I went to work today in this building.
Ok, it wasn’t actually this building. I mean it was this building, only 80 years later. Let me clarify. I work in a fire station that was built in 1931.
It’s no longer an “active” fire station, which means that we don’t have any responding apparatus that are housed there. It means we store all of the archives and old apparatus that is no longer needed. It means we are the collector of all the junk that nobody wants anymore.
We function day to day in rooms that were originally used for dorms, locker rooms, and day rooms. Over the years we have put up partitians, walls, and file cabinets to section off office spaces.
About a year ago, we applied for a grant to seismically upgrade our building. Four months ago, we found out that we were awarded that grant for a total of $1.3 million dollars. In short, they will completely gut our building and reconstruct the entire inside to be more of an office building. This is bittersweet. I know that I have jokingly complained about having to sit in a hallway as an office, but deep down I know that I am sitting in a hallway that 20 years ago was the dorm room that my husband slept in when he first started at the City Fire Department.
Our building was never constructed to be an office building and we have done the best we can with the set up. Our drawings for the remodel are exciting. They include an elevator, a meeting room where we hold our own Board meetings, and an actual women’s bathroom that isn’t a converted broom closet. Actually, there are two women’s bathrooms, one on each floor!
The past three weeks we have spent boxing up everything. There have been some interesting discoveries, like the 1964 Annual Report, which settles the rumor that has floated around for years about the station being haunted. According to the report, on April 12, 1964, John Mitchell, the Fire Inspector, died of a heart attack while on-duty at the station. Most of us have had at least one encounter with Mr. Mitchell.
How many men have slid down this pole? I know a few of us have. Thankfully, it will be incorporated into the new building. Have you ever seen a door as tall as the door that is for the hose dryer tower?
We found this scratched into the concrete in the side bay. We like to think it says "A-1, 9-11-1959"
The boxes are stacking up around the office. Notice the rope to the right of the picture. At one time, there was a fire in our station and these were installed shortly after as an exit option from the second floor.
Another good thing about this project is that we are required to convert the exterior of the building to the way it looked in 1931. The doors and windows that have been bricked in over the years will be replaced with original looking bay doors and windows.
This temporary move will be a test to our strength as a crew. We are used to having our space, to being spread out. By this time next week, we will all be smooshed together in pretty tight quarters. I figure I will either get nothing done for the next year because we will always be talking, or I will get a ton of work done because none of us are speaking to each other.
I am so thankful that I have got to spend the past almost five years in this building and the history it contains. It’s just a fraction of the time it has been there, and I am just one of the hundreds that have cycled through, but I am thankful to have been a part of the history. It’s exciting, it bittersweet, and it’s inevitable. I will keep you informed of the progress and will be sure to post more as the process goes along.
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