The FDNY of the early 1980s was a particular institution in a particular city. New York in this period was still recovering from the financial crisis of the mid-1970s, which had pushed the city to the edge of bankruptcy and resulted in significant cuts to municipal services, including the fire department. The Bronx had experienced a period of catastrophic arson and fire loss in the late 1970s that became emblematic of urban decline; the city’s firefighters had worked in conditions of equipment shortages and understaffing during some of those years. By 1980, the city was beginning to stabilize financially, but the culture of the fire service — the hours, the physical demands, the bond formed by shared risk — was what it had always been, independent of municipal budgets.
For Buscemi, the firehouse was a revelation of a particular kind. He later said he liked the job — the work itself and the people he worked alongside. He described finding something he had not expected: a brotherhood, in his word, of people who depended on each other in conditions of genuine physical danger and who had developed, out of that dependence, a close and particular culture. The firehouse was a place where people cooked together, lived together in the long hours between calls, and then went into burning buildings together when the alarm sounded. You could not perform competence in that environment; you either had it or you didn’t, and the people around you knew which was true.
He was a probie, which meant he was the newest member of the company and did what probies did: the cooking, the cleaning, the maintenance, the hauling. He learned how the equipment worked, how calls were handled, how the men communicated in the chaos of a working fire. He learned the geography of his response area — the narrow streets of Little Italy and the surrounding blocks, the buildings with particular challenges, the routes that worked and the ones that didn’t. Engine 55 was known as one of the FDNY’s busier companies; the Lower Manhattan territory it covered was dense with residential buildings, restaurants, and commercial establishments that generated the full range of fire calls.