The Fire Department’s annual memorial service on Wednesday in Manhattan honored four members who died in the past year.
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“To a firefighter, the first fire is like a police officer’s first collar, a lawyer’s first jury trial, a fisherman’s first tuna. It becomes chiseled into your memory in big block letters, rolled out and dusted off for reminiscence over a lifetime,” N.R. Kleinfield wrote in an article about Jordan Sullivan, a New York City firefighter with Ladder Company 105 in Brooklyn.
We asked firefighters to submit their first fire stories in the comments section and via email. Read a selection of those stories. This call-out for first fire stories is now closed.
The New York Times published an in-depth article about a probationary New York City firefighter this weekend.
More than 11,000 fire officers and firefighters make up the Fire Department today, a professional work force that is a far cry from that of colonial times, when no such organization existed. Instead, all able-bodied men in New York were required to help extinguish fires.
Today, the department answers calls for more than 60 structural fires a day, most of them minor. Throughout its history, the New York metropolitan region has had numerous deadly and destructive fires. Here is a selection of the most notable ones.
(Note: About 3,000 people were killed — including 343 city Fire Department members — in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The scope of that event sets it apart from the list below.)
Sept. 21, 1776: The Great Fire of 1776
Six days after the British invaded New York in the Revolutionary War, a fire destroyed nearly 500 buildings. Before the fire, George Washington had considered burning down the city because he feared what the British military might gain from its occupation, but the Continental Congress rejected that idea. The cause of the fire, which started in a tavern, remains a mystery. The fire prompted the British to form a fire department in the city.
I came to New York in the late ’60s. On cold nights in the downtown area, on street corners, you could find trash-can fires. These fires were tended by street people.
There were many trash-can fires along the Bowery; for the folks who had no place to go, these fires kept them warm and busy looking for trash, scrap lumber, cardboard boxes to feed the 50-gallon drums, with holes cut near the bottom to give draft. On icy days and nights, much like this winter, these cheery fires were ornaments of warmth, available for those who could not afford the comfort of a coffee shop or the shelter of a hotel.
By 1990 or so, those little islands of comfort disappeared from the streets and parks of Manhattan, I don’t know about the other boroughs but I’d like to think this custom continues elsewhere in New York.
Did you ever have one of those dreams where you’re naked in church or a public place?
At 8:30 a.m. it was already 85 degrees, going up to a sweltering 95, so I decided to go out early for my daily run-walk with hand weights. My route is always the same. This morning I decided I’d go topless because of the heat. I’d done this before, even though an unfeeling young woman in a passing car once yelled out, “Put your shirt on!” It’s New York, and hot, and no one is shocked by seeing a few gray chest hairs pass by.
I started out, down 102nd Street, toward Riverside. There’s a little path at Riverside and 101st that I take down to the Firemen’s Memorial Monument, and from there I always head down the stairs to Riverside Drive.
Already so hot that my eyeballs felt as if they were melting in the sockets.
As I entered the path in the upper park, I heard horses’ hooves and saw a couple of mounted policemen clopping down Riverside Drive below. I didn’t think anything of it. But then I saw American flags up and down the stairs that lead from the Firemen’s Monument down to the Drive.
And then I realized that it was Sept. 11.
The Firemen’s Monument is one of the sacred spots where firefighters, their families and other first responders all gather, in uniform, to remember the lives that were lost. I’d attended the ceremony last year.
It was still early and the ceremony hadn’t yet begun. People were gathering. Everyone was dressed for the occasion except me: uniforms, dresses, suits. Voices were low and reverential, as they are at a funeral. Chairs and a lectern had been set up in the top plaza of the monument. I thought I would be able to quickly dart through and out of the way before anyone saw me. But suddenly I was in the thick of the setup, half-naked, and couldn’t find a way out. It was impossible to get through the rows of tightly packed chairs. The only way out was by the stairs themselves.
Do I say anything? I wondered. Do I apologize? It was strangely dreamlike, since, really, there was no one to apologize to, or even to talk to, in my half-naked state.
People looked at me but no one looked outraged as I threaded my shirtless way through the chairs, around the flags, past the lectern and down the stairs, dodging units of men in uniform posing for photos. I hope I’m not in any of them.
The last name painted on the grand liner, christened the S.S. Normandie in 1932 and being converted into a troopship called the U.S.S. Lafayette a decade later, was Lipsett, in large white letters.
The repainting was a publicity stunt by the New York City company hired to scrap the French-built ship after it burned in a spectacular blaze at a West Side Manhattan pier in February 1942, two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor required its wartime use. Read more…
Recently I met a New Yorker in an online chat room. She told me that a few hours earlier she had walked into a burning building. What for, I asked. Her response: “Because I can.”
I began to wonder: do New Yorkers do things without thinking of the consequences? Like the shark who found himself on the N train; was he so excited about going on the subway that he didn’t think about the consequences of leaving the Hudson?
Living in Australia I am unaware of what it’s like to be a New Yorker, but one day I hope to be one. Will I then conform to my surroundings and become unaware of the consequences?
I hope not.