TESLA: The Life and Times Podcast (teslapodcast.com)

Investigator (STEP I), run 2026-10-08. Saved page text (evidence trail, not for publication) is in research/pages/. Findings are leads, not verdicts.

Searched

Google: Tesla laboratory fire March 13 1895 "South Fifth Avenue" newspaper cause of fire
Fetched: http://teslapodcast.com/2022/03/24/show-notes-029-towering-inferno-1895/

"At 2:30 a.m. on Wednesday, March 13, 1895, a fire broke out at 33-35 South Fifth Avenue (now West Broadway) ... The building's night watchman said definitively that the fire started on the floors below Tesla's lab."
Causes as given by the podcast's sources: the pipe-cutter had "saturated the loft building with oil"; or the dry-cleaners' chemicals; Seifer reports that some investigators intimated the night watchman "may have been responsible, perhaps by smoking carelessly near oily rags"; Cheney gives "a gas jet on the first floor that ignited the oil-soaked rags".
Quotations: New York Sun, "two tottering brick walls and the yawning jaws of a somber cavity aswim with black water and oil"; New York Herald, "the fruits of ten years of toil and research were swept away". Tesla "carried no insurance".

Claim 3 (suppression), the book's arson story: the accounts compiled here give an accidental or careless origin on lower floors. None mentions dynamite. The author's arson account stands on his word; no source has been found yet. The decisive record is the 1895 New York newspapers and fire marshal reports (Chronicling America; not reached).