By Steve McCauley

Seven-train riders on the Queens Plaza platform saw the smoke and wondered if they had missed a terror attack. As far as FDNY was concerned, they weren’t far off. The 10-alarm fire that consumed the Greenpoint Terminal Market was the greatest the city had seen since the Twin Towers came down. It took more than 350 firefighters a day and a half to drown the heavy flames, and even after that, some small parts of the historic warehouse complex still lay smoldering. The rush and the wild size of the inferno immediately drew questions of arson from city officials. The owner of the complex, real-estate developer Joshua Guttman, is bogged down in a lawsuit with Baruch Singer, another developer, which Singer brought after his $420 million bid for the 21-acre waterfront property collapsed. At one point, there had been a push by preservationists to designate the market a historic district, but the dilapidated structures held little promise. The area was rezoned from commercial to residential last year. Guttman, who has a record of converting industrial sites into condominiums, saw another Brooklyn building burn up in a four-alarm fire back in 2004, but there was no proof of any wrongdoing. His lawyer swore his innocence in this blaze as well, emphasizing that Guttman stood to gain nothing from it.