## The Lower Manhattan Territory and What It Meant to Work There
Engine Company 55’s territory — the streets of Little Italy and the surrounding blocks in Lower Manhattan — is worth some description, because the territory is part of what makes a company’s identity. Firefighters know their response area the way a person knows a neighborhood they have lived in for years: not just the streets, but the buildings, the hazards, the routes, the people.
Lower Manhattan in 1980 was a different place than it is now. The neighborhood that Engine 55 covered — Little Italy, the western edge of what would become NoLita, the blocks around Broome and Spring and Prince streets — was still largely inhabited by the Italian-American community that had settled there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though the neighborhood was already beginning the demographic and commercial transitions that would accelerate through the 1980s and 1990s. The restaurants and social clubs and small businesses of the old Italian immigrant community coexisted with the downtown arts scene that had been establishing itself in SoHo and the blocks around it since the early 1970s.
The buildings in the territory were a mixture of mid-rise residential structures, older tenements, and commercial buildings — the typical Lower Manhattan building stock that included everything from nineteenth-century brick construction to mid-century additions. Some of these buildings presented the specific challenges that older urban construction always presents to firefighters: irregular floor plans, tight stairs, unreinforced masonry, and proximity to neighboring structures that allowed fires to spread.