The mayor gave firefighter Jeffrey Novack the medal of valor Thursday, and for a brief moment all was good in the city. Baltimore's chief executive joked about Novack's boyish appearance, his being just 23 years old and all, and already a hero.
It was a perfect stage: the opening ceremony of the Firehouse Expo, which attracts thousands of firefighters from all over the country to Baltimore to learn better training and safety. Participants gave Novack a standing ovation as the shy young man stood in front of colleagues from departments in New York, Boston, Chicago and beyond.
Novack played the humble role to perfection. He politely declined Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake's offer to say a few words, and when surrounded by television cameras later, he simply said, "What I did that night is done almost every day across the country."
What he did was rush into a burning three-story apartment building on Liberty Heights Avenue in April and carry an unconscious 86-year-old woman to safety. Then he turned around and rushed back inside, looking for more trapped people.
Novack became trapped himself, and to escape he crawled out a third-story window, where he dangled, holding on to the window sill by his fingertips, until the heavy smoke finally overwhelmed him and he let go.
"He jumped or he would have died," Rawlings-Blake told the crowd gathered at the Baltimore Hilton Convention Center Hotel.
Novack, who was using a wheelchair just a month ago, arrived at the ceremony walking. He spent more than a month recovering in a hospital, including two weeks at Maryland Shock Trauma Center, and he's expected to return to work in a few months.
Said the mayor: "I am sincerely indebted and proud to see you up and about."
What went unsaid during the public portion of the ceremony was that Novack's accident had become entangled in the city's political fight over public safety and spending.
Novack rushed into the apartment building without backup from firefighters who carry water. The engine company closest to the fire that night was busy on a medical call and the next-closest engine — the vehicle that pumps water — was not available because of rolling closures caused by budget cuts.
Union officials used this fire to sharpen their criticism of the city's spending plan and to say that saving money nearly cost a life, this time one of their own. At the time, Baltimore Fire Chief James S. Clack said of the company closures: "I think we're operating at the very edge of what's safe right now."
On Thursday, Clack said the situation had improved greatly under Rawlings-Blake. The new mayor has cut back the rolling closures, which had been as high as five or even six companies in one day under the previous mayor, to three a day this year.
The mayor did tell the visiting firefighters that the city faced harsh budget cuts, but she spun it into good news: She didn't have to lay anyone off, she improved ways to respond to frequent 911 callers and she's working to hire more firefighters.
But the president of the firefighters union, Bob Sledgeski, called the mayor's remarks about championing public safety disingenuous, especially when made to a group of firefighters.
He noted that she has not restored the ladder truck, cut by her predecessor, that used to be in the station just a few blocks from the hotel at which the firefighters are staying. Sledgeski said the nearest trucks that can reach tall buildings are more than a mile away, in Pigtown and Oldtown.
Clack countered that a new study shows that the truck companies stationed downtown made fewer runs after the ladder truck disappeared, indicating to him that downtown is sufficiently covered. In his opening remarks to the group, the fire chief praised Rawlings-Blake for her commitment to public safety and to firefighters.
Novack refused to be drawn into the debate, even though it was his life that had become a part of it.
For a brief moment, the political rhetoric, the vitriolic jousting between management and labor, the fight over whether the city is safe enough or too dangerous, the dispute over whether the mayor saved jobs or imperiled lives, ended with four words from a 23-year-old.
"I'm proud and humbled," Novack said.