NY Times – October 17, 2016
by CHARLES DELAFUENTE
Oct.17 is a sad day for the New York Fire Department. Monday is the 50th anniversary of the fire that, until the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack, claimed more firefighters’ lives than any other disaster in the city. The short trip that the firefighters made from nearby firehouses on Oct. 17, 1966, started around 9:30 p.m. when they headed to a fire at a building on East 22nd Street, just east of Broadway.
Despite the heat and smoke they encountered, firefighters who were there said the source of the blaze — its “seat,” in firefighters’ parlance — had not been obvious. Several firefighters were sent around the block, to 23rd Street, and told to pull a hose through a drugstore there in an attempt to approach the fire from the rear. They went in, and never made it out.
What was burning in the 22nd Street building, a subsequent investigation showed, was paint and lacquer that had been stored in the basement by an art dealer. What the firefighters who went into Wonder Drug & Cosmetics, at 6 East 23rd Street, across from Madison Square Park, had no way of knowing was that the store and the 22nd Street building shared a basement, and that an interior basement wall had recently been moved to give the 22nd Street building more underground storage space.
That meant that the drugstore’s thick floor was poorly supported, and as the fire burned below it collapsed, sending 10 firefighters plunging into the basement. Two others were caught by the flames that quickly roared up to the first floor through the huge hole left by the collapse.
The death toll was 12: two chiefs, two lieutenants and eight firefighters. The five-story building that housed the drugstore is long gone. In its place is a high-rise apartment building that covers 22nd to 23rd Streets. On its 23rd Street wall is a bronze plaque that reads, “In tribute to our comrades,” with the date of the fire and the name and rank of each of the 12 victims.
The Fire Department’s current commissioner, Daniel A. Nigro, whose father was a captain in the department, visited the scene the day after the fatal fire, and speaks often of the tragedy.
“It made a lasting impression on me,” Mr. Nigro said last week.
He attended the funeral of several of the men a few days later, which he recalled as “a very sad day.”
Mr. Nigro became a firefighter three years later and was assigned to a Midtown Manhattan company. At the time, he said, the deaths were “still on the minds of the firefighters in that area.”
The memory has not faded. “Any time I go on 23rd Street, which is fairly frequent, whoever I’m with, I tell them” about the fire, Mr. Nigro said, adding, “Every once in a while, I see somebody who was there, and we talk about it.”
Every Oct. 17, firefighters who helped battle the blaze, department commanders and current members of the companies whose members died gather in front of the bronze plaque for a solemn ceremony for what is remembered as the 23rd Street Fire. They will do so again on Monday.
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