The FDNY bid farewell to Fire Commissioner Robert Tucker with a walkout ceremony at the department’s Downtown Brooklyn HQ on Friday.
Firefighters lining the entrance to the department’s Metrotech Center headquarters near Tech Place saluted as their erstwhile commander passed an FDNY color guard and boarded a fire engine that ferried him to retirement shortly after 3 p.m.
“It’s an extraordinarily special day for me and my family,” Tucker told reporters at his farewell event. “The love that I have felt for the FDNY for the last nearly 16 months is felt by them also.
“I want them to remember they had a commissioner who had their backs and who cared deeply about their safety and cared about the safety of the people of the City of New York.”
Tucker was among the first high-ranking appointees working under Mayor Adams to step down in response to Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral election victory last month, tendering his resignation only 12 hours later.
Tucker, a proud Zionist, said he is the FDNY’s second Jewish leader after Howard Safir. He previously cited Mamdani’s criticisms of Israel — which the mayor-elect once described as an apartheid state, and whose prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, he has called for being arrested — as among the “fundamental differences” that motivated his hasty decision to resign.
“There are things that I have heard [Mamdani] say that would make it difficult for me to continue on in such a senior executive role,” Tucker said in an interview with “CBS Mornings,” adding that his Jewish faith played a role in his decision to resign the day after Mamdani’s victory at the polls.
“I think it’s a factor, no doubt,” Tucker said about his faith. “I don’t want to tell you it’s the only factor.”
“It’s a complicated emotional decision to leave,” he added. “But ideologically there’s no doubt that the mayor and I disagree on some very fundamental things to me.”
Despite their differences, Tucker, at Friday’s send-off, said he has no hard feelings for the incoming mayor.
“I wish the mayor-elect well,” Tucker said. “His success is all of our success. I’m available to him and anyone in the administration to help make certain that the trajectory of the FDNY continues the way it’s going. I only hope that the best days of this department are ahead of us.”
Though Tucker was the first high-profile city official to resign in the wake of Mamdani’s victory over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and GOP candidate Curtis Sliwa in November, he was not the last.
Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Kaz Daughtry, who had a meteoric rise in the NYPD and then city government under Mayor Adams, put in his papers to retire from the NYPD on Dec. 10, with an effective date of Jan. 8, police records show.
