Riverhead Fire Department Old Headquarters

1931

24 East Second Street

Narrator: Carl F Peterson, fire chief 1927-1937

Hello, this is Carl F. Peterson. I was the fire chief back in 1931 when we built this new headquarters. You know this is one of the oldest fire departments around. Riverhead bought its first piece of fire apparatus back in 1836. Of course it was second hand, and actually dated to Washington’s presidency 45 years earlier. Amazingly it still works.

Anyway, back in 1929 while I was chief, the men started agitating for a new headquarters. The old building was antiquated and not suitable for current needs. It was designed for horse-drawn apparatus and we had retired all of that stuff a few years before. The men wanted something in keeping with Riverhead’s other fine public buildings. Their final argument was that "most of the [other] larger villages of the county have modern buildings for fire headquarters." Riverhead firemen never wanted to be left behind.

We needed $50,000, so we decided to bond that amount. Of course, we had to put it out for a vote. Would you believe it barely passed – by just 12 votes. We hired Riverhead’s leading architect, William Sidney Jones, who had carried on the Architectural practice of George H. Skidmore after Skidmore's death in 1904. He designed the Price-Northridge House just down the street that you may have already visited, as well as the Benjamin-Perkins Block on the corner West Main and Roanoke.

The new fire department headquarters opened in 1931. It was a grand occasion.

Jones gave the building Dutch-style gable ends and colonial details, but it was modern inside. Take a good look at the large octagonal bell-roofed cupola with bronze wind vane and look-out walk with railing. Isn’t that spectacular?

Originally the building had three smaller garage door openings with limestone voussoirs, but as equipment grew larger the department replaced those with a single large door and then added a big wing on the right side.

But it still wasn’t big enough to meet the needs of our growing town, so in they asked Riverhead architect Marty Sendlewski to design a new headquarters up on Roanoke Avenue that opened in 2009. He even copied that old cupola!