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A small emergency. I opened up our closed living room fireplace during this year. Inside were bricks cemented together and a rusty tin/ metal pipe on the left side of the fireplace that goes up presumably into the chimney. I am not sure what this pipe does, but I went ahead and assumed it was the exhaust flue from the heating boiler and water heater that is right below in the basement and decided not to touch it but to just chip the bricks around it so as to have a better view and more space in the fireplace to light candles, etc. The first brick that I removed this am, revealed that the front of the tin pipe was cut away at the bottom and not whole as I had assumed. I am also not sure if the pipe actually connects with the boiler downstairs, since it appears that the boiler flue goes back into the chimney from the basement/ ground floor and that this pipe is in the fireplace which is in front of the chimney in the parlor floor. I also turned on the boiler and lit incense sticks near the flue to see if the incense found its way through the boiler flue into the pipe upstairs (assuming still that they might be connected in some way), but they did not. No fumes, heat or exhaust escaped this (now open/ cut away) pipe, neither did the carbon monoxide detector go off. What is this pipe? Can I safely remove the bricks around it (maybe that could expose more of the cutaway section of this pipe)? Is this some kind of stove pipe/ exhaust? Has anyone had this sort of thing sitting in their fireplace? By the way, the fireplace has a flue at the back that goes into the chimney, so this seems unlikely to be the flue for the fireplace (it is also to one side and runs the full height of the fireplace).