Fire Station No. 4: the house that was a fire station

1929–2013 · 2319 LINCOLNWAY EAST

The residential model: Mishawaka's fourth fire station was designed to disappear into its street. Built in 1929 at 2319 Lincolnway East, on Lot 22 of the Brookside Addition at South Brook Avenue, it was designed by the South Bend firm of Freyermuth & Maurer in what its nomination calls "a blend of simple Tudor Revival and English Cottage details" — a residential-model fire station, two-and-a-half stories of variegated red and brown brick on a soldier-course base, steeply pitched gables and lower cross-gables, a tall front gable whose wide full-round arched engine-bay opening holds a deeply recessed pair of fixed panelled wood doors, stone corbel blocks at the gable bases, and, worked into the tops of the tall gable walls, a T-shaped brick design the nomination calls almost niche-like. The slate roof and metal casement windows it was built with are gone; the form records both losses in the fabric. Inside, the house kept its working evidence: terrazzo floors with cove borders, glazed-brick wainscot, the three-story open terrazzo-and-steel staircase, and, in the old engine bay, the round opening for the former fire pole. Its entry foyer doubled, in the interurban years, as a waiting station for the line that ran down Lincolnway — a fire station that was also a transit stop, at the curb of the street it served.

Its course: The nomination's government narrative fixes the city's station sequence around it — Central in 1904, part of the combined city hall, police and fire building; No. 2 in 1911; Hose House No. 3 in 1922 — and carries the station's period of significance from 1929 to 1965, under criteria for both its architecture and its place in the city's government. The fire and safety record of this history carries the house's working life whole: it served until it was decommissioned and replaced in 2013, when the new Station No. 4 headquarters opened at 3000 Harrison Road. The nomination records its present function in two words — a single dwelling. The house that was built to look like a house is one. The Register listed it on 18 September 2017, the city's most recent listing before the parish square: a building whose architecture was always an argument that a fire station belonged on a residential street, preserved now as the residence it imitated.

Sources:

1. National Register nomination, Mishawaka Fire Station No. 4 (2017), read first-hand — the 1929 construction, Freyermuth & Maurer, the Tudor Revival and English Cottage fabric in full, the pole opening and the interurban foyer, criteria A and C, the period of significance 1929–1965, the station sequence, and the single-dwelling present function.
2. National Register Information System and the NPS weekly list of 21 September 2017 — listing 18 September 2017, reference SG100001614.
3. The fire and safety record of this history — the station's service to 2013 and the Harrison Road succession, carried whole there.