Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll meet the New York Fire Department’s newest chaplain. We’ll also get details on Gov. Kathy Hochul’s decision to send State Police and National Guard soldiers into the New York City subway system.
To visit a firehouse in Brooklyn recently, the Rev. Pamela Holmes wore a shirt with a Fire Department emblem — and her clerical collar.
“You want to wear something identifiable so that people will know you are who you say you are,” said Holmes, who will be sworn in today as the Fire Department’s second female chaplain. She will be the first Black woman in the role, in a department that long resisted efforts to diversify its ranks.
Holmes is one of seven chaplains — six of them Christian and one Jewish. Each is “on tour,” or on duty, one day a week. Holmes is also an associate pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn.
The chaplains provide counseling to firefighters and other Fire Department employees, and can assist when families are notified about a firefighter who died in the line of duty. They make hospital visits to injured or sick firefighters. They also do invocations or prayers at ceremonies like street-namings.
But Holmes values days when there is time to visit firehouses.
On one visit, she chatted with a female firefighter who said she is Muslim. “She was floored that I had read the Quran,” Holmes said. As the conversation ended, the firefighter said, “Hey, chaplain, we don’t have an imam right now. Until they get one, if I need one, can I call you?”
Holmes said that the encounter illuminated her approach to the chaplain job. “This is about building relationships, because then people will trust you enough to open up and share.”
She had been on the board of the EMS FDNY Help Fund, a nonprofit that provides assistance to emergency medical technicians and paramedics, for several years when she heard that the department was seeking a chaplain. She uploaded her résumé, went for two interviews and waited.
“Typical of the city, it was months and months,” she said. “I thought, ‘I guess they found somebody, they’re not interested in me, I’ll keep on with the fund and let God figure out the rest.’”
Then she heard that she was a finalist, and got the job, a part-time position that pays about $32,000 a year.
In recent years, much of the attention paid to the Fire Department has centered on racial diversity. Black firefighters made up 10 percent of the department’s work force last year, compared with 7.5 percent in 2019. Hispanics accounted for 15.6 percent last year, up from 12.5 percent in 2019. Asian firefighters were 2.4 percent of the force last year, up slightly from 2 percent in 2019.
Holmes, 57, worked as a paralegal in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office after college, then earned a master’s degree in a program for aspiring politicians, only to decide that running for office was not for her. She shifted to education, eventually working on programs to promote diversity and provide opportunities for African American and Latino students at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, and at Brooklyn College.
By then, she said, she was singing in the choir at Emmanuel Baptist. “God was tugging, tugging, tugging,” she said. “I would say no and God would say yes and I realized you couldn’t say no to God.”
By 2012, she had delivered her trial sermon and left for the Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey. She received a master of divinity degree in 2014 and returned to Emmanuel Baptist.
She said her first visit to a firehouse ended with a conversation with two firefighters. “One of them was a jokester and said, ‘I don’t know about women preaching. Can you really preach?’” she recalled. She replied: “You’re a firefighter. Can you really put out a fire?’’
The other firefighter told her, “You were not what I expected.” Then he said, “Chaplain, promise me, if something happens to me, will you be the one who comes?”
Holmes said: “I got in the car and I said, ‘I understand the assignment now.’”
Weather
Expect rain and drizzle today with some flooding after heavy rain. The temperatures will peak in the 50s. Tonight the sky will be cloudy, with temperatures dropping into the high 30s.
National Guard and State Police will patrol the subways
Gov. Kathy Hochul is sending hundreds of National Guard soldiers and State Police officers to patrol subway platforms in New York City and check passengers’ bags.
Hochul said the show of force would help make commuters and visitors feel safer.
Hochul said 750 members of the New York National Guard and 250 personnel from the State Police and the M.T.A. would be assigned to subway duty. Hochul said part of their mission would be to keep weapons out of the subways.
They will join an already sizable police presence on platforms and in stations. Mayor Eric Adams sent an additional 1,000 officers into the subways last month after major crimes in the system had jumped by 45 percent in January compared with the same time last year.
My colleagues Maria Cramer and Ana Ley write that crime rates were down in February. Police Department data showed as of March 3 that the overall rise in major crimes for the year was 13 percent.
But three homicides since January — and several brutal assaults, including the slashing of a conductor who leaned out of the cab as his train pulled into a Brooklyn station — have once again raised questions about safety.
“Rattling off statistics, saying things are getting better, doesn’t make you feel better,” Hochul said, “especially when you’ve just heard about someone being slashed in the throat or thrown onto a subway tracks. There’s a psychological impact — people worry they could be next. Anxiety takes hold. And riding the subway, which should just simply be part of your everyday life, is filled with stress and trepidation.”
Hochul declined to say how long the National Guard soldiers would patrol the subways, saying she did not want to tip off criminals.
Her announcement drew outrage from civil libertarians, who called the move an overreach that would infringe on the rights of commuters. Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, which represents the city’s transit workers applauded it as “the beginning of real action,” although Richard Davis, the president, said that the plan did not go far enough.
Less than two hours after Hochul’s announcement, a female conductor on a southbound No. 4 train said she was hit with a glass bottle as the train was pulling away from 170th Street station in the Bronx. The man who hit her fled, and no arrests had been made by late afternoon, the police said. The conductor was in stable condition.
METROPOLITAN diary
The producer
Dear Diary:
It happened during the 1970s. I was heading east on 57th Street toward Carnegie Hall, where I was supposed to play drums for a jazz dance class.
As I approached Seventh Avenue, I saw a familiar person standing at the bus stop. It was Zero Mostel.
I walked up to him and said that I was a fan of his and of his films.
He thanked me.
I asked whether he was doing anything.
He looked at me and smiled.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m waiting for a bus.”
— Boris Kinberg
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
