Boston ? More than 80 years ago, the Hook brothers started trucking their catch of lobsters from Maine and Canada to Boston’s fish piers, selling them directly to the city’s top restaurants.

Ever since, four generations of Hooks have kept their seafood wholesale business in a squat wooden building with a corrugated steel roof, resisting multiple offers from developers as luxury hotels, gleaming office towers and the Big Dig highway project dwarfed and surrounded them.

On Friday, a seven-alarm fire gutted their landmark waterfront location, causing $5 million in damage that included the loss of 60,000 pounds of lobster, but the Hooks vowed to rebuild James Hook & Co.

“We’ll set up a trailer, we’ll set up tents, we’ll find a way,” co-owner Ed Hook said as he looked over the smoldering embers of his 83-year-old business founded in 1925 and owned by Hook and his siblings, Jimmy, Al and Nancy.

“If we can survive the Big Dig, we can survive anything,” he said.

Fire Department spokesman Steve MacDonald said 130 firefighters battled the blaze that started about 3:30 a.m., fueled by cardboard boxes used for shipping seafood.

There was no report of injuries and no immediate indication of how the fire started, except that it probably started on the more heavily damaged left side of the building.