Daniel Nigro, FDNY commissioner since 2014, to retire

Daniel Nigro, who joined the FDNY 53 years ago and has been New York City's fire commissioner since 2014, is retiring, the department announced Friday.

Feb. 16 is to be Nigro's last day, according to a department news release. Mayor Eric Adams has not named a successor. Nigro had reportedly wanted to stay on, but the release doesn't address the topic.

Nigro, 73, a longtime resident of Whitestone, Queens, is the fourth-longest-serving fire commissioner of the 33 men to hold the post in the department's 157-year history. He has held every firefighter rank.

"Since the day I raised my right hand 53 years ago and followed my father into the greatest fire department in the world, I have been blessed, privileged, and truly honored to serve the people of our great city," Nigro said in the release.

The announcement comes nine days after the last day of the FDNY's chief of department, Thomas Richardson, 62, of Deer Park, another man who held every uniformed rank. Richardson retired after 41 years.

Nigro was appointed commissioner 2014 by Bill de Blasio, months into his two-term mayoralty, and Nigro has continued in the post into the first weeks of the Adams administration.

Earlier this month, Nigro oversaw operations at the city's deadliest fire since 1990: the Jan. 9 blaze at a Bronx apartment where 17 occupants, including eight children, were killed, because a self-closing door failed to shut as required by law, spewing smoke throughout that 19-story building where a duplex's space heater malfunctioned and sparked the flames.

Since early 2020, Nigro also steered the FDNY as it's grappled with the coronavirus pandemic — outside the department, a surge in infections and death citywide and what the FDNY says is the highest period of medical calls in city history; within the department, coping with sickened personnel early on, a global shortage of personal-protective equipment, a vaccine program, and labor union threats, which didn't come to fruition, that the FDNY's vaccine mandate would cripple hesitant-to-be vaccinated rank-and-file staffing.

Daniel Nigro became a firefighter on Nov. 29, 1969, rising to chief of department on Sept. 12, 2001, after his predecessor, Peter J. Ganci Jr., was killed while responding to the World Trade Center terrorist attacks. Nigro, who survived the fall of the Twin Towers, oversaw all rescue and recovery operations at the Ground Zero site.

Earlier in Nigro's career, after stints in firehouses and administrative posts around the city, in the mid-1990s, he helped merge the city's ambulance corps, Emergency Medical Service, into the FDNY, and he later held other posts. He retired in 2002 on a disability pension from a respiratory illness suffered in the Twin Towers' collapse, but returned to the FDNY in 2014 as commissioner, a civilian post.

On May 9, 2014, Nigro's father, then 93 and also named Daniel, joined his son and de Blasio at the FDNY Academy on Randalls Island for the younger man's appointment as commissioner.

"Before any of the members here think that it's going to be easy, with a kindly old uncle at the helm," the new commissioner said to assembled personnel, "remember that no one expects more of you than your family."

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.