To Your Stations!

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #251

A few weeks ago I wrote about this old fire station in Silver Spring, Maryland which is now a restaurant:

Some folks in the comments pointed me to a couple of other converted old firehouses, which I’m going to share in this piece. (I want to just note that quite a lot of my pieces come in some way from reader comments, which is really nice!)

One interesting thing about buildings in old cities is that they’re often pretty reusable for different purposes. For example, this old car showroom in Jersey City was turned into an apartment building. Obviously this involved basically a complete rebuild of the inside, but the structure itself could be a lot of different things. Suburban architecture is more specialized, which makes it less reusable, or reusable in uncanny-looking ways.

Anyway, here’s one close to home, in the City of Fairfax, in the old town center:

Here’s just the front; they did a pretty nice job disguising/reusing the old garage bays:

The building is from 1930, according to an old real estate listing. The website of the current restaurant notes that it first became a pub in 1982 (it was reopened under new management after a renovation in 2023). The Fairfax fire department first began operation in 1928, and moved to a new station in 1979, three years before the old station was turned into a restaurant; not a bad turnover time. I’m not able to find a photo of it during its life as a fire station.

The second one is further away—in Philadelphia.

Right across the street, in fact, from the Eastern State Penitentiary:

Jack’s Firehouse opened in 1989. And it turns out the chef who started it grew up in Virginia and worked in Washington, D.C. before doing restaurants in Philadelphia!

Here’s the chef/owner from a 2015 interview in the Philadelphia Inquirer, on the history of the building:

It was originally built in 1864 as the first paid fire department in the U.S. It was rebuilt in 1902, and there’s a great story behind that. In the 1870s, a man named Philip Johnson got himself appointed lifetime architect for the Philadelphia City Department of Public Health, thanks to family connections. Since he got a 3 percent commission on everything he built, he ripped down nearly every firehouse in the city and had them all redone. Almost everything in here, including all the wood on the walls and the floors, is from that construction.

Good old-fashioned big-city corruption!

And this bit that underscores the roughness of the neighborhood, at least back in the days when the place first opened:

It was a little rough. I once suspended my wife for a few days - she worked for me - because my staff knew they weren’t supposed to wear their waitressing uniforms walking home, and she kept doing it. The first few weeks after I opened, we had a little problem with people trying to open cars that weren’t their own. So I put gentlemen out on the street with baseball bats and whistles, and when somebody broke into a car, we would encourage them not to. We spoke redneck very well.

“A little problem with people trying to open cars that weren’t their own!”

Here’s an 1896 photo I found from a Facebook post about the building’s history; the structure on the left is still there, while the one on the right must be the one that was torn down and rebuilt:

It’s really cool that these, and many other old firehouses in cities, became neighborhood fixtures in a new way.

Bonus: here’s a historic fire house that still is a firehouse in the small town of Raritan, New Jersey:

One reason these older firehouses were often rendered obsolete is that the fire trucks have gotten much bigger over the years. Like so many other things, the scale at which common activities is done has outgrown the scale at which old towns and cities were built.

This is a subtle point, but it explains a lot about why old cities lost a lot of their original functionality in the 20th century. So we could probably use more urban-scale firehouses and fire trucks now. But there’s nothing wrong with some cool restaurants in historic buildings either.

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Related Reading:

Don’t Burn The Pizza!

Archive Dive: Burning To Know

Don’t Yell “Dinner!” In A Crowded Fire House

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