The old C&K Hotel at 14th and Quincy Streets NW.

A fire tore through the basement and first two floors of the rear of the old C&K Hotel on the 3700 block of 14th Street NW last night, prompting a massive deployment of firefighters and sending two firefighters to the hospital with smoke-related injuries.

The building, which has sat vacant in recent years, was once used as one of the city’s few low-cost transient hotels. It also played host to other less noble purposes, according to longtime neighbors, who said it was interchangeably used as a brothel, boarding house and scene of many a drug deals.

It has traded hands between developers in the last two years; in February 2012, it was sold to a new developer for just shy of $1 million. Since then, though, the new owner has struggled to get a permit to raze the structure. He complained yesterday that while just about every bureaucratic hurdle had been overcome on the path to knocking the building down—it’s three connected rowhouses on the corner of 14th and Quincy Streets NW—Washington Gas had yet to sign off on the demolition.

Despite the slow pace of razing the old hotel, the developer filed plans with the D.C. Consumer and Regulatory Agency last week saying that it intended to build a four-story residential building with 20 units, space for ground-level retail and 10 parking spaces in the rear. An Office of Planning study of the area called the old hotel’s a “key revitalization site,” saying it could help revitalize the southern-most node of what’s called the Central 14th Street area (from Spring Road up to Longfellow Street).

D.C. Fire and EMS spokesman Lon Walls said that the cause of the fire is currently under investigation.