Firehouse, Engine Company 83, Hook & Ladder Company 29
618 East 138th Street | Mott Haven | built 1931
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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.
- 1899
The Fire Department draws up plans for a firehouse here that it never builds
Soon after the 1898 Consolidation, the city planned a second engine company for Mott Haven. In 1899 Manly N. Cutter, the Fire Department's Deputy Building Superintendent, produced plans for a three-story, $24,000 firehouse at what was then numbered 898 East 138th Street, near Cypress Avenue. Those plans were never carried out.
- 1905
Contractors finish a firehouse for a district of factories and tenements with no fire station nearby
The Fire Department hired architect Robert D. Kohn in December 1903, and he filed plans for a two-story building in July 1904. Alfred Nugent & Son built it between January and October 1905 for $41,698. The Real Estate Record & Builders Guide observed that the surrounding blocks were packed with factories and tenements and that no firehouse stood within half a mile.
- 1905
Robert D. Kohn slips hints of the Vienna Secession into a neo-Classical firehouse
Kohn, trained at Columbia and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, was one of a handful of American architects whose work drew on the Vienna Secession from roughly 1905 to 1915. Here he wrapped salmon-colored brick around a three-bay limestone frame at street level and topped it with a bracketed terra-cotta cornice. The concave segmental arches below and the end pieces of the roof parapet carry quiet Secessionist touches.
- 1906
Engine Company 83 and Hook & Ladder Company 29 are organized in the new firehouse
The two companies were formally organized in February 1906 and have answered alarms from this building ever since. The house was an early instance of the firehouse with two vehicle bays, a layout that became the standard for New York City firehouses over the following 25 years.
- 2012
The Landmarks Preservation Commission designates the firehouse a city landmark
At the May 15, 2012 public hearing, speakers from the Victorian Society New York and the Historic Districts Council backed designation and nobody opposed it. The Fire Department of the City of New York also sent the Commission a letter of support. The Commission voted to make the building and its lot, Block 2550, Lot 28, a landmark on June 12.
“There were two speakers in favor of designation: representatives of the Historic Districts Council and The Victorian Society New York.”
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