There’s a reason why firefighters are called New York’s Bravest.

But the Feehans may qualify as New York’s loyalest, too.

Brian McDonald’s “Five Floors Up: The Heroic Family Story of Four Generations in the FDNY” tells the story of New York’s firefighters by focusing on the Feehans and their in-laws, the Davans. A dependable part of the department since 1926, their stories detail nearly 100 years of blazes in the city.

“Five Floors Up: The Heroic Family Story of Four Generations in the FDNY” by Brian McDonald (Grand Central Publishing)

McDonald begins his story, though, in the 19th century, before there even was an FDNY. Then, Manhattan’s fires were put out by all-volunteer companies, rowdy groups which acted, McDonald writes, “like rival street gangs.” Sometimes showing up to fight the same fire, they would end up fighting each other – while the building burned.

“All classes of the community, except the ‘roughs,’ are shocked and disgusted by the horrible waves of disorder attendant on every fire in New York,” read one angry letter to the New York Times. “The shrieking, yelling, hallooing, confusion, absence of all discipline, and insubordination.”

A disastrous fire at P.T. Barnum’s American Museum in 1865 defined the era of firefighting lawlessness. While competing fire brigades brawled in the street, flames raced through a building that housed an exotic zoo, extensive displays, and living “human oddities.” Scores of monkeys jumped out windows and escaped into lower Manhattan. Two Beluga whales boiled alive in their tanks.

It was complete chaos. One firefighter was said to have not only killed a rampaging tiger with his ax but carried out the sideshow’s “fat lady.” Others risked their lives running into the flames — only to emerge from the smoke having rescued wax mannequins. Thousands of New Yorkers gathered for one more Barnum spectacle they couldn’t ignore.

It was time for some reforms.

So, that year, Manhattan’s volunteer companies were replaced with the Metropolitan Fire Department, renamed the Fire Department of New York in 1870. In 1898, when the surrounding counties joined Manhattan, the FDNY became responsible for the entire city. Professionalism was introduced, along with a strict chain of command. Patronage entered, too, with jobs often depending on who you knew.

William Feehan in dress uniform, with one-year-old Bill, circa 1930. (Courtesy Catherine Cole)

That gave some groups an advantage, as who you knew usually meant a Democratic politician or at least a politically connected monsignor. By the late 1880s, Manhattan was 44%, Irish. In the FDNY, that percentage jumped to 75.

That was good news for William Patrick Feehan. His parents left County Mayo for America in 1883. He, his mother’s last and tenth child, was born in New York when she was 43. William dutifully lived at home until she died (his father, perhaps too fond of the bottle, had been out of the picture for years). But by 1926, Feehan was alone, a bachelor in his mid-30s, searching for a wife and a good job.

He found the first in Catherine Cashman, another Irish immigrant. He found the second courtesy of her brother, Father Jim Cashman, a part-time FDNY chaplain.

McDonald admits he doesn’t know what strings the priest pulled if any. But that year, Feehan walked into a job with Engine 21 on E. 40th St.

There’s been a family member in the department since.

Over his 30 years in the department, Feehan constantly seemed to find himself “in the most perilous situations,” McDonald writes. “In department parlance, it’s called ‘chasing fire.’ For these firefighters, the fight is personal. Very early in William’s career, it became evident that he was one such fireman.”

Three times, Feehan was rushed to the hospital. Once, it was because he’d sucked in sulfur fumes responding to a five-alarm fire. Once, he slipped into unconsciousness from lack of air and had to be dragged outside. Another time, the entire building collapsed around him.

But each time, he recovered. And each time, he returned to work.

Which is where he was on July 28, 1945. An Army pilot was headed to Newark airport when he ran into bad weather. Unable to navigate, he decided to go low and slip below the fog. Then the air cleared – and he saw the Empire State Building looming in front of him. He plowed into it.

Feehan was one of the first rushing to the scene.

“The plane tore a hole right through the famous skyscraper,” McDonald writes. “Torrents of high-test gasoline flooded the seventy-eighth and seventy-ninth floors and poured down one of the elevator shafts.”

But because it was a Saturday morning, with most of the building’s offices empty, only 14 people died. And the building still stood.

Things would be horribly different on another morning, 56 years later.

Feehan’s son, William M. Feehan, followed him into the department. After a spotty start – he flunked the eye test at first, but the next time a lucky guess got him in – he would serve for more than 40 years. And he would see some of the city’s greatest disasters.

This photo of FDNY Chief Bill Feehan and his grandson Connor Davan on a fireboat in New York Harbor sat on Feehan’s desk in FDNY headquarters. The World Trade Center is in the background. (Courtesy Feehan Family)

The first was when he was still a probie, a firefighter fresh from the department’s academy. On Dec. 16, 1960, two commercial planes crashed midair over New York City. One came down in Brooklyn. The other hit Staten Island.

No one on either plane survived. Six people in Park Slope were killed.

There would be other surprises over Feehan’s career. Like an arson epidemic that would leave much of the Bronx burning. Or, in 1973, an unheard-of firefighter’s strike.

It only lasted five hours and left some bad blood, but at least it won the workers some money. In those days, base pay was set at $14,000 a year; firefighters often had to moonlight to support their families. After the strike, their salaries got kicked up to $14,950.

By 2001, Feehan became the first firefighter to hold every department rank – even briefly filling in as Commissioner. By the end of his career, though, he had settled in as First Deputy Fire Commissioner. When new mayor Rudy Giuliani considered shaking things up, putting his own choice in that spot, he was advised to keep Feehan on because he knew “every fire hydrant in the city.”

Feehan was at his office in Brooklyn in 2001 when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. He sped to the disaster.

Fire Commissioner Thomas Van Essen wasn’t happy to see him there. “This is no place for a 71-year-old,” he confided to another chief. He asked Feehan to give his helmet to someone else and leave the scene. Feehan, he recalled, just gave him a “you gotta be kidding me” look. Then he turned around and waded into the chaos.

After the North Tower came down, they found Feehan’s white helmet on top of a pile of rubble.

FDNY Chief Joseph Callan (left) and First Deputy Commissioner William M. Feehan outside of a Chinese restaurant fire. (Courtesy FDNY)

Finding his body took a while longer.

It was an unthinkable tragedy, the ultimate sacrifice. And still, the family’s service to the city has gone on. Feehan’s son, John, and his son-in-law, Brian Davan, are longtime firefighters, too. Both responded to 9/11 and later became battalion chiefs. In 2016, Brian’s son – and William Patrick Feehan’s great-grandson – Conor Davan joined the FDNY as well.

Four generations on, the family business shows no sign of ending.

“There’ll be plenty of fires ahead to fight,” McDonald writes. “For the Davans and Feehans, there always is.”

Copyright © 2022, New York Daily News

Copyright © 2022, New York Daily News