though the flames themselves never spread beyond the original apartment.

The investigation that followed revealed a chain of failures deceptively simple in its mechanics. A 2018 city law required self-closing mechanisms on all apartment doors in buildings with more than three units. The building's property owners, a partnership of LIHC Investment Group, Belveron Partners, and Camber Property Group that had purchased the complex in early 2020, said maintenance staff had checked the involved unit's door mechanism in July 2021 and found it working. After the fire, investigators found it inoperable, along with mechanisms on several other doors throughout the building. The fifteenth-floor stairwell door that created the deadly flue effect had also failed. Meanwhile, a 2017 housing survey had estimated that nearly 27 percent of households in the Fordham neighborhood relied on supplemental heat sources like space heaters, a quiet statistic that spoke volumes about the conditions tenants endured.

Survivors filed lawsuits within days, seeking up to three billion dollars in damages and claiming the tragedy was entirely preventable. U.S. Representative Ritchie Torres co-authored the Empowering the U.S. Fire Administration Act, expanding federal support for local fire departments following major fires. On the first anniversary of the blaze, in January 2023, the street outside Twin Parks was renamed 17 Abdoulie Touray Way. The number honors the seventeen victims. The name honors Abdoulie Touray, the building's first Gambian resident, the man who had, decades earlier, opened a door for a community that would make this corner of the Bronx their own. The renaming was a small act of public memory, an insistence that what happened at 333 East 181st Street not be reduced to a statistic or a cautionary tale about space heaters, but remembered as a loss borne by real families in a real place.