Fire Station #13

Fire Station 13 stands at 530 Sansome Street on a lot of 8,939 square feet in the Financial District, listed each year in the city's register of real property it owns. The archive mostly catches the station as a neighbour to bigger things: the 1991 environmental report for Transamerica III measured what the proposed tower would do to it, calculating that pile driving could raise noise at the station to 100 decibels with the windows open, and describing the station facing the project site across Sansome as part of the block's contrast between low-rise and high-rise. Its own repairs are recorded twice as emergencies. In 1989 the Finance Committee approved an emergency expenditure of up to $58,000 from 1987 Fire Protection Bond funds to install new apparatus doors at Stations 3 and 13, and in December 1993 the Board adopted a resolution authorising the department to replace the apparatus door here again. The 1990 survey of post-earthquake damage to general fund buildings itemises what Loma Prieta did: cracked basement concrete, plaster in the kitchen wall, the stairway and mezzanine, the officers' bathroom, the showers and the dormitory. The largest permit ever filed on the parcel — $150 million to erect a 19-storey mixed-use hotel incorporating a fire house — was withdrawn.