Fire Engine Company Number 65

History and architecture

Erected in 1897-98, the Fire Engine Company No. 65 firehouse was built to increase fire protection in an almost unprotected yet increasingly fashionable neighborhood. Its construction came at the end of a decade of extensive redevelopment which transformed service-oriented West 43rd Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues into a locus of prestigious hotels and club buildings. Its largely intact, stately facade is the result of professional developments in the New York Fire Department during the nineteenth century.

The graceful proportions and Renaissance-inspired vocabulary of the exterior are derived, for the most part, from the Beaux-Arts architecture of the influential 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Designed by the young firm of Hoppin & Koen, the Fire Engine Company No. 65 firehouse is a transitional design between the Parlier, picturesque firehouses by the firm of Napoleon LeBrun (later N. LeBrun & Sons) and the later, standardized neo-Georgian modular scheme by Hoppin & Koen that was executed throughout the city after 1910.

Several years after designing the Fire Engine Company No. 65 firehouse, the firm was responsible for another Beaux-Arts style civic edifice, the New York City Police Headquarters Building. At the vanguard of modern fire fighting, Fire Engine Company No. 65, which began with then up-to-date horse-drawn equipment, was the city's first to use pneumatic tires, a diesel powered pumper, and lime-green colored apparatus. Throughout its long and distinguished history, the company has fought many perilous and costly conflagrations; it continues the heroic task today.

Brief History of the New York Fire Department

The New York Fire Department originated under the administration of Governor Stuyvesant when in 1648 the first fire ordinance was adopted. The ordinance provided that funds received from fines would be used to purchase and maintain buckets, ladders, and hooks; it also established a fire watch of eight men, requiring each citizen to stand a watch in turn. Beginning in the 1730s New York relied upon the Volunteer Fire Department, which was organized under a chief engineer responsible to the Common Council; these men used the first pieces of fire protection apparatus in the city: two hand-operated pumps brought from London.

The volunteers, who upon saving buildings were paid rewards by insurance companies, established extensive social networks based on nepotism and elaborate rituals, and occupied unusually comfortable firehouses. Nine of New York's mayors, as well as the infamous "Boss" William Marcy Tweed, were volunteer firemen, each establishing his first political base within his engine company. By the mid-nineteenth century, the city's rapid growth, political feuds among the companies, and the volunteers' notoriously inefficient practices led to public criticism of the volunteer system.

An act of the New York State Legislature in 1865 established the Metropolitan Fire District consisting of the cities of New York (south of 86th Street) and Brooklyn and initiated a salaried force which was characterized by greater austerity and attention to professionalism. Like many municipal services, its administration passed from the State to the City under the Tweed Charter of 1870 and was replaced by the separate Fire Departments of New York and Brooklyn.

Eventually the scattered villages lying north of the city (what is today the Pastern part of the Bronx) were annexed and received paid fire companies. With the consolidation of New York City's five boroughs into one metropolis in 1898, the F.D.N.Y. took over the paid Fire Departments of the City of Brooklyn, Long Island City, and more than 100 volunteer fire companies in Queens and Staten Island. During the twentieth century, the remaining volunteers were superseded by the professional Department.