Five Floors Up, page 5
Catherine, too, would rely on the church in the hope of keeping her husband safe. But she also took more temporal steps in pursuit of William’s well-being. Without her husband’s knowledge, she went to her brother the priest and asked if he would use his influence to get William transferred to a quieter firehouse, preferably nearby in Queens.
We don’t know if William protested the machinations of his wife and priestly brother-in-law, but if he did, he didn’t put up much of a fight. Son Jim can’t remember one time when his father raised his voice to his mother. Though he wasn’t demonstrative in his objection, that didn’t mean he hadn’t a say in the matter. He’d handle it his own way. He wasn’t about to let them ship him to a camp.
At the time of the proposed transfer, William had accrued enough seniority that he could’ve worked his own connections to derail it. He knew, however, that to do so would cause an uproar on the home front. He needed to find a middle ground to appease both his wife and his need for fire action. Once again, he found a way to fulfill her wishes and do what he wanted. Catherine wanted William to work in Queens, and he promised her that he would. She didn’t, however, specify where in Queens she wanted him to work. It was through this loophole that William stepped into the most active part of his firefighting career.
In 1936, the fire department had instituted a three-tour system. This change in the chart created openings in companies across the city, including ones in specialty units called rescue trucks. The FDNY initiated the units around 1912 when several fires presented obstacles for which regular companies were not prepared. One of those incidents occurred in the early morning hours of January 9, 1912. At a soaring nine stories, the Equitable Life Building, as it was known, on lower Broadway was considered the first skyscraper in New York City. The blaze had started in the Café Savarin on the bottom floor of the tower and spread up the elevator shaft to all parts of the building. From its onset, the fire had firemen at a distinct disadvantage. Icy, gale-force winds with gusts that measured 65 miles an hour injected oxygen into the fire as though from giant bellows. By eight o’clock that morning, the entire building was sheathed in flame. Black smoke filled the narrow downtown streets. Water from the hoses instantly froze on the building, and then melted from the flames. According to newspaper accounts, firemen performed heroically, entering the burning building several times to carry semiconscious victims to safety. By hacksawing through heavy steel bars, they also rescued a man who had locked himself in a bank vault in the basement, but others died in the vault. Several firemen, who had somehow made their way to the roof, rappelled down the side of the structure to attempt a rescue of three men clinging to an outside ledge as orange flames shot from the window behind them. The firemen would not reach them in time, however, as the ledge gave way and the three fell to their deaths. Firemen battled the conflagration for nearly four hours before they had it somewhat under control. In all, six people would perish in the fire, including an FDNY battalion chief.
The Equitable Building fire, and a series of subway and subway tunnel fires, added to the need of a unit that would specialize in difficult rescue situations, especially for the rescue of other firefighters. Robert Adamson, the fire commissioner at the time, called for firemen who were also top-notch electricians, mechanics, and welders who could use their skills in complicated rescue operations in factories, trains, and other mechanical settings. On March 8, 1915, Rescue 1 went into operation. Quartered on Great Jones Street in downtown Manhattan, they fitted a Cadillac touring car with a welder’s torch and a line-throwing device called a Lyle gun. They had jacks and Z bars that could lift up to thirty-two tons for subway car rescues. They even carried Draeger masks, a self-contained breathing apparatus that looked like an early diving helmet. There’s a photo of William wearing one that makes him look like a character out of a Jules Verne novel. They had first aid for burns and oxygen for smoke inhalation victims. For the casual onlooker at the time, the rescue vehicle must have been like something out of a Batman comic book. It was also an immediate success. Less than a year after the unit was instituted, Rescue 1 firemen sawed through steel bars with a German-made Blau-gas torch to save a trapped and unconscious fire captain. The unit worked out so well that the department formed a second rescue truck in Brooklyn on March 1, 1925. Rescue 3 in the Bronx and Rescue 4 in Queens followed on June 1, 1931. Staten Island would get its own rescue truck in 1948.
On October 2, 1938, the fire department transferred William to Queens Rescue 4, the busiest company in the entire borough. The men assigned to the unit were some of the best and bravest firemen the department had to offer. Instead of retrieving cats from the leafy trees in suburbia, as Catherine might have hoped, William was racing to the most daring, dangerous, and emotionally draining emergencies. One of the more brutal calls concerned a neighbor’s daughter who had been fatally hit by a train after falling onto the subway tracks. On another run, a pump at a gas station exploded, practically incinerating an attendant. Rescue trucks at the time carried nasal catheters that administered oxygen to victims with badly burned faces. Jim remembered his father saying he’d wished someone had shot the poor man to put him out of his misery.
Though William was a brave man, putting his job and need of action ahead of his wife’s emotional well-being was unquestionably self-serving. He wasn’t unique; firefighters have been selfish in this way for about as long as there’s been smoke. They’ll tell you that someone has to put out the fires, a statement that is hard to argue with. A spouse or family member might counter with: Well, why does it have to be you? It is between those two mindsets that the friction in firefighters’ families exists. In William’s time, however, given the diminished power of women then, Catherine had no voice in the matter. Yes, she could try to maneuver behind his back. But in the end, William always did what he wanted when it came to his fire service. Though Catherine lost battle after battle to her husband’s love of the fire department, a move out of Long Island City would soothe the sting.
Nelly, Catherine’s older sister, was never married and lived with her parents. Sometime in the early 1930, she moved with them to a neighborhood called Jackson Heights in Queens. Then, in 1933, her mother, Nora, died, followed by Maurice six months later. Nelly found herself in a two-family home all by herself. Soon after Maurice died, Catherine became pregnant again. During her first pregnancy, Nelly had been just a short walk away and always willing to lend her sister a hand. And although Jackson Heights wasn’t across the country, psychologically at least for Catherine, her sister now seemed more than just a subway ride away.
In the spring of 1935, Catherine gave birth to James, named after his priest uncle. The apartment in Long Island City wasn’t big enough for the new addition to the family. When Nelly suggested to her sister that she and William move in with her, Catherine thought the idea was the answer to her prayers. William, however, wasn’t quite as enthusiastic. He was wary of the close relationship his wife had with his sister-in-law. He began calling them “the Dolly Sisters,” after an identical-twin vaudeville act. He began to envision them teaming up on him about his job, the risks he took, and the hours he worked. Nelly especially would needle William, but always behind his back. One time, much later on, Catherine’s granddaughter was taking about a boy in school she was interested in but didn’t think was very attractive. “Well, looks aren’t everything,” Nelly said. “Take your grandfather, for instance.” But though William was at first reluctant to go, in time began to see that the upside of the move out of Long Island City.
As with other parts of the outer boroughs of New York City, the neighborhood of Jackson Heights experienced a housing boom in the Roaring Twenties. Just two decades earlier, the mayor of New York City, William J. Gaynor, had called the section “the cornfields of Queens.” With the extension of the subway and the Queensboro Bridge opening, however, the area became prime property for investors. One of the first to see the real estate potential of the area was a man named Edward A. MacDougall. Today, Jackson Heights is the most culturally diverse community in the United States. Within its confines, some 170 languages are spoken. The community MacDougall imagined and went about developing, however, wasn’t nearly as diverse. In fact, according to researchers, MacDougall built houses and apartments specifically for white, non-immigrant Protestants of a certain means. One of the apartment buildings he built, called “The Towers,” featured seven-bedroom flats as expensive as any in Manhattan. MacDougall’s project was an immediate success, and Jackson Heights as a whole became a bustling hub of middle- and upper-middle-class commuters.
On a fireman’s salary of $3,000 a year, there was little chance William could afford to buy a house on his own in Jackson Heights. But Nelly, whom they now called Nennie because baby Jim couldn’t pronounce “Nelly,” could. In 1939, she put a thousand dollars down on a three-story brick and shingle home a few blocks from the two-family in which they’d lived. Though we don’t know what sort of financial arrangement existed between William and his sister-in-law, what we do know is that when Nennie moved into her new house, he and Catherine moved along with her.
The house, part of MacDougall’s vision, was massive and sat on a street as wide as a boulevard and lined with soaring maples and oaks. It was the perfect place to raise a family. It certainly was a step up for the Feehans.
Some of their neighbors included the Slatterys from Slattery Construction, who lived down the block. Slattery Construction built the tunnels under the East River, and later would help construct the United Nations headquarters, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and the World Trade Center. A doctor lived across the street who was also Father Jim’s best friend. Jim Feehan remembers a dentist on the block giving him money to teach his son to play stickball. Jim took the cash and told the kid to sit on the curb and watch. Even the public school custodian who lived in the house next door seemed to have an endless supply of disposable cash. If you’re wondering how a custodian could afford a big house in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, you must not have read the New York tabloids for most of the last half of the twentieth century. Stories about kickback schemes that proliferated due to lack of oversight of public school custodians ran about as frequently as advertisements of sales at Macy’s. “He made more than the mayor,” Jim Feehan said of the janitor.
Another family in the neighborhood was particularly standoffish, or at least the Feehans believed they were. It turned out they were more secretive than aloof. The man of the house’s income was even more mysterious than the custodian’s. Once, when he was gone for a considerable time, his wife explained her husband’s absence as an extended business trip. The extended business trip, however, was actually a stretch in an upstate jail. Jim remembered that the couple later had a row in the street in front of their home, complete with flying pots and pans. They moved from the neighborhood soon after.
Catherine, William, and the children took the spacious and luxurious first two floors of the house. The first floor was cavernous. Jim Feehan remembers playing catch with his brother Bill in the living room. Though Nennie was the house’s legal owner, the king of the castle was her roommate and brother.
Nennie and Father Jim shared the top floor of the house, which had been remodeled into a one-bedroom apartment that included a dining room, living room, kitchen, and bath. “Shared,” however, is a generous description of Nennie’s living arrangement. Father Jim was as demanding as he was pompous. When the church transferred him to a parish in the Hamptons on Long Island, he became a part-time lodger in the house in Jackson Heights. Yet the bedroom waited empty and tidy for his arrival. Nennie was relegated to a daybed in the living room. Father Jim had a buzzer system installed to summon Nennie when she was downstairs. Watching her run up and down the stairs so many times, William began to wonder what would wear out first, the buzzer or Nennie. And most of those trips were for things like making a cup of tea or ironing his trousers, simple tasks that he’d have no trouble doing himself.
The priest drove an old Plymouth that looked like it was once owned by Bonnie and Clyde. At five-three, he could barely see over the steering wheel and never learned how to parallel park, a necessity in New York City. He would drive in from the Hamptons in those days on two-lane highways and winding roads, a journey that would take him four or five hours. Before he left, he would call Nennie and give her his approximate time of arrival. As the prescribed time drew near, she would dutifully put on her coat and stand in the street in front of the house, keeping a parking space open on the corner for him so he could pull straight in.
For the most part, modern American women have obtained a considerable amount of independence, so it might be difficult from a contemporary perspective to understand why Nennie would allow herself to be treated so poorly. But well into the twentieth century, the expectation for many Irish Catholic daughters was one of self-sacrifice and subservience to the men in their families. The Blessed Virgin Mary, and her devotion to her son, was the ultimate role model for them. Though we don’t know for sure if there were specific pursuits Nennie abandoned to serve her brother the priest, it certainly seems he gave little or no consideration to her needs. Nennie was never able to break free from the bonds he placed on her.
Though not thrilled to have a sister-in-law and brother-in-law living with him, William had no problem with the accommodations. The house in Jackson Heights was a castle compared to the tiny apartments in which he had lived most of his life in Long Island City. In time, he even got used to living under the same roof with Nennie and Father Jim. But there was one thing he would never get used to, and that was the feathered housemate who lived on the top floor.
The mynah belonged to Father Jim, although he delegated the care of the bird to Nennie. It chattered and cawed incessantly. It was dirty and smelled. William despised the bird, especially the cageling’s sarcastic streak. Every time he’d go to the top floor, the mynah would greet him with the same refrain:
“Who are you? Who are you?”
For a proud man who lived with his family in a house his sister-in-law owned, the words had a particular bite.
“I’ll show you who I am,” he would grumble. “When I throw you out the window.”
For Catherine, living with Nennie almost made up for the worry she expended on William. Often the Dolly Sisters would go on sojourns into the city to shop at Macy’s or Gimbels. They’d be gone for hours and then blame the Northern Boulevard bus for keeping them out so long. When William’s sister Ellen, also a spinster, moved in, the Dolly Sisters became a trio. When you added the bird, two small children, and the demanding priest with his buzzer into the mix, the house could be like Grand Central Station on a Friday rush hour. It was no wonder William couldn’t wait to leave for work.
On December 7, 1941, William was a fifteen-year veteran of the fire department, had three years in Rescue 4, and was fifty years old. He was also fiercely patriotic. Any notion that he didn’t want to serve in the First World War is dispelled by his action during the second. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, he tried to enlist in the U.S. Army. Well over the maximum age, he lied about it on the form, listing his birthday as July 27, 1896, instead of the actual date, July 29, 1891. He wouldn’t get the chance to fight, however. We don’t know if the Army saw through his ruse or the fire department simply wouldn’t let him go.
During World War II, younger members of the FDNY joined the armed services in droves, much to the consternation of Mayor La Guardia. A fire buff of the first order, La Guardia thought they would perform a better service by keeping his city safe from fire and air raids, which never materialized. Because of the shortages in manpower, however, the department needed as many men as they could hold on to and doubled the work chart for the firemen like William who stayed home. Fireman Feehan was back to working eighty-four-hour weeks as he did when he first came on the job, and he did so without a pay raise. The city also suspended civil service promotional exams during the war. To fill the vacancies in the upper ranks, FDNY brass appointed firemen on an interim basis. William was made an “acting lieutenant.” The job came with all the additional responsibilities, but without an actual promotion or any additional compensation for the higher rank.
Though he wouldn’t go to Europe or the South Pacific, William fought plenty of battles at home. Because of the hours, and the war-thinned department membership, his fire service during the war was incredibly grueling. And with each set of stairs he climbed, each blaze he faced, each inhalation of smoke, his body broke down a little more. There is perhaps no other profession more physically and emotionally demanding than a firefighter’s in a busy specialty squad or firehouse. William was as tough as they come on the job, but even he wasn’t immune to the physical decline that befalls every active fire eater. Meanwhile, the fires he fought remained dangerous and at times spectacular.
The SS Normandie was the pride of France. Christened in the spring of 1935, the ocean liner was the biggest, fastest, and most luxurious of its day. The ship’s dining room was a hundred yards long and adorned with bronze and cut glass walls and lights made of Lalique crystal. The galley served food as good as any restaurant’s on the Left Bank. Promenades that lined the ship’s perimeter were wide as city streets. Movie stars and millionaires filled the first-class cabins, some containing four bedrooms. The Normandie, however, would sail for only four and a half years. In 1939, at the start of the war in Europe, the ship was docked at the West Side piers in New York, a berth in which the great liner would stay for the rest of its short, tragic life.
