Five Floors Up, page 2
Standing on the spot where terrorists murdered his dad, Billy felt nothing for those who killed him. Homicide is the cause of death listed on his father’s death certificate, the first issued to a member of the FDNY killed in the attack. There would be anger, plenty. But not at that moment. Instead, he felt strangely comfortable, as though time had stood still and his father’s last breath still hung in the air.
Later, Billy would tell people he could have stayed there all night and the night after. At that moment, alone in this shattered and holy place, he’d found the answer to the question that had burned in his mind. His father had died as he would have wanted, wearing his helmet, gear, and a jacket that bore the initials of an organization to which he had long since given his life: the FDNY.
At some point, as he stood in the wreckage, time began to move forward again for Billy. For the rest of America too. Soon Billy’s melancholy was replaced with a hollow ache and the growing awareness that he would never have his dad again.
The family held the funeral the following Saturday at St. Mel’s in Flushing, the Feehans’ parish. Chief Feehan’s was the first of three high-profile FDNY funerals that day. Later, Masses would be said for Pete Ganci and Father Mychal Judge, the beloved fire department chaplain. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani had proposed to the Feehan family the idea of having the three funerals together at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The Feehans declined the offer. They knew their father would not have wanted the pomp and attention.
At first, a relatively small group of firefighters gathered to pay their last respects outside the church. In normal times there would have been a sea of firefighters dressed in Class A blues and white gloves for a line-of-duty death. But those members who weren’t working were digging through the smoking pile, searching and still holding on to fading hope. The mayor and Fire Commissioner Tom Von Essen spoke at the Mass, one of hundreds they would attend. The commissioner’s aide had forgotten to give Von Essen the eulogy he’d written for Bill Feehan. Twenty years later, he still thinks his extemporaneous words that day were inadequate.
As fire officers in white hats and Class A’s carried out Bill’s coffin draped with an FDNY red-and-white flag, a single violinist played “Ashokan Farewell.” Billy had first heard the musician play the tune a few weeks before in the World Trade Center’s concourse. He’d come out of the PATH train and was headed toward his office in the Woolworth Building. The sweet sadness of the song reminded him of his dad. He dropped a few bucks in the open violin case and took the violinist’s card. Weeks before the attack on the World Trade Center and his father’s death, he’d had no reason to hire a violinist. But now, as the melody accompanied his dad’s casket into the bright sunshine, the moment seemed fated.
Outside the church, the crowd had grown into the hundreds. The firefighters didn’t wear the Class A dress uniforms, but instead bunker gear that was covered in cement dust from the Trade Center. They had come from the pile to pay their respects to a man most of them knew by reputation only. Chief Feehan was a boss, a big boss, and by rank about as far removed from the firehouse as you could get. But even when he held the lofty post of fire commissioner, he insisted on being called “Chief,” an homage to the uniform that bound him to the firefighters who now stood in silence and saluted his coffin.
Though a fire service career like no other ended in that bright sunshine, the heroic story of Chief Feehan’s firefighter family would continue for two more generations. Just as it had for a generation before.
TWO
The Roaring Twenties
On a cold late February morning in 1926, William Patrick Feehan, Chief Feehan’s father, walked two blocks from his apartment in Long Island City, Queens, to the Vernon-Jackson subway station. There he hopped on a subway train that took him under the East River one stop to Grand Central Station. The rest of his commute required a two-block walk from the station to East 40th Street and the firehouse that quartered his new fire company, Engine 21. Door-to-door, the trip couldn’t have taken him more than fifteen or twenty minutes. To the captain on duty that morning, however, William might as well have come from Schenectady by horse.
“I don’t see any mud,” the captain said to his brand-new recruit. “Where’s the mud?”
William looked nervously back at the fire officer. “I don’t know what you mean,” he managed to say.
“You come from the country, don’t you?” he said. “I thought you’d have mud on your shoes.”
Though the captain might have thought he was a hayseed from Queens, William certainly didn’t look like a rookie his first morning on the job. He was thirty-four and a bear of a man with a broken nose from an amateur boxing career and a balding head, a physical characteristic of which he was unabashed. One day, later in his career, when he’d gone completely bald, he popped his head up through the sidewalk grate of a building he was inspecting.
“Look what Kreml did to me!” he said to passersby, poking fun at the popular hair tonic of the day.
Why William had waited until nearly middle age to enter a career that would not only define the rest of his life, but those of three generations of Feehan men who followed, is something of a mystery. A family theory exists that the delay might have had something to do with his relationship with his mother. That he was the youngest of ten in an Irish Catholic family goes a long way in supporting that hypothesis. He stayed single and lived at home into his thirties, for the entirety of his mother’s life.
Julia Lawlor, William’s mom, didn’t have an easy go of it. She was born in County Mayo, Ireland, in 1849, and had grown up in the shadow of the Great Famine when nearly a quarter of the Irish population died of starvation. She was married on July 18, 1872, at Saint Abbans in Doonane parish, to William Feehan the elder, an event that did little to make her life any easier. Soon afterward, she found herself pregnant, a condition she would carry for the better part of the next fourteen years. The firstborn, Elizabeth, came in 1873, John Thomas in 1874, Mary in 1875, Dora in 1877, Julia in 1881, and Ellen in 1882 or 1883. Though records are convoluted at best, according to family stories, she also gave birth to other children who died either in childbirth or infancy.
In early July 1883, the Irish Feehans did what one and a half million of their fellow countrymen did in the last half of the nineteenth century: They headed to America for a better life. Apparently, the oldest son, John Thomas, made the crossing in 1882 and sent for the rest. A year later, William Sr., Julia, and the other four surviving children boarded the steamship City of Paris with steerage tickets. The crossing, a miserable journey, took an interminable nine days. On July 9, 1883, they arrived at New York at Castle Garden, now called Battery Park. A forerunner to the more famous Ellis Island, the immigration port rotunda was hot, crowded, and smelled awful. One magazine writer of the day described the odor as stifling, a mixture of rancid cheese, onions, and herring, among other things. Though Castle Garden was also much more lenient that its successor—practically no one was sent back or detained, as they were at Ellis Island—it was filled with sharpies, swindlers, and even an employment agency that worked as a front that whisked young women into jobs with bosses who subjected them to sexual assault and abuse. Whatever the Feehans’ image of America was beforehand, by the time they made it through Castle Garden, the veneer had peeled off the dream.
They moved into a small apartment at 128 7th Street in Long Island City, a neighborhood in Queens just across the East River from Manhattan. That address no longer exists on any map. Today, the Hunters Point section of Long Island City is filled with apartment buildings made of glimmering glass and steel, with amenities such as a concierge and Peloton exercise bikes. The neighborhood is coveted by the young and upwardly mobile. However, the main selling point for these apartments is the view of the East Side of Manhattan. The iconic skyline is so close it seems you could swim there—that is, if the tidal current of the East River didn’t suck you all the way to New York Harbor. When the Feehans moved there, Long Island City was a self-contained, working-class municipality with enough factories, warehouses, and rail termini to keep the local population employed. William Sr. found work as a janitor. Julia stayed home and took care of the children.
Though a good percentage of Irish immigrants took on menial jobs, they didn’t face the same discrimination they had a generation earlier. The Irish who came in the 1840s and 1850s, the ones who encountered “Irish Need Not Apply” signs, were the first who not only assimilated but, thanks to Tammany Hall, the Democratic political machine, rose to positions of power in politics and civil service, especially in the police and fire departments. The first Irish Catholic mayor of New York City, William R. Grace, was elected three years before the Feehans arrived in Queens. Of course, Grace was of the “lace curtain” variety of Irish Catholic, a disparaging term for Irish of means, not one of the huddled hordes like the Feehans. There is no indication that William Sr. explored any avenue that would lead to a civil service career. Instead, he would be a janitor for the rest of his working life.
In the winter of 1891, eight years after they’d arrived in New York, Julia found herself pregnant again. By then some of the older children had moved on with their lives, which afforded the family more room in the apartment and perhaps a few more dollars. Julia was forty-three, and though it was not unusual then for women her age to give birth, the pregnancy came ten years after her last one. As mentioned, she lost some children in infancy, and records aren’t clear, so maybe the gap was not as pronounced. Regardless, just when she must have thought she was through with teething and diapers, another bundle of joy was on the way. William Patrick arrived on July 29, 1891, the only one of the Feehan children who was American by birth.
Much like the street on which he grew up, William Jr.’s early years are lost to posterity. We do know that he was a tough kid from a roughneck, waterfront neighborhood. For a time in his youth, he wanted to be a boxer. He fought at the amateur level, probably for the local Knights of Columbus boxing club. Though his dream of a boxing career wouldn’t come to fruition, long after he’d hung up the gloves he could still punch.
Much later, he would demonstrate his boxing technique to his two teenaged sons. “You give ’em a short chop,” he’d say. The instruction would then be followed by a demonstration.
“He didn’t realize how much it hurt,” son Jim remembered. “He had the strongest hands.”
At some point in his midtwenties, around 1915, Julia became sick with cancer and William’s attentiveness toward her increased. The belief is he was exempted from the draft during World War I to take care of her. On June 5, 1917, he went to the local draft registration office and filled out a draft card. There is, however, no record of William serving in the military. Instead, he took a local job as a shipping clerk and then a mechanic for General Vehicle. What the Ford Motor Company was to Detroit, General, which made electric vehicles, was on a lesser scale to Long Island City. Electric cars made up nearly a quarter of the forty thousand vehicles that crowded the New York City streets at the time. The company employed around two thousand people, a number that would balloon to eight thousand in 1917 when the military fitted the plant to make airplane engines for the war effort.
Whether or not William had set his sights on a career with the car company we don’t know. We do know, however, that his employment at General Vehicle would come to an abrupt and unceremonious end sometime after the First World War. Even though he was an auto mechanic for the company, he didn’t own a driver’s license and wouldn’t have known the difference between a gearshift and a coat rack. One day a supervisor, obviously oblivious to his lack of driving credentials, asked him to move one of the company’s trucks. William Patrick did what he was told and nearly put the vehicle into nearby Newtown Creek.
In his mother’s last years, William was the man of the house. His brothers and sisters had all moved on with their lives and records indicate his father lived at a separate address in Woodside, Queens, some distance away. Though the reason for the estrangement of his parents is not completely clear, there are indications that the elder Feehan liked his drink, as the Irish might say. William lived with his mother until she succumbed to cancer in October 1921. When his father died of a stroke four years later, he was thirty-three and without a family or a career of his own. It is here in our story, however, that a higher power would intercede and change William’s life forever.
Though William was nearly middle-aged when his life path turned toward a fire service career, the organization he was about to enter still held fast to its ribald and colorful adolescence.
Historians point to 1865 as the birth of the modern New York City Fire Department. It was then that reform politicians replaced a patchwork of volunteer departments with a paid force called the Metropolitan Fire Department. Before that, the volunteer fire brigades acted like rival street gangs. Intensely territorial, they would battle each other, sometimes while a building was burning, for access to the limited water sources like hydrants, and the glory that awaited the brigade that put out the fire. In 1850, government officials divided the city into eight districts, each with its own “fire tower” that would alert brigades to a fire by ringing a bell. Only two brigades were supposed to respond to the fire, but the ordinance did little to smother the smoldering animosity between the volunteer departments. One letter to the New York Times in 1865 about volunteer departments read in part, “And all classes of the community, except the ‘roughs,’ are shocked and disgusted by the horrible scenes of disorder attendant on every fire in New York—the shrieking, yelling, hallooing, confusion, absence of all discipline and subordination.” However, it was a riot in July 1863 and not a published complaint that sounded the volunteers’ death knell.
The Civil War was unpopular in many quarters of New York City, especially among the city’s working class, who believed Black men, a portion of whom had escaped the slavery of the South, were trying to take their jobs—they called the war between the states “Lincoln’s Nigger War.” Many volunteer firefighters, some of whom worked on the docks and as skilled laborers, vehemently opposed the war. The genesis of what would become known as the Draft Riots occurred in March 1863, when the U.S. Congress passed the Conscription Act, the nation’s first federal draft. Up until then, because of the service they provided to the community, volunteer firemen in New York City had been exempt from being drafted into military service. The Conscription Act did away with that exemption. The first round of the Civil War draft lottery included several members of the “Black Joke,” a name taken from a bawdy Irish tavern song, and an all-white and particularly violent fire brigade. It was then that the simmering anger against the war and Blacks exploded into the bloodiest civil unrest in U.S. history.
According to some historians, the riots began when members of the Black Joke descended on the draft office and set it on fire. Over the next four days, the riots held lower Manhattan in a bloody grip. According to some estimates, over fifty thousand became involved in the fighting. President Lincoln had to send in federal troops to impose martial law. Though the estimates vary, when all was said and done, some estimates said over a thousand people lay dead, including hundreds of Black men, women, and children who were murdered because of their race.
The Draft Riots were the final straw for the Republican-controlled New York state legislature. In 1865, state lawmakers replaced the citizen fire brigade with the Metropolitan Fire Department. Though volunteers made up the bulk of the new department, one of the first orders the department gave them was to forcefully remove from the firehouses those volunteers who didn’t become part of the paid force. As you might imagine, these evictions didn’t go smoothly, and brawls were commonplace. Though the paid fire department would eventually win out and its arrival would mark the end of the volunteer brigades, a fire in July 1865 proved to be an appropriate epitaph to the most colorful era in New York City’s fire service history.
P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in lower Manhattan was one of the country’s most popular attractions and is still known as perhaps the most bizarre in the history of New York City. Along with animals of every stripe, including two adult whales kept in water tanks, Barnum’s museum was home to a host of circus performers, from tiny Tom Thumb to the Gigantress, a woman purported to be eight feet tall and weighing four hundred pounds.
The fire began in a basement office around noon, perhaps from a discarded cigarette, and spread quickly to the upper floors. Two competing fire brigades ran alongside horse-drawn apparatus. It’s not too far of a stretch to believe, as they arrived on the scene, that they immediately knew the fire was going to be one of epic notoriety. So of course there was the obligatory brawl for first dibs to fight it. Meanwhile, flames shot from the museum’s windows while scores of monkeys who’d escaped the conflagration ran past them and disappeared down the cobblestone streets of old Manhattan, some “never to be seen again,” according to one report. The volunteer firefighters were right about the notoriety. Thousands of New Yorkers watched the fire and the antics of the volunteers from the street. According to historians and newspapers of the day, volunteer fire eaters carried wax figures out of the blaze, believing they were human. One of them threw a likeness of Jefferson Davis wearing a dress out of a window. Another firefighter supposedly carried the Gigantress to safety. Miraculously, no one was killed inside the museum. The two adult whales, however, were boiled alive in their tanks.
