Firefighter Killed in Harlem Blaze Praised as a ‘Hero of the Highest Order’
The bagpipes had stopped, the drums gone quiet. The funeral was about to begin. A fire engine rolled to a stop in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue on Tuesday morning, and the surrounding blocks went still.
Atop the fire engine was a coffin, mounted high and shrouded in the flag of the New York Fire Department. No one among the thousands of firefighters, city leaders, family members, friends and strangers paying respects seemed to move. In the middle of Midtown Manhattan, the snap of a flag in the breeze could be heard down the block.
It stayed this way for minutes, as if to give the body in the coffin, Lt. Michael R. Davidson, a 37-year-old nozzle man in Harlem whose last breaths were filled with black smoke, a final, quiet moment all his own, facing toward the clear sky above his city.
Then a command was shouted, and scores of white-gloved hands flew to hat brims in salute. The coffin was lowered to the avenue and carried by pallbearers up the steps to the cathedral, the silent party greeted by Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan — city and church together for a send-off that, as Lieutenant Davidson’s brother, Eric, observed in his eulogy, would make a passer-by stop and say, “Wow, this guy must be important.”
He added, “And still that would be the understatement of the century.”
The funeral began even as mourners continued to flow into the massive cathedral, filling every pew and standing in rows in the rear and sides. Cardinal Dolan, in his homily, compared the fallen firefighter to Jesus Christ: “Both we love. Both we thank. One we miss, very much.”
“Jesus came to save us from everlasting flames,” he added, “Michael to rescue us from earthly ones.”
On Thursday night, Lieutenant Davidson’s company, Engine 69, known as the Harlem Hilton, responded to a call of smoke and flames coming from a basement on St. Nicholas Avenue. The call had come from a film crew working on the upcoming movie “Motherless Brooklyn,” directed by Edward Norton.
Lieutenant Davidson, as the nozzle man, was among the first to enter the building and descend to the basement. Thick smoke made seeing anything impossible, and before long the firefighters’ air tanks were signaling they were low. Firefighters followed the hose with their hands to find their way outside, but Lieutenant Davidson lost his grip, got turned around in the smoke and collapsed. He was taken to Harlem Hospital Center, where he was pronounced dead early Friday morning. He was posthumously promoted to lieutenant.
The cause of the fire remains under investigation. Hours before the funeral, contractors began tearing down the Harlem building, at 773 St. Nicholas Avenue, which the city deemed too unstable to stand. The demolition will also allow investigators to begin work in earnest.
Lieutenant Davidson left lasting impressions on the streets of Harlem and outside the firehouse, where flowers were stacked hours before the funeral a few miles south. His father, a former firefighter, had also worked at that firehouse.
A man and a young girl walked past on Monday. The girl, named Shyla, noticed the flowers. “Those are for the fireman who died,” she said.
Her father, Chris Perry, 33, nodded and said, “He’s the one who fixed your bike.”
A reporter stopped them and asked to hear the story. Mr. Perry told it — a flat tire last summer, a quick patch in the firehouse — and said, “He was a good guy.”
Calvin Hunt, 56, of Harlem, attended the funeral and stood outside. “I’m from Harlem and Lieutenant Davidson was part of Harlem,” said Mr. Hunt, a retired chef who used to frequent the former St. Nick’s Jazz Pub, where the fire broke out. “He stood out,” Mr. Hunt said. “It was his personality, his character. He was full of fun.”
The setting of the funeral was far grander than the scene outside the firehouse, but the sentiment was the same. Mayor Bill de Blasio called the lieutenant “a hero of the highest order.” In his eulogy, the mayor directly addressed the fallen firefighter’s four young children and invoked his own father, with whom he had a deeply troubled relationship, but whose military service he would always admire.
“I had a dad who wore a uniform and wore it with pride as well,” Mr. de Blasio said. “Your father will be there with you. You’ll know who he was, what he did and what an imprint he left on this earth. That will sustain you.”
Daniel A. Nigro, the fire commissioner, drew knowing laughs from the uniformed men and women when he said, “every firefighter wants the nozzle,” and to feel the satisfaction of “facing a fire, pushing it back.” He called Lieutenant Davidson a “natural-born nozzle man” and recalled the lieutenant’s injuries from a fire early in his career. “Mike pulled forward, crawling and inching, room to room,” he said in a eulogy. “He would not stop.”
“Mike commanded every situation and led his fellow firefighters into battle,” Commissioner Nigro said. “He wasn’t their captain. He wasn’t their lieutenant. But he was, without question, a leader.”
The funeral ended as it began, a stately feat of precision and turnout that froze a stretch of the city’s spine for hours. The coffin was carried back to the fire engine, and up and down the avenue, firefighters in dress blues kept vigil until the rig drove slowly away.