Former Engine Company 17 firehouse
91 Ludlow Street | Lower East Side | built 1900
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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.
- 1880
Napoleon LeBrun & Son's new firehouse for Engine Company 17 opens on Ludlow Street
Volunteer firefighters had used 91 Ludlow Street since 1831, and the professional Engine Company 17 took it over after 1865. In 1879 the city commissioned a new three-story brick engine house here from Napoleon LeBrun & Son, at a cost of $9,024. It was finished by March 1880 and had the latest gear, including a patent swinging harness. The firm used nearly the same design for a firehouse on East 11th Street.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1894
Journalist Meg Merrilies spends a week living with Engine Company 17
A female journalist who wrote as Meg Merrilies lived for a week in 1894 with the firemen at 91 Ludlow Street. According to the World Almanac, she wore boys' clothes and rubber boots, slid down the pole at alarms, rode the engine to fires and helped fight a large blaze at Broadway and Leonard Street. She also drove engine horses back from fires and carried a horse choking on smoke to safety.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1912
Rex the firehouse bulldog earns a helmet for sniffing out fires near Ludlow Street
Engine Company 17's mascot Rex was a bulldog that fireman Tom Foley found on a cold day and brought into the station more dead than alive. In March 1912 the Evening World reported that he alerted the crew to a fire on a Ludlow Street tenement roof, and the company gave him a firemen's helmet. The Tribune credited him with saving seven lives. In June 1912 a horse kicked him on the way to a fire and he was so badly hurt that a patrolman was called to end his suffering; the men laid him on straw with his four medals around his neck.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1925
Engine Company 17 is reported the busiest in the city, answering 1,288 alarms in a year
A 1925 Municipal Reference Library note, citing the New York Times, called Engine Company 17 at 91 Ludlow Street the busiest fire company in the city, with 1,288 alarms in 1924. The note placed the house in what it called the most congested district in the world. Its firemen had answered 1,062 calls in 1906. In 1939 the company moved to Broome Street, and the city later sold the firehouse at auction.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1941
The city auctions the old Ludlow Street firehouse to toy jobber Louis Keehn
After Engine Company 17 moved to Broome Street in 1939, the building was briefly used by the Sanitation Department. In March 1941 the city sold it at public auction for $18,000 to Louis Keehn, a toy and stationery jobber, and gave him the mortgage. A 1951 renovation by S. Gardstein & Son enlarged the truck bay and bricked up some upper-floor openings, leaving a store, a mezzanine office and storage. Louis Keehn & Brother stayed into the 1960s.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
Further reading
- The Abused 1880 Engine Co. 17 - 91 Ludlow Street Daytonian in Manhattan
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