Understanding why requires understanding who he was before anyone outside New York’s downtown theater scene had heard of him.
## Brooklyn, the Civil Service Exam, and the Long Way Into a Firehouse
Steven Vincent Buscemi was born on December 13, 1957, in Brooklyn, New York. He grew up in Valley Stream, a suburb on Long Island, in a working-class household where civil service work was the practical aspiration. His father was a New York City sanitation worker, which meant he understood institutional employment — the pension, the union, the structured career that a civil service position provided. When Steve was approaching eighteen, his father’s advice was direct: take whatever civil service exam you can get.
Buscemi took the Fire Department’s exam in 1976. He was eighteen. He was also, even then, thinking about acting — he was drawn to theater, to performance, to the life of the arts that his upbringing had not particularly prepared him for. He moved to Manhattan and spent the years between the exam and his appointment doing the things ambitious young people with artistic ambitions did in New York in the late 1970s: moving furniture, doing odd jobs, taking whatever performing work was available. He did stand-up comedy. He worked the margins of the downtown arts scene that was then producing performers and writers who would become central to American culture in the following decades.
The appointment to Engine 55 came in 1980. He was twenty-two years old.
Engine Company 55 is stationed at 363 Broome Street, in the neighborhood now called NoLita but then simply the edge of Little Italy. The firehouse itself is a landmark: designed by architect R.H. Robertson and completed in 1899, with a red-brick and limestone facade combining Romanesque Revival and Beaux-Arts elements, iron scrollwork above the bay doors, and the original “Engine 55” inscription still visible from the street. It was Robertson’s only commission for the FDNY. From that building, Engine 55 had been serving one of the densest and historically most complex neighborhoods in Manhattan for over a hundred years when Buscemi arrived as a probationary firefighter — a probie, in the department’s terminology — in 1980.