Former Empire Hose Company firehouse

70 Barrow Street | West Village | built 1852

Open on the map3 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

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.

  1. 1852

    The city builds a firehouse at 70 Barrow Street that later becomes a shoe factory and then apartments

    Read more

    No. 70 Barrow Street was built in 1852 as a three-story firehouse for the city. After the Fire Department abandoned it, the building was for a time a shoe factory. A fourth story went on in 1880, when it was also converted to apartments over a ground-floor carriage house. Today the central doorway of the original design has been bricked up and made into a window, with a round-arched entrance to the hallways on each side of it.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  2. 1857

    Two volunteer firemen live in the Barrow Street firehouse of Empire Hose Company No. 40

    In 1857 Empire Hose Company No. 40 had 30 members, and two of them lived full-time in the station: John H. Read, a gasfitter, and Alexander Kimburgh, a cartman. The company carried 1,000 feet of hose in good condition, though the city aldermen's inspectors judged the house to be in poor shape and too cramped. The volunteers were disbanded after the 1865 act created a paid Metropolitan Fire Department.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1878

    September 29

    The old firehouse at 70 Barrow Street hosts a Gospel Mission sermon

    After the volunteer fire companies were abolished, religious reformers who were fighting vice in Greenwich Village turned the firehouse at No. 70 Barrow Street into the Gospel Mission. On September 29, 1878, Dr. D. J. Lyster preached there; his topic was the angelic study of the gospel. The building was bought by brothers Adolph and Aaron Weiss in 1926, housed small manufacturers for about fifty years, and became apartments in 1971.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

Nearby

All 1,156 buildings with stories in West Village