The retired FDNY fireboat Fire Fighter, a storied city fireboat that led the marine response to the terrorist attack on World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, will be back in Greenport Sept. 11 through Sept. 30.
A photo of the Fire Fighter believed to have been taken on Sept. 10, 2001. |. America’s Fireboat — Fire Fighter Facebook group photo
The ship is now a non-profit museum, which called Greenport its home from 2013 to 2020. It is now home berthed at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut.
The Museum’s President and Director, Charles Ritchie, announced the trip to Greenport in an Aug. 30 Facebook post.
Fire Fighter, launched in 1938, had been in service to the New York City Fire Department for 72 years when she was replaced in 2010, and she was headed for the scrapyard when a crew of firefighting buffs rescued her. Over the next decade and a half, they’ve turned the storied vessel into a floating museum.
Fire Fighter first arrived in Greenport in February of 2013. She underwent a major overhaul in 2017, including a hull repainting from red to her original color, black. At the time, she was home berthed at the Greenport commercial dock adjacent to the North Ferry, but that location proved to not be viable for the longterm.
The boat left the village in the winter of 2020, in the midst of plummeting visitors and donations due to the Covid-19 pandemic and escalating costs to dock at Greenport Village’s East Pier.
Megayachts are now often docked at the deepwater pier, which is among the village’s newest pieces of maritime infrastructure.
Mr. Ritchie says the boat will again be docked at East Pier, in Mitchell Park Marina — accessed behind Aldo’s Coffee — when it comes in to visit this year.
The ship, designed by renowned naval architect William Francis Gibbs, had a storied career with the FDNY, fighting more than 50 major fires.
It led the department’s Marine Unit response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center “by supplying water to emergency crews fighting fires in Ground Zero,” according to the Fireboat Fire Fighter Museum’s website. “Spending three weeks pumping at her maximum capacity while her crew sought out damaged but still-operational pumpers to use as inland pumping stations among the rubble of the Twin Towers, Fire Fighter was only released from her station at the foot of Albany Street in the Battery when enough landside water mains had been repaired to support the firefighting efforts.”
Since its decommissioning, the non-profit museum has fundraised extensively for its repairs, many of which are carried out by a team of volunteers that spans the tri-state area. In 2023, the ship received a $450,000 matching grant toward its refurbishment from the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation.
The ship was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1989.
Extensive information about Fire Fighter’s history and the work to restore the fireboat can be found in the ship’s Facebook group, where we’re expecting hours of tours and information about its Greenport visit to be posted.
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