SFFD Station 1

Station 1 is old enough that the city has repeatedly had to work out what to do with it. The 1899 report of the Board of Fire Commissioners still counts an engine company the Victorian way — its apparatus, its horses, the number of bell and still alarms answered, the hours worked, and an inventory of the property in its charge down to the bedsteads, chairs and clock. A 1951 survey of the city's firehouses states the hard limit on this kind of history: plans exist for every firehouse built after 1906, and for those built before, none survive — they were lost, apparently, in the fire of that year. The companion 1952 plan for the location of firehouses then went site by site, recommending which to keep, which to repair and which to abandon, and judging one 1884 house worth preserving as Victorian civic architecture at its best. In the modern record the station appears as a job already finished: the Budget Analyst's review of spending after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake notes that Fire Station #1 had been completed under Phase I of the Earthquake Safety Bond Program, at a point when only about six of the programme's twenty-three identified projects were complete. Its earlier home at 416 Jessie Street is itemised in the 1990 survey of post-quake damage to general fund buildings.