By Jon Schuppe
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
HARLEM — As the years went by and Marietta Courts reached old age, people often teased her about retirement. She'd always brush them off and say, "It's going to happen."
But she never quit. Weakened by diabetes and approaching her 80th birthday, Courts refused to leave her job at the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development, where she'd worked for 30 years.
On Tuesday, the co-workers who knew her as "Miss M" will return from their holiday weekend and find her desk empty. Courts, 77, died Sunday night in a fire that engulfed her 16th floor apartment in Harlem's Lenox Terrace housing complex, where she lived alone.
“It’s just so sad," a neighbor, Joyce Wright, said. "So sad."
The fire, reported at 10:44 p.m., caught Courts in her bathroom on the top floor of 25 W. 132nd St., one of several high-rise buidings that comprise Lenox Terrace. The complex is home to many artists and politicians, including Gov. David Paterson and Rep. Charles Rangel.
Firefighters arrived and encountered "Collyers' mansion" conditions inside the apartment, a spokesman said. The term is used to describe excessive amounts of clutter, and is a reference to the Harlem townhouse where two brothers were found dead in 1947 amid tons of books, newspapers and other debris.
The firefighters took Courts' badly burned body from the apartment. Wright said she watched them cover her with sheets in the 15th floor hallway, probably because the 16th floor was smoky and flooded with water. The body was so badly burned, Wright said, that she didn’t recognize her neighbor. She was left with the image of Courts' charred socks protruding from the sheets.
The medical examiner's office said Courts died of burns and smoke inhalation. Her death has been ruled an accident, spokeswoman Ellen Borakove said. The cause of the fire remains under investigation.
Neighbors described Courts as pleasant and low-key. One, who declined to give his name, said she was “a hoarder,” which may explain the clutter that firefighters encountered.
Courts was one of nine children who grew up in North Carolina before moving to New York on her own many years ago, said Carrie Wilson, a close friend who worked with Courts at HPD. She may have been married once, but she had no children, and most of her relatives remained in North Carolina, Wilson said.
“Her family was the people she worked with, and her friends in her building,” Wilson said.
Courts worked in the HPD's Division of Alternative Management, where she processed invoices for contractors, another colleague said.
She rarely missed a day of work. It happened on Wednesday, when she stayed home during the blizzard. But she trudged back to the HPD's offices in lower Manhattan on Thursday and Friday, despite her co-workers' protests.
That is how they will remember her.
“She did it her way,” Wilson said.
