Engine 55 was known as “Cinquantacinque” — Italian for “fifty-five” — reflecting its history in and service to the Italian-American neighborhood it had covered since 1887. The firehouse at 363 Broome Street had been part of the neighborhood’s landscape for over ninety years when Buscemi joined in 1980. The company had accumulated a history and a reputation across that time, and new members joined an institution with its own traditions, stories, and expectations.
Buscemi spent four years working in that territory and living in that building. He would have driven the truck down Mulberry Street and Mott Street, hauled hose up narrow tenement stairs, searched building floors in conditions of limited visibility, and done the whole range of work that an FDNY engine company does. He would have learned the specific geography of his area in the detailed, practical way that emergency work requires.
The proximity of the Engine 55 territory to the World Trade Center is worth noting. The towers, which dominated the skyline of Lower Manhattan from their completion in 1971 and 1972 until their destruction in 2001, were within the extended response area of companies stationed in Lower Manhattan. Engine 55 would have been among the units capable of reaching the Trade Center in a major incident, as it was on September 11. The geography of the territory created a connection between the firehouse community and the towers that was both physical and professional.
When the towers fell in 2001, Engine 55 was already there. The five members who died — Lieutenant Freund, Faustino Apostol Jr., Stephen Russell, Robert Lane, and Christopher Mozzillo — died doing exactly what they had always done: responding to an emergency in their extended territory, going into a building that was on fire, trusting that the training and the equipment and the people around them would be adequate to the situation. The situation was not one that any firefighter’s training or any fire department’s equipment had been designed for. They went in anyway.