Queens

And, but today I'm going to talk to someone who was the child of someone who didn't make it.

Lieutenant Kenneth Phelan was a firefighter from my neighborhood in Maspeth, Queens.

He had four children, and I grew up with one of them, his daughter Erin.

He was someone, um, I didn't know very well because he had, his, his eldest two kids were daughters and his youngest two were sons, and the youngest two were fairly younger than me.

I could tell who he was just from his face.

He was always very involved in his family, very involved in his kids, coached a lot of sports teams.

Um, the kids all went to the same grammar school as me, Our Lady of Hope in Middle Village, Queens.

In 1989, he joined the fire department of New York, and he was in Engine 16 and Ladder 7, and then transferred to Engine 217 in Brooklyn, which was the same fire company as his father's.

Mm-hmm.

And when I crossed into Queens, in the Little Neck area, I might as well have been crossing into Sana'a, Yemen.

I mean, women in burkas, women in hijabs, women...

You know, we- every sign in Arabic.

Mm-hmm.

So you have to go through Queens, and you can't get into the city anywhere unless you had ID.

Mm.

You had to be a, a fireman, a police officer, a doctor, a nurse- Mm-hmm ...

Why? Because tourists, people don't tour Brooklyn.

They don't tour Queens.

If you're a tourist, you go to Manhattan.

A lot of people work in Manhattan.

Moines,

New York Hospital in Queens, St. John's, Queens Hospital, Mary Immaculate Hospital, EMS Division, and New York University Downtown Hospital.

These rescue workers are joining the midshipmen around a giant flag in the same way that Americans from all walks of life have come together to help in the wake of these tragic events.

At this time, we ask

If you've been at Shea the last few years, you know that There's a skyline right at the top of the board with the bridge in front and the Mets logo in the middle.

It's the Manhattan skyline.

And off to the left, looking at Manhattan from Queens, the World Trade Center.

Here's the O2 to Lopez dribbled foul.

you're

from Queens.

We've gotten used to it with our

president.

I am from the president's borough of Queens.

He and I grew up not too far.

I mean, he's a little bit older than I am.

You know, I remember that day very vividly.

But Mayor Mamdani has gone out of his way to some degree visiting Hazmat One, Rescue Four 288, where one of my best friends was on the 73rd floor of Tower 2 that day and died.

He visited them in Queens, spent time with the firemen.

He also signed an emergency preparedness executive order for New York City that backfired on him when he handed the pen off to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who then handed it off to Ramzi Qasem.

Ramzi Qasem is the chief counsel to the mayor, but he represented Al-Qaeda terrorists who wanted to blow up a French oil tanker in Yemen in 2002, whose brother-in-law was one of the hijackers And you can see the awkward silence that went on in that room and the smirk kind of on Ramsey's face.

He was trying to contact his family, and he gave a quite terrifying account of what he was witnessing at that time.

I'm across, uh, from the UN in Queens, and it's utter chaos here.

There's, uh, all this siren smoke.

To...

[sighs]

A, a, a very difficult time, obviously, for, for everybody there.

People getting sick, uh, people down on their knees crying, throwing up, and I'm in Queens across.

So the downtown area is absolute chaos.

That indescribable feeling we get.

Yes, Queens! And we go somewhere we've never been before.

It's a bold strategy, Cotton.

Let's see if it pays off for them.