## The City and the Institution That Shaped Him
New York is a city that shapes its inhabitants in specific ways, and one of those ways is through the particular combination of density, history, and institutional culture that characterizes life in its older neighborhoods. Buscemi grew up in Valley Stream, which is technically a Nassau County suburb rather than a city neighborhood, but his adult life was formed in Manhattan — in the downtown arts world of the early 1980s, in the firehouse on Broome Street, in the theaters and bars and loft spaces of SoHo and Little Italy and the surrounding blocks.
The New York of 1980, when he joined Engine 55, was coming out of its worst decade. The fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s had pushed the city to the edge of bankruptcy. The South Bronx had experienced catastrophic fires. Times Square and much of Midtown were in various stages of deterioration. The city that would emerge through the 1980s and 1990s as a symbol of urban renewal and cultural vitality had not yet arrived; the city of 1980 was a place where working in a fire department meant working in a city that was struggling and where the department itself had endured years of resource constraints.
The culture that formed in that environment — the fire service culture, the downtown arts culture — was shaped by scarcity and by the particular creativity that scarcity can generate. People found ways to do things with what was available. The independent film movement that produced the directors and actors who shaped American cinema through the 1980s and 1990s was not a movement of abundance; it was a movement of resourceful people making films with very little money in a city that was cheap enough, in those years, to allow artists to live while they tried to make work.