After sitting vacant for about four years, the old Douglas fire house in Kalamazoo has undergone a $156,000 renovation to become a new community center. The station, at the corner of Douglas Avenue and North Street, was built in 1908 - back when fire trucks were pulled by horse teams.
City Historic Preservation Coordinator Sharon Ferraro showed me around the old Douglas station, also known as Station 5:
“There’s almost pockets next to the archways where the doors would fold back and be flat and be out the way as the horses come racing out. The engines and all the fire equipment would have been stored in the front end of the building but it was one big space. And then at the back - where we’re standing right now, which would be the west end of the building, that’s where the horses were.”
Ferraro says everything the horses needed had to be on hand at the fire station:
“So up above where the horses were was a hayloft - so where they stored the hay for the horse and the grain and the feed. There’s a small brick room on the ground floor here behind where the horses were that was the manure closet. Which is where you’d shovel the manure in from one side and there was a door that led to the outside, so you could clean it up from the outside. The door doesn’t fit that tight, so I’m not really sure it was that much help. But so and it would have been…you had to get everybody, you had to get the horses hitched up quickly.”
Back in those days, it took firefighters a while to get to the fire. In fact, Ferraro says that’s one of the reasons neighborhood fire houses like Station 5 were built.
“You just tended to work in your area because it was travel time - how soon can you get to a fire - and if you’re using horses it may not be as quick as you wish it could be. Especially when you’re considering that first someone has to send an alarm. And we’re talking about 1908 when not everyone had phones yet. So they had alarms on the posts, so you could go pull an alarm on a phone pole - but then it had to go to the station, they had to figure out where it was, and they had to get everybody up and running. So it was nowhere near the response time we get today for fires.”
At the top of the stairs on the second floor, there’s a screen wall with a door. Ferraro says horse manure attracts flies. So the wall was there to keep flies away from firefighters while they were sleeping. Living spaces were also equipped with swinging doors.
"You want the guys to move fast," says Ferraro. "Some went down the pole and some went right down the stairs. So the doors into the living space for the firefighters both are swinging doors.”
Ferraro says when the station switched to motorized fire trucks in 1920, things started to change.
The two archways by the front doors were built for horses and too narrow for trucks to fit through. So the front had to be remodeled.
“And the weight of the modern equipment was a lot heavier too. So one of the other things they did was they took it out and filled in the basement except for where the furnace is," says Ferraro.
Other than the concrete and the archway door - Ferraro says Station 5 is pretty close to what it would have looked like in 1908.
But renovations aren’t quite done yet. The station is missing something important: a sprinkler system so that the fire station doesn’t catch on fire.
“Occupancy over a certain level, you need to have fire suppression so that if something happens people will be ok. I think it’s really funny putting it into a fire station though,” says Ferraro.