ST. CLOUD, Minn. — Across the street from the now destroyed Press Bar, Chriss Wohlleber had a front row seat to a view she didn't want to see.
"You could see flames of fire coming out of it, like shooting up," she said. "Your heart kind of stops."
Wohlleber, the general manager at the Courtyard St. Cloud hotel, knew what she needed to do.
"We felt like, boy, some hot coffee might be great," she said.
The Courtyard opened up their dining room, with windows overlooking the flames, to the firefighters, the Red Cross, other first responders and the tenants above the nearby Cowboy Jack's bar.
"We have the space. [Firefighters] can still see what's going on ... We have big windows and you can look at everything. So it seemed like the perfect spot to give them," she said.
A few stops down Fifth Avenue, Darin Agnew was in a perfect spot, too.
The owner of Searles on Fifth Avenue, which has yet to open to the public, had a kitchen which wasn't busy and a view of the firefighters working to put out flames at the bar down the street.
"I said we should probably make some food for them. So I talked to my chef and he cooked up some burgers and fries for them," Agnew said.
That was lunch. By dinner Agnew's team was making New York strip steaks to feed to the crews fighting the flames.
But food wasn't the only thing they had to offer.
With employees at the Press out of work and employees temporarily without work at nearby Cowboy Jack's, Agnew decided to serve up some jobs.
"It was an instant, 'We need to reach out and employ whoever we can,'" he said. "Because it was terrible ... They were supposed to work the next day and now they don't have a job."
Agnew says he reached out to the manager of Cowboy Jack's, and with the manager's blessing, offered temporary employment to the workers. He says he's hired about ten Cowboy Jack's employees so far.
He plans to open Searles on Fifth Avenue this weekend.
The St. Cloud Fire Department estimates more than a dozen businesses and community members offered them food and coffee while they battled the fire which destroyed the iconic Press Bar in St. Cloud's downtown.
St. Cloud Fire Marshal Mike Post told KARE 11 he wanted to give a shout out to Adventure Coffee MN, a mobile coffee company which served him coffee the morning of the fire.
The cause of the fire remains under investigation.