41st Precinct Station House ("Fort Apache")
1086 Simpson Street | Longwood | built 1914
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1912
The Art Commission reviews the design for the Simpson Street police station twice
Hazzard, Erskine & Blagden sent plans and a watercolor of the proposed Simpson Street Police Station to the city's Art Commission in December 1911. Its architecture committee, chaired by Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, took it up on January 9 and May 14, 1912, and the revised drawing shows finer rustication, a reworked five-arch arcade and brick-and-limestone walls instead of imitation stone. After Police Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo's dismissal the design was never repeated, leaving Simpson Street the only example.
- 1913
The 62nd Precinct opens its new station house on Simpson Street
The station house opened in 1913 for the new 62nd Precinct, which covered 1.80 square miles and 33 miles of streets with about 48,000 people. By 1916 its force numbered 70 patrolmen, nine sergeants, three lieutenants, three matrons and one captain. Police Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo, who had pushed the station-house building program forward, was dismissed in 1913 and his plans were set aside; an elderly resident later recalled the opening and the last gardens and orchards of old West Farms.
“In 1913 when the new station house opened, the 1.80 square miles of the precinct contained a population of 48,000 people…”
- 1920
Police blotters from 1920-21 record unmuzzled dogs, speeders and Lorna Doones
Entries in the precinct's blotters for 1920-21 describe a nearly suburban beat: summonses for an unmuzzled dog, Sunday selling and uncovered fruit, and drivers clocked at up to 32 miles per hour on Southern Boulevard. Six boys aged 13 to 15 were brought in for playing in the street and sent home with their parents. The commissary's daily deliveries included bacon, coffee, Fig Newtons, graham crackers and Lorna Doones.
- 1971
The 41st Precinct house, renumbered in 1929, becomes known as "Fort Apache"
The 62nd Precinct was renumbered the 47th in 1920, the 20th in 1924 and the 41st in 1929. By 1971 the precinct's blotters were dominated by drug arrests, and one officer and a suspect were both shot as a hostile crowd gathered. With some residents treating the building as a target rather than a refuge, the popular press nicknamed the station house "Fort Apache."
“…the building had become less a refuge and more a fortress and was dubbed "Fort Apache" in the popular press.”
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