FIREHOUSE
DECEMBER 19, 1935. ABBOTT FILE 267

FIREHOUSE
Park Avenue and East 135th Street
NOVEMBER 24, 1937. ABBOTT FILE 64

This firehouse on the East 135th Street pier served the Harlem River fireboat, the Lawrence. With its entrance facing the waterfront, the house included an upstairs dormitory and downstairs recreation room for the firemen on call. Photographed the same day as Gus Hill's Minstrels on nearby East 129th Street, the firehouse must have appeared to Abbott as another neighborhood Victorian building. In fact, it was built in 1908 at Lexington Avenue and 132nd Street, moved to the East 135th Street pier nine years later, and heavily remodeled in 1929. The Victorian-style shingles, gray on the walls and red on the roof, were made of asbestos, a new, fireproof material popularized in the 1930s.

In May 1937, Abbott photographed an authentic nineteenth-century firehouse in the Bronx. She was strongly drawn to the Harlem pseudo-Victorian firehouse and returned to it in November 1937, exactly duplicating the horizontal and vertical compositions of 1935. It may be that she returned to the firehouse with orthochromatic film to better distinguish the red shingles from the gray (O'Neal, 110). The difference between the two sessions was negligible, and Changing New York includes one print from each. Oddly, Abbott chose a horizontal image marred by the blurred motion of a team of horses leaving the Cullen Fuel Company (left).

With the ongoing construction of the F.D.R. Drive, which reached 125th Street in 1936, Abbott may have suspected the imminent demolition of the firehouse. It was not until after World War II, however, when the Harlem River Drive was completed, that the site was cleared.

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