All fall down. 118-year-old firehouse collapses during move. Watch video.
Click here to see video of the collapse
The Centennial Firehouse in Peekskill New York had been vacant for more than 20 years. The 1890 structure, until today, sat under a metal bridge (the firehouse roof was altered in 1932 when the original bridge was built). The building needed to go so Route 9 could be widened.
The plan was to move the building a block away to an old train station where Abraham Lincoln spoke in 1861. The firehouse was to be turned into a museum. This morning those plans literally fell apart.
Peekskill’s Mayor Mary Foster was told issues with a hydraulic jack caused the firehouse to collapse into a pile of rubble.
Some of the structure was not destroyed, including the stone with the firehouse emblem on it, said Foster. And salvaged brick may be reused.
“A lot of the brick is very much intact, so the mover is, in fact, going to clean and move the brick over to the site where we were eventually moving the 1890 structure,” she said. The city may use salvaged brick to build a smaller building or use it as part of a planned firemen’s memorial.
A before shot of the Peekskill firehouse by Alan Zale for The New York Times
On August 9, The New York Times did a lovely story about the history of the building and the plans for its future. Here are some excerpts:
The firehouse’s history is still fresh to some of the firefighters who worked there. Deputy Chief John Esposito not only remembers off the top of his head the day the firehouse closed — Oct. 19, 1980. He also knows by heart the names of the two members of the company who died in the line of duty on Aug. 1, 1918, while battling a fierce fire at the Fleischmann plant.
“They were John Torpy and Walter Cole,” Mr. Esposito said. “Walter Cole was 18. He had just been elected to the company in July. That was his first major fire, and unfortunately his last.”
He wasn’t certain of Mr. Torpy’s age but speculated he was about 21, because he had just gotten out of the Army. (Five members from the Cortlandt Hook and Ladder Company were also killed in the Fleischmann fire.) The men died when a brick wall collapsed on them.
Mr. Esposito, a 44-year veteran of the Peekskill Fire Department, can tell you about the company’s first fire apparatus — it was called a jumper, and the water was hand-pumped. The firemen responded to fires by pulling the wagons themselves, sometimes running up the steep hills surrounding the station.
Mr. Esposito even knows the names of the two horses — Homer and John — that pulled the company’s first horse-drawn wagon, purchased in 1908. The horses were kept in a stall on the side of the firehouse.
Fond as he is of the firehouse’s history, Mr. Esposito was delighted when the company moved to its current quarters on Washington Street.
“We were ecstatic,” he said. “When you got torrential rains, the old firehouse would get flooded out. We’d have three feet of water in the building. And it happened all the time.”
