HISTORIC NYC FIREHOUSES: AN ARCHITECTURE WALKING TOUR

Why New York's firehouses look like small palaces

A New York firehouse from the 1880s or 1890s is a strange object: a three-storey civic building, often on a lot twenty-five feet wide, dressed as if it mattered a great deal. Rusticated limestone, carved cartouches, terracotta friezes, a copper cornice, and over the apparatus bay an arch big enough to drive a horse-drawn steamer through at speed. The city built dozens of them in the twenty-five years after it replaced its brawling volunteer companies with a paid professional force in 1865, and a remarkable number survive, most of them still with a fire engine inside.

The reason they look the way they do is political as much as architectural. The volunteer companies had been political clubs with hoses attached; Boss Tweed came up through one. The professional department had to look like the opposite of that, so its buildings were made to read as civic from across the street: symmetrical, solid, a touch grander than the tenements and cast-iron warehouses either side. One firm, Napoleon LeBrun & Sons, got the job of designing every one of them for fifteen years and set the pattern. When that arrangement ended in 1895 the city handed the commissions round to the fashionable firms of the day, and the firehouses got bigger, more French and more theatrical, before the department brought the work in-house and standardised it again.

Lower Manhattan holds the best of both eras within a two-and-a-bit-mile walk. This page is a guide to six of them, in the order you'd come to them on foot, starting in Tribeca and ending on Great Jones Street. One of them is the building we modelled for our Engine 55 model. One of them is better known as the Ghostbusters firehouse. One was, for three years in the 1970s, the first gay community centre in New York.

  • Written by Gavin Paisley, director & model-maker at Chisel & Mouse based in Sussex, England.
  • Last updated: 6-Nov-26.

One firm, forty-two firehouses

For fifteen years, every firehouse New York built came off a single drawing board. Between 1880 and 1895 the firm of Napoleon LeBrun & Sons designed all forty-two of the Fire Department's new buildings, at a rate of two or three a year, and in doing so decided what a New York firehouse looks like.

LeBrun was not an obvious choice. Born in Philadelphia in 1821 to French parents, he had trained under Thomas Ustick Walter, the architect of the Capitol dome, and made his name there with the Cathedral of SS Peter and Paul and the Academy of Music. He moved to New York in 1864, already in his forties, and was better known for insurance offices and churches than for anything municipal. The likeliest explanation for the commission is that in 1879 he was the American Institute of Architects' representative on the Fire Department's Board of Examiners, a seat he kept for eighteen years.

What he produced was a type. The department had only been a professional, paid force since 1865, and before that the volunteer companies had been as much political clubs as fire brigades. The new buildings had to say civic. So each one got a big arched or trabeated opening in the middle for the apparatus, a smaller door either side for the men, two or three floors of dormitory and kitchen above, and a facade of brick and stone or cast iron that was always a little grander than the tenements around it. LeBrun also fixed the plan: horses stabled inside at the back of the apparatus floor rather than in a yard across the street, and a hose-drying tower running the full height of the building against one wall so the cotton hoses could hang after every fire.

The firm reused designs when it had to. Engine 15 on Henry Street, Engine 53 on East 104th and Engine 54 on West 47th are near-identical triplets. But the range is wider than that suggests, from plain Greek Revival storefronts to the Loire chateau on Lafayette Street, and the firm's larger commissions for the department, the 1886 headquarters on East 67th Street and Engine 31, are proper set pieces.

Napoleon LeBrun died in 1901. The firm, run by his sons Pierre and Michael, went on to build the Metropolitan Life tower on Madison Square. But the firehouse commission had already ended in 1895, and what came next is the other half of this story.

The six firehouses

In walking order, south to north.

1. Engine 7 / Ladder 1 — 100 Duane Street, Tribeca

Trowbridge & Livingston, 1904–05

Start with the company, not the building. Hook & Ladder 1 was founded in 1772, under British rule, and is the oldest fire company in the city. Its firehouse is one of the youngest on this walk: a 75-foot-wide double house in what its architects called the "modern French" style, red brick with heavy stone banding above a rusticated limestone base, and three arched bays across the ground floor, two for Engine 7's apparatus and one for the ladder truck. Trowbridge & Livingston were a society firm (they went on to do the J. P. Morgan building and the St Regis) and this was the department spending money on the civic centre's doorstep, a block from City Hall. On 11 September 2001 the French documentary-makers Jules and Gédéon Naudet were filming the probationary firefighters of this house, which is why so much of what the world saw that morning was seen from here.

Photograph by Beyond My Ken, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

2. Hook & Ladder 8 — 14 North Moore Street, Tribeca

Alexander H. Stevens, FDNY Superintendent of Buildings, 1903–05

This is the building everyone photographs and almost nobody looks at. It is the Ghostbusters firehouse, used for the exteriors in the 1984 film and its sequels, and on a sunny afternoon there is a small crowd outside taking selfies. What they are standing in front of is one of the first firehouses the department designed in-house after the LeBrun years. Stevens was the Fire Department's own superintendent of buildings, and this was one of four near-identical houses he produced in 1903–05: three storeys, a limestone base, brick above, Beaux-Arts trim. Originally it had two great arched apparatus doors on North Moore Street. In 1913 the city widened Varick Street and simply sliced the building in half; what you see is the surviving western half, with one door, and the eastern wall is a plain brick cut. The company was among the first to reach the World Trade Center in 2001 and lost its lieutenant, Vincent Halloran, for whom the block is now co-named. The building had a $6 million restoration in 2016–18.

Photograph by Jazz Guy, licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

3. Engine 31 — 87 Lafayette Street at White Street, Civic Center

Napoleon LeBrun & Sons, 1894–96

LeBrun's last and most extravagant firehouse, and the one that proves the firm could do anything it liked once the budget allowed. It is a sixteenth-century Loire Valley chateau with a fire engine in it: two storeys of brick and limestone under a steep slate hipped roof with iron cresting, dormers over a storey tall, a balustrade and a low corner tower. The carved detail — shells, dolphins, wreaths — is of a quality the Landmarks Commission said in 1966 was unsurpassed by any building in its category. It cost about $80,000, a very large sum for a firehouse, and the critics were not kind: Montgomery Schuyler in the Architectural Record asked what elegance had to do with putting out fires, and the Real Estate Record & Guide called it a manifestly extravagant absurdity.

The site is the harder story. The building stands on the filled-in Collect Pond, once sixty feet deep, and LeBrun had to drive wooden piles into the saturated ground, Venetian-fashion, to carry it. The department left in 1972 and the building stood empty for seven years before the Downtown Community Television Center took it on; when the water table dropped the piles rotted and the chateau began to settle, and the whole foundation had to be rebuilt in the 1980s. It is still DCTV's home and still, from the street, the most improbable public building in lower Manhattan.

Photograph by Jim.henderson, licensed under CC0 1.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

4. Engine 55 — 363 Broome Street, Little Italy

R. H. Robertson, 1898–99

The one we modelled. Engine 55 was among the first firehouses the city commissioned from outside architects after the LeBrun monopoly ended, and Robert Henderson Robertson, better known for churches and the Park Row Building, never did another. He answered LeBrun's chateau with something heavier and more Roman: a rusticated limestone ground floor, a monumental round-arched apparatus bay, oval windows draped in carved garlands either side, a stone banner reading 55 ENGINE 55 across the arch, and a terracotta phoenix over the second-floor plaque. The Landmarks Commission's shorthand for it is Romanesque Revival meeting Beaux-Arts, and the mix is what makes it work: the weight of the one and the ornament of the other.

It has been a working firehouse continuously since 1899. Wesley Williams, one of the first Black firefighters in the department, joined the company here in 1919 and went on to become its first Black battalion chief. Steve Buscemi was a firefighter here before he was an actor. Five of its members died at the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001; the memorial plaque is beside the door.

Photograph by ajay_suresh, licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

5. The former Engine 13 — 99 Wooster Street, SoHo

Napoleon LeBrun & Son, 1881–82

A plain early LeBrun, and a reminder that the firm built far more of these than it built chateaux. The apparatus bay is cast iron, painted red, with rusticated piers either side; above it, two floors of red brick with stone banding and a grid of terracotta rosettes under a bracketed cornice. It is an exact twin of the former Engine 27 at 173 Franklin Street, which you passed two blocks from Duane Street. The lintel over the doors once carried the company name and the panel between the second and third floors listed the officials and the dates; both were stripped before 1940.

The department left in the 1940s and the building was a warehouse when the Gay Activists Alliance leased it in April 1971. For three and a half years the GAA Firehouse was the first gay community centre in New York: Thursday general meetings, Saturday dances on the apparatus floor, a film series run by Vito Russo, a cable television programme, and the planning of the "zaps" that confronted politicians in public. The lambda, now a worldwide symbol, was first adopted here. In October 1974 the upper floors were set on fire in six places and the GAA was evicted. The city made the building an individual landmark in June 2019, the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall.

Photograph by Epicgenius, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

6. Engine 33 / Ladder 9 — 42–44 Great Jones Street, NoHo

Ernest Flagg and Walter B. Chambers, 1898–99

End here, because nothing else on the walk can follow it. Flagg had trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and would go on to build the Singer Tower; this was the city giving a fashionable young architect a firehouse and a free hand. The whole four-storey facade is one gesture: a single monumental arch rising from a rusticated stone base, deep concave surrounds, a carved keystone over a cartouche, and inside the arch three floors of tall French windows with iron balconies, grouped into one composition. Over the top sits a very deep metal cornice with antefixae and fleur-de-lis on paired scroll brackets. The Landmarks Commission in 1968 called it architecturally daring in its day, and it still is: it reads less like a firehouse than a Paris hôtel particulier that happens to have two fire engines in the ground floor.

It was built to house the Chief of Department as well as the company, which explains the scale. Ladder 9 joined Engine 33 here in 1948. On 11 September 2001 this house lost ten of its men.

Photograph by Ajay Suresh, licensed under CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The walk

About 2.7 miles on the flat, roughly an hour of walking and two hours with looking. Start at Duane Street (Chambers Street or City Hall subway) and finish on Great Jones Street (Bleecker Street or Astor Place). Every one of these is a working firehouse except Lafayette Street and Wooster Street, so stay off the apron in front of the doors and expect the truck to come out at any moment. If a door is open and the crew aren't busy, they are usually happy to talk. Distances are approximate.

1) Engine 7 / Ladder 1 - 100 Duane Street

2) Hook & Ladder 8 - 14 North Moore Street

3) Engine 31 (now DCTV) - 87 Lafayette Street

4) Engine 55 - 363 Broome Street

5) Former Engine 13 - 99 Wooster Street

6) Engine 33 / Ladder 9 - 42-44 Great Jones Street

On the way from stop 1 to stop 2 you pass 173 Franklin Street, the former Engine 27 of 1881–82, which is the identical twin of the Wooster Street building you'll see at stop 5; worth a glance to see what LeBrun's cast-iron base looks like without the red paint.

If you want a seventh, the old Firemen's Hall at 155 Mercer Street (1854) sits two blocks east of Wooster. It predates the professional department and the LeBrun era entirely, and shows what the city thought a fire building should look like before anyone had decided it should look like anything in particular.

Related pages

Frequently asked questions

How many historic firehouses are in New York City? 

The Landmarks Preservation Commission has designated well over fifty firehouses across the five boroughs as individual landmarks. The six on this walk are among the oldest and most elaborate in Manhattan, all built between 1882 and 1905.

Who was Napoleon LeBrun? 

A Philadelphia-born architect who, with his sons, designed every firehouse the New York Fire Department built between 1880 and 1895, forty-two in all. The firm also designed the Metropolitan Life tower on Madison Square.

Which NYC firehouse was used in Ghostbusters? 

Hook & Ladder 8 at 14 North Moore Street in Tribeca, built in 1903–05 and still a working firehouse. It’s stop 2 on this walk.

Can you go inside a New York firehouse? 

Not as a visitor, but every house on this walk except Lafayette Street and Wooster Street is active, and if the doors are open the crews are generally happy to talk. Stay off the apron in front of the doors.

How long does the walk take? 

About 2.7 miles on the flat: an hour walking, two with looking. Start at Chambers Street subway and finish at Bleecker Street or Astor Place.

Is the Engine 55 firehouse still in use? 

Yes. Engine Company 55 has operated from 363 Broome Street continuously since 1899. We make a plaster model of the building; the link is at the foot of the page.

Sources and further reading