Firefighter/Author Andy Serra Pens Historical Novel Tied to Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Andy Serra is a former New York FDNY captain-turned-author who lives with his family in Tudor City. He was a young first responder on 9/11, and his memoir, Finding John, which eulogized one of the 343 firefighters who perished that day, received critical acclaim. He sat down with Straus News to talk about his latest work, Hell’s Hundred Acres, a contribution of historical fiction about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The firehouse where he spent his final eight years at Ladder 20 in SoHo responded to the original conflagration in 1911 and will ring the memorial bell for the victims once again on March 25 this year.

Just to start off, I feel like this is slightly unconventional—correct me if I’m wrong—but there aren’t many people with long firefighter careers who take up a second phase of their life as a writer. Is this something you always wanted to do?

I did know I always wanted to work in writing, to one extent or another. Back in school days—whether it be short poems, writing projects or even term papers for college courses—I do actually enjoy the writing process and everything. And even getting into novels, I started, maybe 2012 was my first historical novel. I’ve been working on books since then, in various forms or another. I didn’t at first know I’d necessarily write about anything related to firefighting. I definitely didn’t think I could write about 9/11 for a while. In 2018, I did come out with a 9/11 memoir. I’m glad I did, even though it took a while to get started. I felt the writing was therapeutic for me. [Hell’s Hundred Acres] is a historical novel. I was kind of able to bridge the firefighting community with the history of my old firehouse and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, which is a well-known historical event.

Just considering the time of publication for Finding John, what inspired you to write that at that moment of your life in 2018, 17 years after the tragic events? [Serra and another firefighter discovered the remains of firefighter John Tipping while digging through the rubble at the WTC in the days after the attack.]

It’s funny—people would ask me a lot, are you ever going to write about 9/11 or something? And I always said no. I couldn’t even think of it. Finding John is a memoir, but it’s also like investigative history. I was involved with uncovering the remains of a fallen firefighter during the recovery operations, and I always felt like I had a connection to this even though I didn’t know him in real life. Later that year, there was a story published about this fire crew, which included John. The author alleged that when they were killed, they weren’t rescuing people. They were killed looting merchandise. This was a series of articles in The Atlantic that was compiled into a book later in the year, too. That always ate away at me, that this allegation was out there. I felt like it was a miscarriage of justice, basically. I always felt like it was something that needed, you know, a wrong that needed to be made right. So years go by, and then one day in around 2016, I’m sitting around and I said, “You know what? Let me just write one chapter.” And I did. I said, “Okay, that wasn’t too bad. I think maybe I can do this.” And that’s when I started.

A hundred-plus years after the fact, what was the spark that inspired Hell’s Hundred Acres?

Well, I retired from the fire department and I always knew I’d return to writing. I was on the hunt for my next project. Nothing really seemed to be clicking, and then it occurred to me, you know, when the last 11 years of my career I worked in Ladder 20—which is in SoHo — right in that neighborhood where the fire occurred. The history of my firehouse is definitely intertwined with the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. It was something that I started thinking about. I thought I could tie in the history of the firehouse, the neighborhood, the politics, and the life at the time. There’s been novels about it, and so for me, I think, “How do I bring something new to it?” I just figured I could focus on the people. I just tried to take a cross-section of people that were affected by this, like the seamstresses, the firefighters, the owners of the factory, and the politicians—the major players. It’s easy to forget that it’s not a statistic. It’s 156 families that had such varied and interesting and hard and tragic lives, even before that. Many of them escaped terrible conditions in their former countries before immigrating. I felt an interesting human facet of the tragedy.

How much of yourself is in this book?

I was able to draw on my experience with Charlie walking into a firehouse for the first time. He’s the new guy—all eyes are on him. That pressure was definitely something I was able to draw upon. And then with the fire scene, I tried to strike a balance between not speaking too much technical jargon, or things the average reader wouldn’t be familiar with, but I also wanted to describe it as vividly as possible. A lot of times, in Hollywood, representations of fire depict characters surrounded by flames in these grandiose terms. But in my experience, fires are dark. You can’t see anything. It’s dirty, it’s sweaty, it’s loud. It’s not a glorious situation. You’re right in a dark abyss, so I tried to give the reader some of that feeling through Charlie’s eyes, because it’s all new to him.

Do you prefer writing nonfiction or memoirs?

I do love writing historical fiction. I’ve always been a history buff, and I feel you can really delve into the characters’ mind in a way, whereas in nonfiction writing, you can only guess at what people might have been thinking or feeling. If you can do [historical fiction] well, you can somehow make people show the timelessness of the human story and human condition.

What can we expect next from you?

I honestly don’t know for sure what my next project is going to be. I’ve been so focused on putting this book together, and then publicizing it, so it’s taken up a lot. I haven’t necessarily pinpointed my next project yet.