Five Floors Up, page 4
In December 1928, the fire department promoted William to first grade fireman, a rank he would hold for the rest of his thirty-year career in the FDNY. This was not from a lack of ambition. William loved facing a raging fire with a nozzle in his hands and saw no reason to do anything else. His mindset was not all that unusual in the FDNY. There were and are many firefighters who wouldn’t think of trading an active firefighting role for a promotion that would take them away from fighting fires.
For Catherine, however, her husband’s dedication to his perilous job was a constant source of consternation. They’d moved into a small apartment at 146 11th Street in Long Island City, not too far from where both had grown up. Six days a week, William worked fourteen-hour shifts. He’d drag himself home reeking from the stench of smoke and with stories of narrow escapes and harrowing fires. When Catherine became pregnant in early 1929, her worries only increased.
More than once throughout his career, fireman Feehan’s love of his job would directly conflict with his wife’s wishes. By all accounts, the relationship he had with Catherine was much the same as he had with his mother: He was devoted to her. William was not a selfish man. The last thing he wanted was for his wife to suffer. And yet when it came to a choice between his Catherine and the fire department, the fire department always seemed to win. There were times, however, when he was able to satisfy her demands while holding on to what he wanted. The first of these creative maneuvers came in April 1929.
At the time, the FDNY was in the process of opening sixteen new firehouses in Queens to accommodate a population spreading out from the city center. One of the new structures was in Astoria, a neighborhood growing with new apartment buildings and businesses that included a movie studio later called Paramount. Chances are, William’s transfer to Astoria was an organizational decision—the firehouse needed the manpower. When her husband brought home the news that the department was sending him to a docile, suburban setting bordering Long Island City, Catherine was thrilled. Not only would William be safer, but he’d be closer to home. William, it seems, went along with the transfer without argument. After all, his wife was pregnant with their first child, and according to family stories, Catherine was not having an easy pregnancy. William wanted to support her in any way he could. He had no intention, however, of staying in the Astoria firehouse for long.
On September 29, 1929, Catherine gave birth to a healthy baby named William Michael Feehan. Two weeks later, much to Catherine’s consternation, her husband transferred back to twenty-one engine and the cauldron of the East Side. How he managed the quick turn of events is not clear. By then he had begun to form an impressive reputation as an active fire eater. Perhaps some sympathetic fire chief saw William’s courage being wasted rescuing cats from trees in Queens and brought him back where his talent could be put to use. Though William was able to outmaneuver his wife’s wishes to get back to the firehouse he loved, Catherine wouldn’t give up in trying to steer her husband’s career to safety. She had good reason to worry about him.
After the stock market crashed in 1929, sending the United States spiraling into the Great Depression, fires on the East Side of Manhattan increased dramatically. One cause of the fires was alcohol stills that people built in their apartments. As “bathtub gin” increased in popularity, so did the number of contraptions that implemented an open flame. The city put together a task force of tenement inspectors, at least 250 men responsible for Manhattan’s apartment buildings. However, the force had a limited effect on illegal operations, as many offenders received suspended sentences or fines of just two dollars, about thirty dollars today. Fires in tenements had been prevalent enough without what was tantamount to a lit fuse burning in them. By one count, in 1927 there were twenty-five hundred stills operating in Brooklyn alone, and that was before the Depression. Most of the bootleg booze apparatus was for personal use, but moneymaking operations proliferated. Explosions in apartments became so commonplace that cops wouldn’t even write them up in reports. For William, who never touched a drop of alcohol in his life, fighting fires caused by stills not only brought more danger to his job but was the height of irony.
It wasn’t a still fire, or even one in a tenement, however, that would nearly take William’s life for the first time. That would happen in a brownstone on a fashionable block off Fifth Avenue.
The morning of October 27, 1931, was quiet in William’s firehouse. The guys drank coffee and talked about the stories in the newspapers. A few days before, a judge had sentenced Al Capone to eleven years for tax evasion. Sportswriters wrote about Babe Ruth asking Jacob Ruppert, the Yankees’ owner, to renew his eighty grand per annum salary. One newspaperman reportedly asked Ruth to comment on his salary being more than President Herbert Hoover’s. “I had a better year than him,” Ruth quipped. The New York State governor, Franklin Roosevelt, attended the opening ceremony of the newly finished George Washington Bridge. By then, William was a battle-hardened fire eater. Four-plus years in a busy engine company will do that to you. The nozzleman position is usually one that rotated among members of the fire company. William, however, was so fearless at the job that it was hard to ask him to give it up. He’d be on the nozzle the first time a fire almost killed him.
Often compared with London’s Bond Street, West 46th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues was lined with upscale clothing shops housed in old town houses and lofts. It was early morning when the alarm came in. Had the fire started even an hour later, the streets would have been a snarled mess of cars, trucks, and double-decker buses, but with little traffic at that hour, the engine truck reached the burning town house in a matter of minutes. The blaze, however, moved faster than they did. By the time Engine 21 turned onto West 46th, fire had consumed the top floors of the structure.
William jumped from the rig and helped run a hose line into the building and up the stairs. He wore a rubber trench coat, a wool coat underneath, heavy cloth pants, and cut-off rubber boots. Though the outfit might have been appropriate for a February sleetstorm, it did little to protect a fireman from a blaze. Nozzlemen often walk on their haunches to stay under the smoke, which leaves the upper thighs and groin area especially susceptible to burns. The outfit William wore also made a nearly unbearably hot job even hotter. Deep red fire burns at over a thousand degrees. White flames can reach temperatures of two thousand degrees or more. Underneath his rubber coat, William was soaked in sweat. His wool coat was as heavy as cement. As he moved, smoke as thick as tar hung just overhead. He didn’t wear gloves. Few firemen then did. The retired fire chief and author Vince Dunn tells the story of being instructed to buy his own pair of gloves when he graduated from proby school in 1957. “Look at this guy with gloves!” Dunn remembers a fireman yelling, as if he’d shown up at the firehouse wearing a mink coat. He also remembers not getting to use the gloves very much, as they had a habit of ending up in other firemen’s lockers.
If William used any type of breathing apparatus at all, it would have been rudimentary. It was only after World War II that the Scott Air-Pak, used by fighter pilots at high altitudes, became part of the firefighters’ equipment in the FDNY. Even into the 1950s, however, many firefighters refused to use them because they thought they were cumbersome. The superheated atmosphere singed William’s nasal passages. The fire devoured the oxygen in the room, leaving him little breathable air. Unconsciousness came without warning. The big firefighter’s blood oxygen level dropped dangerously low. Respiratory failure and cardiac arrest are the most common causes of firefighters’ demise. William was within a breath of becoming part of those statistics.
William’s fellow firemen pulled the nozzle from his hands and dragged him out of the burning room. They summoned an FDNY physician named Harry M. Archer. Dr. Archer was either nearby or on his way to the fire, because he arrived quickly. Out on the sidewalk, he worked for over an hour to keep William alive, using two tanks of oxygen attached to an early resuscitator called a pulmotor. Still, the burly fireman barely clung to life. A regular resting heart rate is between 60 and 100 beats a minute. William’s had fallen to 20. Firemen ran to the rectory attached to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, just a few blocks away. They returned with a priest who gave William the sacrament of Last Rites. As the back doors of the ambulance closed and he was transported to the Polyclinic Hospital on West 50th Street, his company pals were sure it would be the last time they’d see him alive. A news article about the fire stated that “little hope is held for [William’s] recovery.”
But William would survive, perhaps miraculously. The family story goes that the nurse tried to take off his scapular medal, colloquially known as Catholic dog tags, and William nearly jumped out of the hospital bed to stop her. There’s no way of telling whether or not his faith in God saved him from an early worldly exit. We do know that his near-death experience did little to dissuade him from running into burning buildings. In a five-alarm blaze a few months later, William inhaled sulfur fumes and found himself in the hospital again. Two years after that experience, he was buried in a building that collapsed during a fire and ended up in the hospital again. Each time he lay in a hospital bed, Catherine would come to see him and make him promise he would not put himself in danger again. Each time, William would nod to ease her worry, all the while knowing that the next time the opportunity came, he would grab the nozzle again.
Not every fire run he took was death-defying for William. In fact, the stories of his antics and hijinks could fill a binder and have been told so many times since in the Feehan family that they’re rounded at the edges.
After a spate of deadly and spectacular theater fires across the country, mostly caused by the gas lamps of the day, New York City enacted regulations that required a uniformed fireman to be posted at all theater performances. Before the show, the fireman would check the fire alarm, the self-closing fire doors installed in all theaters, the proscenium arches, and the nonflammable curtains put in place due to earlier fires. During the performance, firemen made sure the aisles were clear and the fire exits accessible.
For a busy fireman, theater duty was a chance to take a breather and see a show. One night in the early 1930s, William volunteered to do fire duty at a theater featuring an up-and-coming singer named Ella Fitzgerald. Noting her name, he told his pals in the firehouse that he was in the mood to hear some good Irish music. On another evening, the detail put him in an uptown opera house. The performance that night was by an Italian composer and set during the days of the Roman Empire. Just before the performance, several of the extras on the show called in sick with the flu. The director found himself in a real bind. When William arrived for work, he saw his way out of it.
The local firehouse captain would do rounds each night to check on the firemen who were on theater duty. On this particular evening, the captain happened to be accompanied by his boss, a deputy chief. When they arrived at the opera house, William was nowhere to be found. They looked near the exits, in the lobby, even in the wings. As the search continued, the deputy chief became more and more aggravated.
“Where the hell is he?” the chief demanded of the captain.
“He must be here somewhere,” the captain answered. “Feehan’s a good man.”
It was at that point that the captain’s eyes fell on the performance. “There he is!” he exclaimed.
“Where?”
“The third Roman soldier from the left,” he said, pointing at the back of the stage. “The one with the spear!”
The friendships William made in Engine 21 would last his entire life. There was Mike Imhoff. Five foot five on his tiptoes, Mike was built like a fireplug but was as nimble as a dancer. And then there was Eddie Keeley, a chauffeur on the rigs who would drive the engine in bare feet because he had a better feel for the clutch and brake pedal that way, he said. Rough and tough like William, Keeley worked the docks as his second job. One day, after he’d retired, William sent his son Bill to the waterfront to deliver Eddie a message. Bill was then a college student and dressed, as male students of that day often did, in a suit and tie. When he asked a dockworker if he could speak to Eddie, the man looked him over suspiciously. At the time, television networks were broadcasting the Kefauver Committee hearings on organized crime. The Senate investigation had partly to do with the Mafia’s control of the docks in New York. Thinking young Bill might be a federal agent, the man gave him the runaround. Only when young Feehan said that his father knew Eddie from the fire department did the man relax his guard.
Catherine, too, had plenty of friends, all of them from the neighborhood in which she grew up. There were the Brady sisters, Lol and Nel, and a girl named Mamie O’Rourke, just like the one from the song “The Sidewalks of New York.” Still, caring for the baby, she spent many hours alone at night while William was working. At least outwardly, Catherine wasn’t emotionally frail—she was a city kid from a tough neighborhood. But she had to have had moments at night where frightening scenarios played in her thoughts—all firefighter spouses experience the feeling. And although she didn’t have the close camaraderie of the firehouse that her husband enjoyed, she did have one person in her life on whom she could always rely, her sister. And much to William’s dismay, that relationship was going to become a united front against him.
For many in New York City during the Great Depression life was miserable. Shantytowns called “Hoovervilles,” named after the unpopular president, swelled in Riverside and Central Parks. Many of the homeless who lived in Hooverville had worked in the trades. Masons built sturdy homes of brick and cement in the parks, while the unskilled in labor lived in slapdash structures made of tin sheets and plywood. Unemployment in Harlem reached 50 percent. Food lines and violent demonstrations were commonplace. For the most part, however, William’s civil service job, and his yearly salary of $3,000, kept the Feehans immune from the financial rapaciousness of the Depression. But the poverty of the time brought even more overcrowding, squalor, crime, and fire to the response area of Engine 21. In 1935, a Broadway play by Stanley Kingsley called Dead End drew the world’s attention to the street urchins who roamed the blocks under the Queensboro Bridge. Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia steered New Deal federal money into slum clearance efforts on the East Side. Families living in the tenements were relocated to housing projects on the Lower East Side, the Bronx, and elsewhere. The plan brought needed work to carpenters, electricians, and roofers. One of those projects would eventually become one of the most exclusive stretches of real estate in the world—Sutton Place. The neighborhood once ruled by the junior toughs portrayed by Huntz Hall and Leo Gorcey onstage would become home to the likes of the Pierpont Morgans and the Vanderbilts. It would also be the scene of one of the most spectacular blazes Engine 21 fought.
In the middle of the afternoon on April 4, 1935, a roofer kicked over a flaming tar kettle on the roof of 505 East 55th Street. The blaze caught quickly and began to consume the building and spread to adjoining structures, one of which sat on the East River’s bank. Engine 8 from nearby 51st Street was the first fire company to arrive. By the time Engine 21 and William got there, the fire was winning the battle. Thick black smoke poured from the structure, and flames licked upward from the blown-out windows. As William entered the building, the structure’s support walls began to give way and the wall facing the street buckled. Bricks rained down on him and his mates. The ensuing collapse partially buried Engine 8’s rig and most of William’s company.
There is no official departmental record of the event. For many years, the FDNY’s record-keeping system was limited to journals kept by captains in individual firehouses. Even when a uniformed member of the department died in a blaze, the fire department did little post-fire analysis. Other than the captain’s journals, firemen relied on oral accounts usually shared at mealtimes. As you might imagine, details would shift, be misconstrued or exaggerated. Only in 1998, when Congress funded a study to investigate firefighter deaths, did official written records supplant the oral history tradition. Newspaper reports, however, tell us that the collapse of the building on 55th Street was so catastrophic that it pushed most of the adjoining building into the East River below. The fire reduced the other structure to a hollowed-out shell. There aren’t records of William being hospitalized, but it’s hard to imagine he wasn’t injured when the wall fell on him. The department would honor him for his actions later that year by placing him on the Roll of Merit, a list of firemen who had performed above the call of duty. On Valentine’s Day 1936, William was injured again, this time in a fire at Hunter College on the East Side. An iron radiator fell through the ceiling and fractured his skull. For Catherine, it was the last straw.
William had remained a devout Catholic, and would light a candle in church on his way to every shift. But even with faith as deep as his, with the close calls in the fires of West 46th and East 55th Streets, it seems he had started to wonder if he was cheating death. In the kitchen of the apartment he set up a shrine with votive candles where he would pray for an hour after dinner. He had a three-foot tall wooden statue of Our Lady with a kneeler in the bedroom. He carried a missal the size of a thumb that his parents had brought from Ireland. In the late 1600s, English invaders banned the Catholic religion and hunted and brutally murdered priests. Worshippers printed the tiny missals so that they could be easily hidden. Much later, William would give his to his granddaughter Elizabeth. And he still received Communion most days.
