Heritage House

By Carl Glassman

The handsome Tribeca firehouse of Engine 7 and Ladder 1 turns 100 this year, and on Sept. 25 the Duane Street block where it stands, between Church Street and Broadway, will come alive with a six-hour centennial celebration and street fair, beginning at 11 a.m.

There will be a slew of free activities at the fair, from demonstrations of rappelling and below-grade rescues to displays of antique apparatus and a "smokehouse" where kids can (safely) experience the rapid movement of smoke through a building. But even for those who attend the festivities, it will be hard to imagine what 100 years means in the life of this old house, where horses once pulled rigs out of those same red bays onto cobblestoned Duane Street. Steve Olsen is a firefighter who wants to tell the story. Olsen, 45, is an 18-year veteran of Ladder 1. He is not only organizing the celebration, he is also researching the long history of the two firefighting companies. It has been an eight-year pursuit. The effort began modestly, when Olsen decided to line the walls of a refurbished room in the firehouse with historical photos and

stories of the companies' medal winners and men killed in the line of duty. As he flipped through dusty log books in the firehouse attic and talked to retired firemen, his research led to a deeper journey into the past, and the creation of a book.

		Other firefighters in the house, recruited by Olsen, helped dig through archives. But his closest partner in the writing and research is Mike Boucher, a Brooklyn fire dispatcher and the Fire Department's unofficial historian. The history they are writing goes back not just 100 years, but to Colonial New York, when Ladder 1 was born, a time when the "hooks" of hook-and-ladder companies were used to tear the smoldering hay off of thatched roofs. Olsen said he is compiling the book for the community, and for his fellow firemen in the house. But he also wants to put the history into a time capsule, to be opened by firefighters a century from now. He imagines one of them writing about the next 100 years. "In a hundred years somebody like me will continue the tradition," he says with certainty. The Duane Street firehouse is not the oldest in Lower Manhattan. Ladder 8 on North Moore Street also turned 100 this year. And the Engine 6 firehouse on Beekman Street, at age 102, has been in continuous use the longest. But Ladder 1, as the name suggests and as Olsen discovered, was the city's first ladder company, established (without name or number) in 1772. It disbanded when most members of the city's volunteer fire department went off to join the Continental Army. Many would not live to fight another fire, but 16 of the returning volunteers formed "Mutual Ladder 1" at Fair (now Fulton) Street, near King (Nassau) Street. In the years that followed, Ladder 1 moved many times around Lower Manhattan, to Whitehall Street, Wall Street, Beaver Street, and, in 1842, Chambers Street, on the northeast corner of what now is City Hall Park. It would be another 23 years before the men there-Ladder 1 and Engine 7, now housed together-got paid for their work. Not only was Ladder 1 the city's first ladder company, but in 1964 it also became the first "tower" ladder company. Tower ladders use manned buckets for spraying fires from outside the burning buildings. Olsen, however, is especially proud of another

Ladder 1 first. It was the first company in the city to get a horse. Until 1832, the year that the $80 steed reported for service, fire wagons were pulled by men. Olsen likes to tell the story of the day Ladder 1 raced Engine 11 to a fire on Broadway, having met up at Broadway and Canal.

"They [Engine 11] ran out handdrawn, we ran horse-drawn," he says. "We got there second. The captain was irate that the horse couldn't beat the manpower so he came back and basically fired the horse. He didn't believe in horses." There are still a few reminders of the horse-drawn days at the Duane Street firehouse. The animals were kept in what is now the back of the building, which was once a separate structure, and from the outside it still has something of the look of a stable. (The interior was long ago converted to a kitchen and dining area.) Horses used to await bridling in the area where the companies' rigs now park. There, a pulley-andrope contraption quickly plopped halters onto the animals before they were driven off on a run. There is still a "hose tower" rising up the three-story building. That's where the firefighters hung their wet hoses to dry. In the early part of the 20th century, the 50-foot-long hoses were still made of cotton "If I was a fireman back then I'd quit," says Olsen. "It was a lot of work." "They took better care of their horses then than their firemen," quipped Boucher, Olsen's research partner. "The horses had more vacation time." In the early years, fires would raze scores, sometimes hundreds of the rickety wooden structures of Lower Manhattan, and the volunteers of Ladder 1 had their hands full. The biggest conflagration of them all was the Great Fire of 1835 that destroyed nearly 700 buildings, from Bond Street to South Street and from Wall Street to Coenties Slip.

Sixteen buildings were destroyed in the Harper Brothers Publishing Company fire of 1853. Ladder 1 was the second company on the scene and its firemen raised several ladders, reportedly rescuing many young women and a seven-foot-tall safe. Collapsing walls destroyed every one of the company's ladders, but no firefighters were injured. A fireman named Andrew C.

		Schneck was the company's first recorded casualty, in 1854. Rushing to the rescue of firefighters trapped beneath a collapsed wall, he was crushed by a second collapse-one of 12 firemen killed in the disaster. In all, 11 firefighters from Ladder 1 and Engine 7 have died in the line of duty. By a quirk of fate, none were lost on Sept. 11, despite the two companies being among the first on the scene. Less than 10 floors above Engine 7 firefighters in Tower One were four men from the Engine 10 and Ladder 10 firehouse on Liberty Street who could not get out in time. In all, 25 men from the Battalion 1 firehouses of Lower Manhattan died that day. The Duane Street house was the only one spared. The two companies lost all their rigs that day, and six weeks later the men rappelled down through the trade center rubble to their crushed truck and recovered a sign: "Ladder 1," it says. "The guys needed that," recalls Battalion Chief Ron Schmutzler, who at the time was a Ladder 1 captain. "It's our fire truck. They wanted to save something and bring it back." The big mangled sign can be seen in the firehouse basement. Only 14 of the 50 men who were with Engine 7 and Ladder 1 on Sept. 11 are still with those companies. There is a new generation in the firehouse

now, and Olsen says that that makes an understanding of its history all the more important.

"It gives a sense of pride for the company," he says, "a sense of where our forefathers have been and where they led us to today."