goes the neighborhood’ feeling at first,” Harris said of being the only black man on his block. “But it got better once they got to know me.”
Harris turned the rig left onto East Grand Boulevard, past Kirby Street. The firehouse is located on the city’s east side, near the hulking wreck of the Packard automobile plant that closed in 1956 but which nobody ever bothered to tear down. A square mile of industrial decay, scavengers had descended upon it, ushering in a marathon game of cat and mouse. The scavengers, looking for metal to sell at the scrap yard, light a section of the building on fire. After the firemen dutifully extinguish the blaze, the scavengers return to help themselves to the neatly exposed girders and I-beams that form the skeleton of the structure. From the rig, you can see the missing roofs and walls and forty-foot holes in the ground and the trees growing inside, and the whole thing looks like a gigantic, cancerous atrium.
“It’s like we work for the fucking scrappers,” Nevin said.
A walkway that arches over Grand Boulevard, connecting the south portion of the plant to the north, holds a marquee with missing letters, spelling out an appropriate epitaph: MO OR CITY IN U TR L PARK .
A block away is the firehouse. Inside is a perpetual pot of coffee, which the men stand around while waiting for the next run, and they don’t get to the bottom of their cups before the next run comes.
The radio box bleated incessantly like a colicky sheep across a city constantly in flames.
“Ladder 16, please respond.”
The response:
“Ladder 16, out of service.”
Jimmy Montgomery laughed. He laughed every time he heard something like that. We went out and stood on the street corner. Everything seemed broken here: the toilet seat in his firehouse, the city government that pays his check. He stared at the house across the street on East Grand Boulevard, the one with a blue tarpaulin for a roof. He looked at the weeds. The abandoned car. The empty little factories and workingman bars and the bakery where he used to get his bread when he started on the job seventeen years ago.
Even the alarm in the firehouse was broken. And since no one from headquarters had bothered to come out to fix it, one of the boys here jerry-rigged it into some Rube Goldberg mousetrap contraption.
When a call comes to the station, a fax paper rolls out of the printer containing the directions to the fire. So someone had it rigged where the fax paper pushed over a door hinge with a screw mounted on it. The screw touched an electrified metal plate that was wired to the alarm, which completed an electrical circuit. The bell rang. Then the box bleated.
In came a call: A man has tapped into the gas main with a garden hose because he is too poor to warm his children. The hose leaks. The block explodes. They arrive at the neighborhood three minutes later. The place looks like a painting from the hand of Hieronymus Bosch, a landscape of fire and human failing. The firefighters pull the children from the flames and peel a guy’s guts from the jagged window frame where he lies like an old cloth doll. One fireman gets in the ambulance with a kid, holding one hand over her eyes, the other over her shattered femur.
There is a crater where the house used to be.
“Is it ever gonna stop?” Nevin asked no one in particular an hour later through his cheap cigar, nonchalantly, as though the carnage were an everyday occurrence. “Children are dying in this city because they’re too fucking poor to keep warm. Put that in your fucking notebook.”
I put it in my fucking notebook.
Eight men returned to the firehouse with faces of mud, dirty and tired, and before they knew it, the box was bleating again. This time, it was a run-of-the-mill house fire in a city with 62,000 vacant homes. They jumped into the rigs and were off in seconds, barreling down Mt. Elliott Avenue. Motorists didn’t even bother to move to the side. The siren had become
Harris turned the rig left onto East Grand Boulevard, past Kirby Street. The firehouse is located on the city’s east side, near the hulking wreck of the Packard automobile plant that closed in 1956 but which nobody ever bothered to tear down. A square mile of industrial decay, scavengers had descended upon it, ushering in a marathon game of cat and mouse. The scavengers, looking for metal to sell at the scrap yard, light a section of the building on fire. After the firemen dutifully extinguish the blaze, the scavengers return to help themselves to the neatly exposed girders and I-beams that form the skeleton of the structure. From the rig, you can see the missing roofs and walls and forty-foot holes in the ground and the trees growing inside, and the whole thing looks like a gigantic, cancerous atrium.
“It’s like we work for the fucking scrappers,” Nevin said.
A walkway that arches over Grand Boulevard, connecting the south portion of the plant to the north, holds a marquee with missing letters, spelling out an appropriate epitaph: MO OR CITY IN U TR L PARK .
A block away is the firehouse. Inside is a perpetual pot of coffee, which the men stand around while waiting for the next run, and they don’t get to the bottom of their cups before the next run comes.
The radio box bleated incessantly like a colicky sheep across a city constantly in flames.
“Ladder 16, please respond.”
The response:
“Ladder 16, out of service.”
Jimmy Montgomery laughed. He laughed every time he heard something like that. We went out and stood on the street corner. Everything seemed broken here: the toilet seat in his firehouse, the city government that pays his check. He stared at the house across the street on East Grand Boulevard, the one with a blue tarpaulin for a roof. He looked at the weeds. The abandoned car. The empty little factories and workingman bars and the bakery where he used to get his bread when he started on the job seventeen years ago.
Even the alarm in the firehouse was broken. And since no one from headquarters had bothered to come out to fix it, one of the boys here jerry-rigged it into some Rube Goldberg mousetrap contraption.
When a call comes to the station, a fax paper rolls out of the printer containing the directions to the fire. So someone had it rigged where the fax paper pushed over a door hinge with a screw mounted on it. The screw touched an electrified metal plate that was wired to the alarm, which completed an electrical circuit. The bell rang. Then the box bleated.
In came a call: A man has tapped into the gas main with a garden hose because he is too poor to warm his children. The hose leaks. The block explodes. They arrive at the neighborhood three minutes later. The place looks like a painting from the hand of Hieronymus Bosch, a landscape of fire and human failing. The firefighters pull the children from the flames and peel a guy’s guts from the jagged window frame where he lies like an old cloth doll. One fireman gets in the ambulance with a kid, holding one hand over her eyes, the other over her shattered femur.
There is a crater where the house used to be.
“Is it ever gonna stop?” Nevin asked no one in particular an hour later through his cheap cigar, nonchalantly, as though the carnage were an everyday occurrence. “Children are dying in this city because they’re too fucking poor to keep warm. Put that in your fucking notebook.”
I put it in my fucking notebook.
Eight men returned to the firehouse with faces of mud, dirty and tired, and before they knew it, the box was bleating again. This time, it was a run-of-the-mill house fire in a city with 62,000 vacant homes. They jumped into the rigs and were off in seconds, barreling down Mt. Elliott Avenue. Motorists didn’t even bother to move to the side. The siren had become
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