DOTTY 2024 Awardee Andrew Serra: FDNY Captain Leaves A Legacy

Captain Andrew Serra will always be a firefighter’s firefighter.

When asked if he misses the job that he retired from last June after a 25 year run, he is quick to answer: “every day.”

He is part of the shrinking number of firefighters with real time memories of 9/11. On the day that will be seared in his memory forever, he was a single, young firefighter at Ladder 131, with three years on the job. He was off-duty when he heard a newscaster talking about a plane hitting the WTC on his clock radio. “I turned on the tv and saw the image that no one will ever forget,” said Serra. When he arrived at his fire house that day, most of the vehicles had already left, but he and several other off-duty firefighters managed to grab a transport truck and headed downtown, arriving just as the south tower collapsed. In that tower, there were 15 people from engine 54, ladder 4 and battalion 9, a midtown firehouse. It would emerge as the house with the single greatest death toll. Six months later, while working on “the pile” Serra and several other firefighters discovered the remains of John Tipping. He turned out to be one the firefighters from ladder 4 who perished that day.

An article excerpted in The Atlantic magazine around that time contained a shocking allegation that some of these fallen firefighters looted blue jeans on the concourse level before the towers fell. While the article and book by William Langewiesche with the original allegations got considerable publicity, it was eviscerated by the late David Carr at The New York Times. Langewiesche backtracked and said he never meant to single out an engine from the house that had lost the 15 men, and conceded he never witnessed the events he described about a truck being lifted from the rubble with blue jeans neatly stacked inside.

In fact, through painstaking research, Serra learned the truth from eyewitnesses. “They were in the south lobby, actively rescuing occupants of an elevator car jammed between the first and second floor.” While the allegations were discredited, Serra points out that it never received the same amount of publicity as the original false allegations. “It always ate away at me,” Serra said. It was the driving reason he set out to clear the name of the fallen firefighters with a book. “All the evidence needed to be put together in one place,” he told NY1 in an interview at the time of publication in 2018. “I just felt a connection to this family and this firefighter.” The book was part history of the fallen fighters on Ladder 4 as much as it was a riveting story about how firefighters and families were coping after 9/11 and part memoir of his own life. To this day, all of the book’s proceeds are donated to the Ray Pfeiffer Foundation, supporting first responders with 9/11-related illnesses.

In a recent visit to the firehouse he ran on Lafayette St. for the past 10 years as captain, he was greeted by firefighters who worked with him. While his 9/11 book worked to burnish the legacy of the midtown firehouse that gave its all, it is apparent that he has left his own quiet legacy at Ladder 20 as well.

“He was 100 percent a gentleman inside the firehouse and outside the firehouse,” noted Nick Avvento III., who served under Serra for seven years. “If you had personal issues, his door was always open. And he had a ton of knowledge to pass down.”

“He took a lot of pride in the members who were here before in Ladder 20,” noted Robert Colon, another firefighter who had spent most of his nine years working under Serra.

One project that Serra oversaw was a listing of every firefighter who had ever served in Ladder 20 from the time the unit was established, originally on Mercer Street in 1889, on a wall of honor. Another was the building of new gear racks using floor jousts salvaged when the original Ladder 20 house a few blocks away was being demolished.

When the grueling post-9/11 days of countless funerals and memorials eased off, Serra earned his his B.A., and then an M.A. in political science. After he met his wife, Teresa who spoke fluent Italian, he went on to earn an M.A. in Italian from Hunter College.

It will come in handy, because two years ago, he and his wife bought a home in Umbria, in central Italy near Tuscany. When not visiting Italy, they live in Tudor City with their two children, Sofia, 14 and Luca, 9.

“One of the advantages of being retired,” Serra, 50, said. “We get to spend summers in Italy. And he’s already working on his next book.