by Tom Rinaldi
Not that Welles or Platz made the trip to the roof daily, or even weekly. They were busy, immersed in the daily lives of young professionals in the city, outwardly aspiring masters of the universe, and inwardly wandering through the hollows of that aspiration. But they never lost the feeling that they had scored: 115 Washington Place, prewar, downtown, two bedrooms, on the fifth floor, a mile from work. The rent was $2,500 a month. Bite down, suck it up, move on in.
For Welles, it felt destined. The apartment number was 19—his lucky number for as long as anyone could remember, the digits he wore on every jersey from the time he was a boy, the number he wore through his lacrosse career at Boston College. The figure was his talisman.
They loaded in on September 15, 2000.
“It was a stretch,” Platz said. “We were both young in our careers, so it took two of the four paychecks we got a month to pay the rent. But to this day, I would rent that place again in a heartbeat.
If not for the memory.”
• • •
Long days. Short years.
Time passed quickly outside the walls of apartment 19. The two men kept similar schedules, but with enough separation for each to have time in the pad by himself when he needed it, which wasn’t often. Typically Welles left for his day before Platz did, and returned home first. Welles headed south in horizontal terms and then dramatically north vertically, to his spot on the 104th floor at Sandler. Platz was more earthbound, going northeast to his office in Midtown, in the Grace Building, across Forty-second Street from Bryant Park. A few times a week after work, they made sure to meet at any number of city watering holes, typically back in the Village. A favorite was Boxers on West Fourth Street, a reliable bar and grill with cold beer and thick burgers, since closed, where they basked in their status as regulars.
During many of the weeknights out, they reminisced about their summer days together in Madrid, and wondered if there might be a financially constructive way to relive them—by creating a business that connected them to Spain. While they weren’t exactly sure what services they might provide, or who their clients would be, or how such an idea would yield profits, they did have a name: Iberian Ventures. It would be a consulting firm, to identify and connect countries ready to benefit from a trading relationship. There was a simpler motive as well.
“We thought of it as an opportunity for us to get back there,” Platz said.
While they chewed on the idea fitfully over the months, often at Boxers, Welles also brought up another job, a much more radical departure from Sandler. Half a dozen times, at least, into the spring and summer of 2001, he raised the idea with Platz, working it out in his mind, trying to speak it into existence.
“I’m thinking of taking the test,” Welles said. “Taking the exam.”
Platz would look at his roommate and smile.
He understood how deeply rooted the notion was, reaching back to boyhood. Welles wasn’t talking about the GRE or LSAT, some standardized assessment for graduate school.
No.
“It was the exam,” Platz said, “to become a New York City fireman.”
• • •
This is a picture that never plays in the father’s slide show. In hindsight, it is too fraught. In the frame, Welles stands next to an old family friend, Harry Wanamaker Jr., two men in an easy pose beside each other, both strong and smiling, one older and one younger, one in uniform, the other in a polo shirt. They have known each other a long time.
There is a story that the older man’s family would tell about him decades after it happened. On a day when Harry Wanamaker Jr. was being celebrated for many official acts of valor, they related an episode that took place on a vacation. Wanamaker spent his life in Upper Nyack, but he and his family enjoyed time away on Cape Cod during the summer. On one of those trips, after the family had spent the evening at a local amusement park, Wanamaker looked up to see smoke drifting through the air, floating high above the trees into the night. He instantly knew it wasn’t exhaust from a generator or smoke from a grill at the park. His training told him as much.
Together with his wife and children, Wanamaker got in his car and traced the direction of the smoke back to its source. A nearby house was on fire, flame and smoke pouring from the second floor. There were neighbors on the home’s lawn, screaming that sometimes kids were left at the house; they were uncertain if anyone was still inside.
No trucks or local firefighters were on the scene yet.
“Dad jumped out of the car and ran into the house wearing only shorts and a T-shirt,” his daughter Gail recalled. “We were little kids and watched from the car and held our breath,” she said. “Thankfully, no one was in the house, but the five minutes Dad was inside with no gear was intense for us. It was the first time we really had seen him in action. It opened us up to what he did every day that he went to work.”
It was a life’s work for Wanamaker. After graduating from Nyack High School in 1961, and then serving in the navy, he returned home to become a Nyack police officer, and spent time as a lineman for a local utility company. He worked hard, but those posts were merely placeholders as he waited for the call he wanted most. He got it in 1968, when the Fire Department of New York accepted his application. At twenty-five years old, he was a city firefighter.
He would serve the department for the next thirty-seven years in some of the busiest fire stations across the five boroughs, including tours in Harlem and the South Bronx. In 1982, he rose to the rank of lieutenant. In all, he’d earn six Certificates of Merit, for various acts of bravery, and received the Columbia Association Medal for valor on the steps of City Hall. For all the calls he answered at all the different stations, with the “Bronx Bombers of Ladder 49,” or the decade spent with Engine 92, his appetite for fighting fires never faded. To satisfy that passion, and to pass on the lessons he’d learned at his day job, he did it in his free time as well, volunteering at his local fire department, Empire Hook and Ladder Company No. 1 in Upper Nyack.
Wanamaker spent nearly fifty years in the old brick firehouse on North Broadway in every conceivable role, helping any way he could. At times, it was the most direct way, putting down residential and commercial fires as part of the company’s response to alarms. At others, it was teaching. The newest to join the department, regardless of age, regarded him with awe.
In his time at Empire, seven members of Empire Hook and Ladder, including Wanamaker’s cousin Paul, followed his path into the FDNY.
Wanamaker took great pride in that, and in training the volunteers at Empire, most of whom would never join New York’s bravest. Of those, he had a special place in his heart for Welles, whom he first knew as the young boy who would tag along with his father, crawling into the tightest spaces of the company’s trucks, where grown men could never fit, and didn’t want to try. Headfirst, he’d nearly disappear to clean some distant nook. Whether it needed cleaning was less important than what he gained upon crawling out—the feeling that he’d pleased his father, that he’d contributed, and that one day he would belong to the company and be called on to help, the same way the veterans were.
It was Wanamaker, among others, who worked with Welles as a junior member of the department at sixteen years old.
Six years later, Lt. Harry Wanamaker Jr. was fifty-eight, a veteran of the department who had earned a plum assignment with Marine Company 1, New York City’s first marine fire brigade. And upon the deck of Marine 1’s big boat years later, he’d pose beside Welles on an early summer night.
Marine 1 consisted of two boats, actually, with the larger vessel considered the standard-bearer of the department’s fleet. The fireboat’s formal name was the John D. McKean, 334 gross tons heavy, 129 feet long, and more than forty years old. She was a steady warhorse, with two 1,000-horsepower propulsion engines and a fuel capacity of 7,000 gallons, enough to operate for more than four days before running dry. The McKean lo
oked like a little boy’s vision of a fireboat, from her red-and-white color scheme to her wide and squat smokestack to the enormous brass water cannon on her nose. When called into action, she was capable of pumping 19,000 gallons of water per minute.
She was also perfect for an evening cruise, as she was doing in June 2001, with Wanamaker as host. The group knew Wanamaker well and jumped at his invitation. His guests had driven down from the Hudson Valley in Rockland County to meet him along the water on the west side of Lower Manhattan. Wanamaker had cleared the group, a handful of volunteer firefighters, for a short tour. The guests were from Empire Hook and Ladder Company No. 1 and other members of the Nyack Fire Department. Welles and his father were among the first to climb aboard.
“It was a beautiful evening,” Jeff Crowther said. “We took some sandwiches and sodas and cruised around the harbor, around the Statue of Liberty, and back up the East River. We had a lovely time.”
As the light started to fade, the volunteers took in the unparalleled vistas of the city at sunset seen from the water, the glowing Battery at the southern tip of the island, and the blaze of Midtown, the gray corridors of buildings slipping by.
At one point, Jeff wondered where Welles was. He hadn’t seen him in a while, and wanted them to appreciate the city’s twilight together, but his son was nowhere in sight.
“I didn’t see Welles for about an hour and then he popped up. I said, ‘Hey, where you been?’”
“I was talking with one of the firefighters,” Welles said.
“For an hour?” Jeff asked.
Welles just smiled and looked out at the Hudson’s dark mercury and beyond, to the city shimmering in the fading light. He was enthralled by the moment: the setting, the camaraderie, and the conversation he’d just had with Tommy Sullivan, one of Marine 1’s crew.
Sullivan was ten years older than Welles but looked young for thirty-four, with thick black hair and a strong build. From the time he was a boy, water was in his blood. His first experiences on the river were working as a teenager in Stony Point, New York, scraping barnacles off boats. After a stint with the NYPD, he moved over to the fire department in the mid-1990s, an uncommon move. He’d been with the department for seven years.
Less than a decade later, Sullivan would play a heroic role in one of the greatest moments in the history of Marine 1, and one of the proudest for the FDNY. On the freezing afternoon of January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 came down for an emergency landing on the Hudson after both of its engines failed. Getting the call in their firehouse on the pier, Marine 1’s crew instantly divided. Five crew members were aboard the John D. McKean, the proper fireboat, while Sullivan and two crewmates raced out on Marine 1’s Alpha, a twenty-seven-foot fast-response boat, moving north at forty-five miles per hour. Minutes later, Sullivan was throwing life preservers into the water and lifting passengers off the partially submerged left wing of the plane and onto the deck of the Alpha.
One of the women he rescued, forty-seven-year-old Beverly Waters, told the New York Times, “He pulled me up like it was nothing for him.”
Considered the most successful ditching of a commercial jet in history, the rescue of all 155 passengers and crew aboard the flight was dubbed “The Miracle on the Hudson” and made a national star out of its pilot, Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. Local commercial vessels from the NY Waterway company played a vital role in the safe evacuations, as did boats from the coast guard, NYPD, and FDNY. On that frigid day, Sullivan’s boat, which had a maximum capacity of sixteen including crew, carried twenty rescued passengers to a triage center for medical treatment. For its part in the episode, the city’s fire department fleet received renewed attention and respect, and, in time, more resources for water rescues.
But all that lay in the future that evening. Nothing more was written across the water than its own slow currents. That Welles would have the chat with Sullivan was no surprise. He was endlessly curious, a natural conversation starter, and he already knew plenty of city firefighters from Empire Hook and Ladder, including Wanamaker. What was unusual was that he didn’t tell his father about what they’d discussed, at least not then.
Years later, Sullivan remembered meeting Welles and Jeff, but the precise details of the conversation had faded. He knew both were volunteers at Empire and friends of Harry’s, and recalled spending time with Welles and liking him. He surmised what he would have said when Welles asked his inevitable question about life with the FDNY.
What’s it really like? How do you like it?
“I would’ve told him,” Sullivan said, “that I loved it.”
Sullivan loved the teamwork and camaraderie so much that he regularly showed up early for his twenty-four-hour shift, and many days stayed late after his replacement arrived. He was where he wanted to be, doing what mattered to him. It was the life he loved. There was no other purpose to match it, not the rush of the calls or the challenge of the rescues or the clarity of the mission. To serve.
As the boat coasted down the Hudson toward its home berth, Jeff, Welles, and Wanamaker ended up side by side on the top deck.
“Welles,” Jeff said. “Let me get a picture of you and Harry.”
Jeff lifted the camera toward them as they moved together, shoulder to shoulder, Harry in his light blue uniform shirt with a black sash and radio handset across his chest. Welles stood beside him. As Jeff prepared to take the picture before any more light leaked away, Welles stopped him. He wanted to be sure the setting was just right.
“Dad,” he said, “make sure you get the Twin Towers in the background.”
Jeff paused, years later, thinking back to that June night in 2001. Without having to hold it in his hands, he saw the image before him. “You can clearly see the World Trade Center towers off to the right of where they were standing.”
The buildings top the skyline on the left side of the picture, reaching into darkness.
• • •
A few months later, in early August, Welles made a call home.
The city was in the midst of a stifling stretch of summer heat and humidity, with temperatures in Central Park peaking at 104, baking the air. It was the kind of weather that felt like breathing in carsickness with every step out the door. For anyone unable to escape to the Jersey shore or to the beaches on Long Island, the city was a hotbox.
Welles wasn’t calling his father to talk about the weather. There was a restlessness on his end of the line, a sense that while the shirts he’d worn for the past few years still fit him, the collars were growing tighter and beginning to chafe.
After some small talk, Welles got to the point.
“Dad,” he said, with a slight pause, “I think I want to change my career.”
“Excuse me?” came the instant reply.
Welles had made the hard and prized move to Sandler’s trading desk a few months before. He’d been with the company more than a year and a half, and now was in position to begin reaping serious rewards. For an equities trader at Sandler in the furious cycle of buying and selling, each day came with a scoreboard attached, based on the market’s closing numbers. It was intense work, exhilarating at times, but exacting always; you didn’t lightly step away from the game before the market closed and the scoreboard issued its tally.
Welles heard the note of incredulity in his father’s voice. He expected it.
Jeff Crowther had spent his entire career in banking. He had many passions, to be sure, many of which he shared with his son. But a sound and secure profession came first, a career like the one Welles was beginning to build at Sandler. And it was a good career, as far as Jeff understood it. Welles had already shown the ability to grow and be recognized. He’d made the leap from research to the trading desk, a precinct that carried with it the real possibility of making a fortune. Not a faraway dream of striking it rich. Not standing in line for a golden ticket. Not drilling down into some
patch of Texas dust, or toiling in some Silicon Valley garage. Sandler was a Wall Street finance player, and if one could withstand its pressures and endure its swings, there might well be a path to a lot of money. In years to come, six- and seven-figure bonuses and a bursting portfolio of his own. It was a chance at lasting, life-changing wealth.
Change his career?
Excuse me?
“I think I want to be a New York City firefighter.”
There it was. He said it. Aloud. To his father. For so many of us, change first begins by giving it voice. Say it so that it might become real. Welles had just done that.
Perhaps his biggest surprise was the lack of astonishment at the other end of the line. Jeff’s mind immediately turned back to the June night with Marine 1, to Welles’s disappearance for an hour, to his conversation with firefighter Tommy Sullivan.
“Oh,” Jeff said. “So you think you’re going to get assigned to the fireboat?”
Maybe Jeff had seen the trail in the water better than Welles had assumed.
“I know it’d be cool,” Jeff said. “But, you know, your dad’s not some retired battalion chief from the New York City Fire Department. That’s not going to help you.”
It was an easy response, based on an older man’s understanding of the way the world works, the connections that pave its opportunities. It was a connection from Stacey Sennas McGowan, after all, that helped Welles get his Sandler job in the first place. But Welles had already gone past the surface of the water, the superficial allure, in his mind. He’d thought about this.
“No, no, Dad,” Welles said. “I understand that.”
“It’s going to be four or five years, at least, before you could get picked up into the fire department,” Jeff countered.