Buscemi navigated both cultures simultaneously for four years, and both left marks. The fire service gave him the specific knowledge of what solidarity feels like under conditions of real risk, and what it means to belong to an institution that asks you to trust other people with your life. The arts culture gave him the aesthetic framework and the professional ambitions that would shape his entire subsequent career. The combination — the practical and the artistic, the institutional and the individual — is not unusual for people who grow up in working-class families in cities with strong institutional cultures. It is, however, not universally present; many people who grow up in those environments do not also develop the artistic ambitions and the creative capacities that Buscemi brought to his acting career.
The city itself — New York, specifically — made certain things possible. The proximity of the firehouse to the theater world, the ability to audition for Off-Off-Broadway productions on days off from the firehouse, the density of a cultural environment in which the fire department and the arts scene occupied the same neighborhoods and shared some of the same people: these are features of New York that are not features of most American cities. The fact that he could be a firefighter in Little Italy and an aspiring actor in SoHo without those identities feeling like they belonged to different worlds was a fact about the city as much as a fact about him.
September 11, 2001 was an attack on that city — on its particular density of people and communities and institutions, on its specific geography of neighborhoods and financial centers and cultural life. The FDNY’s response to the attacks was a response by people who were, in many cases, products of the same neighborhoods and institutions that the attacks struck. The firefighters who died were New Yorkers responding to an attack on New York, and the grief that followed was a specifically New York grief — collective, institutional, expressed through the channels and communities that New York’s density provides.