by JOHN FREEMAN GILL
For 101 years, when fires have broken out in Lower Manhattan, the alarm bell has rung at the landmark limestone-and-brick firehouse on Duane Street. The doors have flown open, and out has rushed the fire equipment: a horse-drawn steam engine in 1905, a thousand-gallon-per-minute pump truck nowadays.
But when the firehouse doors themselves came under threat last month, the call for help went in the other direction — from the Engine 7/Ladder 1 firehouse to TriBeCa.
In mid-June, workers arrived at the French Renaissance-style firehouse and began replacing its three mullioned wooden doors with steel ones.
"It was just hideous," said Steve Olsen, a firefighter and the company's unofficial historian. "They took an old, quaint part of Downtown Manhattan and were suddenly making the front of the firehouse look like a factory."
The firefighters called Jean Grillo, acting chairwoman of the Duane Street Block Association. She alerted the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission and Community Board 1, which covers the area.
"Thankfully, we got things taken to an elevation where they didn't dare take down another door," said Roger Byrom, chairman of the board's Landmarks Committee. The controversy was first reported by The Tribeca Trib, a local newspaper.
Seth Andrews, a spokesman for the Fire Department, said that the doors, which slid up and down like garage doors, had been ordered replaced because they were falling apart. After the second door was removed and the department was informed that the firehouse was a landmark, he added, it stopped the work. Two steel doors are now in place, but that may change.
The building's blueprints showed that the old doors, whatever their age, weren't the original ones, according to Lisi de Bourbon, a spokeswoman for the landmarks commission.
But the perceived ugliness of the new doors nonetheless caused deep dismay. At a public meeting on June 20, Capt. Jorge Palacio of Ladder 1 asked board members to help him oppose the new doors. "If I'd been a captain in the Navy, they would have painted my ship pink," Captain Palacio said. "Please, save my ship from being pink."
The board then passed a resolution calling on the Fire Department to replicate the old wooden doors if replacement proved necessary.
Historic preservation is something of a tradition at the Duane Street firehouse. Its original brass bells, from the city's early alarm system, are on display on the ground floor, accompanied by an oak replica of a 1905 firehouse watch desk, which the firefighters made themselves. A century-old watch journal from the firehouse, written in fountain pen, is also displayed, and pieces of fire trucks crushed on 9/11 hang on the walls.
"In the back we have pictures of men who lost their lives," Mr. Olsen said. "They came out of this house and we come out of this house, and to alter it is sacrilegious."
One unexpected consequence of all the attention paid to the firehouse is that its doors may ultimately look much as they did in 1905. Ms. de Bourbon said the landmarks commission was helping the Fire Department "come up with a design that recalls the original doors, which were barn doors with leaded glass."
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