Want an Open Floor Plan (and a Pole)? Live in an Old Firehouse

For Chicago entrepreneur Ben Shipper, it was love at first sight when he saw her 20 years ago. “I wanted something unique and I fell in love,” he said. Shipper, now 49, is talking about the 1907 firehouse he bought with his wife Cindy Perpich in 1995 for $410,000 on Chicago’s north end near Wrigley Field. With its brick facade and bright red double doors, the firehouse on North Ravenswood Ave, served as an insurance patrol station until 1933, with a private crew responding to fires in a Chicago-built open-cab Diamond T truck

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The firehouse passed through several owners after the last alarm bell was rung, including the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, which used it for offices and even a basketball court. But since purchasing the firehouse more than 20 years ago, Shipper and Perpich have added new hardwood floors in the apparatus bay, the ground level where the truck was parked inside , skylights and modern appliances and finishes in what used to be the day room and kitchen, and a sleek bathroom on the bunkhouse level. The three-bedroom, three bathroom home is now on the market for $1.35 million, which is probably out of reach for most firefighters, but Shipper is looking for a buyer who’ll keep the traditions of the firehouse, where the photos of the old apparatus and crews still hang on the wall and the iron hinges on the massive floor-to ceiling front doors stand ready for the next call.

“We have lived and loved in our firehouse for 21 years and we are proud to pass it to another family to do the same,” said Perpich.

Shipper and Perpich aren’t the only people living in a converted firehouse. CNN anchor Anderson Cooper rehabbed a former New York fire patrol building at 84 West 3rd Street in the West Village after he purchased the 20th century beaux-arts firehouse for $4.3 million in 2010. Cooper embarked on a top to bottom renovation, keeping the exposed brick walls and brass pole, and even converting one floor into a sprawling gym.

If you don’t want the work of rehabbing a century-old firehouse, you can always rent or buy one that’s been remodeled, but be prepared to set afire to your wallet. In San Francisco, a former firehouse that housed Engine Co. 44 until 1959 in the city’s Noe Valley neighborhood went on the market last November for nearly $7 million. In Brooklyn, a retired firehouse on Frost Street, the former quarters of FDNY Engine Company 229, with its roll up door and brick facade, rents for $15,000 a month.

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Still, you can find a bargain, if you know where to look. A firehouse in St. Louis built in 1894 was recently offered for a more modest $200,000.

Since most homeowners want lots of open space and large rooms, disused firehouses make excellent conversions, said Joseph Smith, an architect in San Antonio who’s drafting the designs for a rehab of a retired Spanish Colonial style firehouse built in 1924 that will become a bar and restaurant. “For a residence or loft type living, it’s a great opportunity,” he said.

Smith, like Shipper and Perpich in Chicago, isn’t changing much, inside or out, to his firehouse. “We’re going to preserve as much as we can, including the fire poles,” said Smith. “I think keeping that alive is important. It should look clean and smart without a lot of ornamentation,” he said. “Being a fireman was a simple life. These guys lived in the firehouse, but they were providing a service and the building reflected that,” he said.

However, don’t expect to be able to make a lot of changes except to wall coverings and floors, he said. “These things are built like tanks.” Smith spent several days and nights observing working firehouses to see how they are laid out and function as residences and a key part of the neighborhood . “A firehouse was the neighborhood center. It was where you went to drop off a lost dog or cat. They were a part of the community,” Smith said.

For Shipper and Perpich, their firehouse is a conversation piece in the city, and over the 21 years, seemingly men have one question. “They always ask, did you keep the pole?” Perpich said, who added that the brass pole was placed out of service due to liability though it’s been worked in to the staircase. Still, she routinely get knocks on the doors from Chicago city police and firefighters wanting to look inside. And the home is popular for an unusual reason as well. “We always get wedding parties asking if they can take pictures in front of our doors,” she said.

Even in otherwise rundown cities like Detroit, the firehouses have stood more than the test of time, even decades of municipal neglect, said Michael Poris, an architect and president of McIntosh Poris Associates in Birmingham, Mich., which is converting the Detroit Fire Department’s former five-story headquarters station Firehouse No. 1 into a 100-room luxury hotel. Because the headquarters firehouse contained many offices for various chiefs, arson investigators and code inspectors, converting the offices into rooms was fairly easy, and many of the original fittings were retained, said Poris. “We’re keeping the tile in the kitchen as well as the marble floors,” he said.

Sadly, not all of Detroit’s old abandoned firehouses are getting the same TLC. Many sit empty and derelict, and have been vandalized, with fittings such as toilets ripped out. The city recently bid out for development more than a half-dozen abandoned fire stations, some even with stables, with bids as low as just $55,000. Detroit hasn’t even had enough money to maintain many of its active stations, but like firefighters, the old firehouses seem to just grin and bear it, he said. “The firemen have gotten pretty creative in keeping the firehouses together,” Poris said.

Joseph Smith agreed, saying he was amazed how well his San Antonio firehouse was maintained by the generations of firefighters who called the building home, at least for their shift and career, and did much of the repair work themselves. “Firemen don’t ask for help, they are the help,” said Smith.