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From an article in the
New York Times Newspaper
April 2003
With Fire in Their Eyes Buffs
Find Passion in Chasing Sirens
By ROBERT F. WORTH
By day, Ira Rubin takes care of his ailing mother and works as a
production manager at a matzo factory in Jersey City.
At night, he flicks on the police scanner and enters a lurid
world of fires and disasters.
If he hears the dispatchers call in a serious fire, he will
often jump into his Mercury Marquis and race to the scene to watch. If not, he
may simply monitor the nightly mayhem by two-way radio from the renovated
19th-century firehouse where he helps run a canteen service for firefighters. On
weekends, he often puts on a gray kilt and Glengarry hat to play the bagpipes at
fire and police department events.
In short, Mr. Rubin belongs to that quietly eccentric band of
people known as fire buffs. Their ranks include lawyers, salesmen, doctors,
locksmiths, even an heiress or two. All of them seem to share a single
experience: at an early age, they heard a siren and saw a bright red fire engine
bolt past. They have been chasing fires ever since.
It is impossible to say how many fire buffs there are
in the New York area. There are about 100 subscribers who pay
$100 a year to help support Citywide Radio, a channel that buffs use to
communicate about fires and other disasters (461.225 megaherz on the dial). But
many prefer to keep their habit private, tuning in to police scanners or pagers
and devouring Fire Department bulletins and industry magazines. Some belong to
groups like New York's Fire Bell Club, or canteen services like the one Mr.
Rubin helps run, the Gong Club of Jersey City.
When asked about their hobby, some buffs get a little
defensive.
"It's not about pyromania," said Doug Kahn, 39, a night
assignment editor at Channel 11 who got his first scanner at age 15. "It's about
watching what the firefighters are doing. I hate to make it sound like a
spectator sport, but it's kind of like watching guys fight a battle and rooting
for them."
Some buffs take pictures at fires and then donate them,
negatives and all, to the department, which then uses them in training.
"Buffs are very good for us," said Vincent Dunn, a retired
fire chief who spent 42 years on the job in Manhattan and the Bronx and has
written three books about firefighting. "Some of them know more about the fire
service than we do, and they help get our point across."
Most buffs are also quick to point out that their passion has
a distinguished history. Gov. Alfred E. Smith chased fires in Lower Manhattan as
a boy in the 1880's, and Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia would often speed to the
scene of a major fire. Buffs claim the well-known photographer Weegee, who often
slept in his car with a police radio on during the 1940's and 50's, as one of
their own. And during the 1970's, when the almost nightly fires of the South
Bronx could be seen from miles away, large crowds would often drive up from
Manhattan to watch.
"The scene of a fire in those days had the strange quality of
a social event," recalled John Miller, now the chief of the counterterrorism
bureau at the Los Angeles Police Department, who grew up in Manhattan running
uptown to photograph fires in the Bronx. "They'd all stand around talking,
swapping notes about the big one they saw the other guy missed, how fast they
got there, and which engine came first."
But many buffs now say their hobby is dying. There are far
fewer fires to see than there were 20 years ago, largely because of improvements
in building codes and fire prevention, along with the surging economy and
dropping crime of the 1990's, which helped to reduce arson.
"Thank God there isn't the kind of urban blight there was in
the 60's and 70's," said David Bookstaver, who grew up in Manhattan with a
scanner taped to the handlebars of his bicycle. "But there's not enough now for
a young kid to get interested in."
On a recent Saturday evening, Mr. Rubin, 49, sat for several
hours under the Gong Club's dusty tin ceiling, lamenting the passage of the
great age of fires. Every now and then the radios on either side of him would
emit a sudden burst of voices, and he would tilt his head back slightly,
listening to the dispatchers. None of the fires was big enough to be worth
chasing.
Mr. Rubin serves as the archivist of the Jersey City Fire
Department. He talks about fires of the past with a kind of melancholy
nostalgia, like a Harold Bloom of the fire buffs' world.
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Mr. Rubin was still talking about the lost romance of
fire buffing when a group of visitors from Boston arrived at the Gong Club
door. They were members of the Sparks Club, Boston's largest buff group.
They had just come from a two-alarm fire on Wooster Street in SoHo, and they
soon got into a vigorous discussion of comparative firefighting methods with
their Jersey City counterparts.
The terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, had a powerful
effect on fire buffs. Many say the attacks taught everyone else what they
already knew about the heroism of firefighters. But there is a new
uneasiness, too. In the past, buffs would often say goodbye with a
traditional phrase: "I'll see you at the big one." Not anymore.
"It was enough to make the whole thing seem morbid," said
Mr. Bookstaver, who is now the spokesman for the State Office of Court
Administration.
While some buffs may have grown away from the habit,
others have developed it into a career in journalism (Mr. Kahn) or public
service (Mr. Bookstaver).
And starting in the early 1970's, a few began using their
expertise more directly as a way to make money. It was then that John
Delventhal was coming home one morning when he happened to see a Cadillac
spin out and strike a building on Houston Street. He caught the whole thing
on videotape, sold it to a network, and a business model was born. He and a
friend formed a company called Action Movie News, which was soon followed by
another, the Broadcast News Network.
Their successor today is the Breaking News Network, a
24-hour pager service that condenses breaking news for journalists and other
clients. It is run by Robert and Steven Gessmann, identical twin brothers
and lifelong buffs, out of a small suite in an office park in Fort Lee, N.J.
The Gessmanns spend their days listening to fire and
police radios; they take calls from a network of freelance buffs from
Maryland to Connecticut. They type up each item as it comes in and send it
out on the pager, a constant diet of fires, suspicious packages, car chases
and false alarms for their 2,000 paying subscribers, who pay amounts ranging
from $8 a month for individuals to $300 a month for commercial accounts.
But some buffs look down on the Gessmann brothers for
mass-marketing their pastime. "To me it's not a business," Mr. Rubin said.
Some buffs, in fact, speak of their hobby as though it
were a kind of cult, complete with its own relics and sacred texts. On a
recent afternoon, Barry Gintel and Marty Schwartzberg gave a tour of the
Bell Club's office on East 23rd Street. (The room, as it happens, is a bit
of a fire hazard: no windows and no sprinklers, with the exit sign not
lighted.) The club owns a chunk of the B-25 bomber that crashed into the
Empire State Building in 1945, and a piece of the Hindenburg. There are
countless plaques and photographs, century-old leather fire buckets, helmets
and a massive, old-fashioned alarm bell.
With all this hero worship, why do buffs not take the
final step? Why are they not firefighters? For some, the answer is simple:
they failed to pass the rigorous physical exam. Others say they prefer the
role of the spectator. Still others chose a career that was seen as more
lucrative, but have been haunted ever since by a parallel life, one they
will never live.
"Would I have been able to walk into a burning building?"
Mr. Schwartzberg said. "Do I have that intestinal fortitude? I'll never
know." |
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