New York's ground zero of grief
Staten Island lost 200 residents Sept. 11. Now the same community values that made its firefighters heroes help the community heal from its loss.
By Terry Golway
Nov. 20, 2001 | STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- When politicians and celebrities visit ground zero to pay tribute to the spirit of New York, they're probably not thinking of the tree-lined streets of northern Staten Island, or the tracts of new row houses that have sprouted up around the infamous Fresh Kills landfill in the island's southwest corner, where World Trade Center debris is being trucked. The city's least-populated and most suburban borough is home to neither the glamour nor the power that the world associates with Manhattan. But it, along with the Rockaways, is the city's ground zero of grief.
Nearly 200 Staten Island residents, in a borough of about 400,000, lost their lives Sept. 11. Of that number, 81 were firefighters. Two months after the terrorist attack, small shrines of flowers and the artwork of school-children decorate the borough's firehouses, and firefighters still are gathering in their dress blue uniforms outside the borough's churches, still saluting widows holding their husbands' helmets, still eulogizing fallen brothers. To add to the horror, the remnants of Staten Island's Rescue Company 5, decimated on Sept. 11, were sent to the Rockaways on Nov. 12 when American Airlines Flight 587 crashed, killing at least 260 people.
If, in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks, there is a new cultural moment known as blue-collar chic, Staten Island is its epicenter. It is the city's whitest borough and its most Republican. It is heavily Catholic, predominantly Italian, filled with cops, firefighters and other uniformed workers. It is almost aggressively middle-class in its values and cultural interests. It is a place easily dismissed, at least before Sept. 11, as the home of big hair, clunky minivans and brawny do-it-yourselfers.
But there's an infinitely more complex and more human narrative at work in the borough's tidy backyards, thriving public schools and flourishing civic life. The stories of some of the borough's lost firefighters fascinate not only because of the courage they displayed, but the stereotypes they shattered. Lieutenant Charles Margiotta, 44, one of a locally famous athletic family, was on his way home after working the 6 p.m. to 9 a.m. overnight shift when he heard about the terrorist attack Sept. 11. A graduate of Brown University, Margiotta double-majored in English and sociology and played for the school's Ivy League championship football team in 1976. He worked for General Motors for a few years after college, but it offered him little satisfaction, so he joined the Fire Department in 1981. The morning of Sept. 11, driving home, he heard about the attacks and drove to the nearest firehouse, the headquarters of Rescue 5, and jumped aboard a rig headed for downtown Manhattan. He died there, leaving a wife and two children.
Sean Hanley, 35, had grown up hearing stories about his maternal grandfather, who died fighting a fire in Brooklyn in 1939. Undeterred, he followed in his grandfather's footsteps five years ago, and on Sept. 11, he, like Margiotta, had finished up a night tour and was headed home when the planes struck. He drove himself to the World Trade Center, and died.
Even the Fire Department of New York can't teach such selflessness. It springs from family, parish and community, from values that honor courage more than money, sacrifice more than ambition, family more than status. Those same values are helping the borough heal from the Sept. 11 tragedy, but even here, it will be slow going.
If we really want to understand the lives of the Charles Margiottas and Sean Hanleys of our world, we will have to put aside our media-encouraged clichés about narrow working-class life. Staten Island may send Republicans to Congress and the City Council, but the borough's firefighters are old-fashioned union men (even those with college degrees) who haven't forgiven their onetime union leader, Thomas von Essen, for crossing over into management to become Mayor Rudy Giuliani's fire commissioner. The two- and three-car garages may indicate suburban individualism run riot, but many of the borough's two-dozen-plus towns cling fiercely to their collective identities. Tottenville, in the borough's southern tip, prides itself on its little shopping district and small-town values; St. George, just across the harbor from downtown Manhattan, is grittier, more urban and almost -- almost -- chic.
Staten Island can be a parochial place, like so many ethnic or blue-collar enclaves, but the flip side of parochialism is a sense of community that no city of transient careerists can match, or perhaps even comprehend. The obituaries in the local newspaper, the Staten Island Advance, chronicle not just the lives of individuals but the life and heartbreak of a vibrant community. This firefighter coached youth soccer teams; that one ran charity golf outings. One arranged his work schedule around his children; another organized an annual family reunion. Staten Island, it becomes clear, is a place where nobody bowls alone, to use sociologist Robert Putnam's shorthand for modern anomie. It is a place where the firehouse ethic of brotherhood and fraternity rules. Before Sept. 11, that ethos was condemned as ridiculously out of date: patriarchial, clannish and parochial. Now, however, those supposed weaknesses help explain the strength of a community and a profession.
Next page: Taking care of a dead firefighter's parents
