Goffe Street Fire House; Dixwell Fire Station

The Dixwell Fire Station swoops around the corner of Goffe Street and onto Webster, drawing both pedestrian and driver to its bright red, brick façade. Four large fire truck bays, windows, and a glass door puncture the red and let the insider view out. The building has a mostly square floor plan with the stark exception of the street-side curve that gives the station a quirky, streamline-moderne feel (1). In sans-serif, all-caps, black lettering reads “RESCUE • TRUCK CO. 4 • ENGINE CO. 6 • ENGINE CO. 3”. The last bit of the lettering peels off the building to force the viewer into viewing the sign as both ornament and structural. Its features are characteristic of architect Robert Venturi’s philosophy, a Philadelphian vanguard in the Postmodern movement. The fire station was completed in 1974 as the last of the urban renewal fire stations in the city (2). The building is still a working fire station. 

None

The lot on the corner of Webster, Goffe and Sperry Streets has served variety of functions, though almost always it has contained one large lot, suitable for a fire station. Prior to the Dixwell Fire Station, the land was occupied by the Brockett and Tuttle Company, which manufactures carriages (23). This was followed by the Holcombe carriage company, which by 1924 was in the business of selling automobiles (24, 25). This shift speaks to the rise of the automobile in the Dixwell area from an early time. This history reinforces the way that the fire station’s sign interacts with the road. The area has always had a relationship to the transportation culture of the neighborhood.

However, the corner of these three streets did not even exist prior to the creation of the fire station. In the earliest maps of the a rea, Webster Street did not curve south to meet Sperry St. Even in the 1973 Sanborn map, when the lot was a parking lot, Webster Street lacked its elegant curvature (26). This curvature is distinctly important in its interaction with the building itself. The building is constructed so that it matches the curvature of the street, but the curvature of the street was clearly altered to match the curvature of the building. Thus the street and building form an even tighter partnership.

The area between Sperry and Webster Streets was occupied by residences, followed by an auto company sometime between 1924 and 1973 (27). After the fire station was built and Webster Street curved, a small traffic island was created where there used to be homes. 

Beginning in 1961, the mostly-Black Dixwell area was the location of New Haven’s latest urban renewal projects (18). Urban renewal displaced about 1,100 homes and 200 businesses, and constructed 300 housing units as well as a half-dozen public buildings (19). In the beginning of the project, residents were mostly in favor of the services that the renewal would bring to the area. However, by the end of the 60s, residents mostly viewed renewal in negative terms due to the high rates of displacement (19). Protests against urban renewal were further powered by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the late 60s (19).

The Dixwell Fire Station was the last of the major public urban renewal projects in Dixwell (19). The Fire Station marks a shift and a bright-looking ending to the urban renewal project. Venturi and Rauch were critical of urban renewal efforts and believed that buildings needed to fit into their surroundings (20). While other renewal efforts used brutalist, foreign, concrete structures, the fire station is pointedly vernacular (21). It incorporates itself far more into the signs and commercial structures of the Dixwell neighborhood rather than the Gothic or Modernist Yale, just a ten minute walk away. Its colors and structure are a stark contrast to the earlier renewal projects and its sleek curve points a way further forward.

The building is still a working fire station, with a crew of 32 firemen and serves the residents of the Dixwell area. According to a pamphlet at the station, it received 6,800 calls from 2001-2002. It is also serves as a polling location (22). 

The Dixwell neighborhood is dotted with red brick buildings — r esidences, churches, and commercial buildings. The fire station’s brick speaks to the language of the neighborhood, allowing it to blend in with its surroundings. As Vincent Scully once said of Venturi’s architecture, “his buildings were prepared to get along with the other buildings in the city” (15). Clearly this building speaks in the same tropes and materials as its neighborhood. The building

used to be in conversation with a brick church that stood facing it. However the church was torn down (16). The station matches the curvature of the street perfectly, given that the street was likely re-engineered around the construction of the fire station (I’ll address this later). The low building speaks to the sprawl of the city, as opposed to tall density. The large sign on the surface of the building communicates the building’s function to those driving past, just like a billboard on a highway (16). Indeed, Venturi thought deliberately about how to design for an “auto landscape,” and designed with communication to automobilists in mind (16). The pavement in front of the building opens up across the sidewalk and onto the street. Strategically, the buildings placement on the corner of three streets allows fire trucks leaving the building to travel in all four directions (17). 

In Learning From Las Vegas, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steve Izenour lay out a distinction between two kinds of buildings, “the duck and the decorated shed” (3). The duck is a building whose structure’s function has been subsumed into a symbolic sculpture; whereas the decorated shed prioritizes accommodation and flexibility of function and uses surface level signage to express its function. The authors make an argument for the decorated shed over the duck because it is accommodating and allows its users to define their own functionality within the space instead of the building defining it for them. They set the decorated shed in opposition to the duckish brutalist buildings that define the space restrictively. We can see in the Dixwell Fire Station primarily a decorated shed but with some playful elements of the duck.

Architecturally, the most defining feature of the Dixwell Fire Station is the large, Franklin-Gothic-font text that wraps from the far-left edge of the building, just touches the four firetruck bays, and ends on a wall that breaks away from the rest of the building. The large block lettering is a testament to the “decorated-shed” style of Venturi’s architectural philosophy. The lettering is the decoration of the decorated shed, a vernacular sign like those of Las Vegas: fully expressive of the building’s function. The break-away wall draws additional attention to the importance of the text: it needs more space than the building has (4). The feature bears striking resemblance to a billboard or a poster peeling from the wall (5, 6). The sign leads the visitor from across the bays to the glass entrance open and waiting to invite the public inside.

Overall, the building looks quite ordinary, the simple shed Learning from Las Vegas argues for. It “both fits into and stands out from its surroundings” (6). It is a fairly simple and personable building, made from red brick with a low broad stripe of yellow on the garage side. The yellow stripe gives “the low building the traditional bottom, mid-level and top” (7). The station takes on the tropes of an ordinary fire station, through the red brick and four large garage doors, but gives it a modern twist in its curved face. Like the other fire station Venturi and Rauch designed in Columbus, Indiana, the building’s simplicity “represents ordinariness symbolically and stylistically” (8). It becomes a symbol of itself. The Dixwell Station is probably a playful response to the brutalist Central Fire Station of New Haven, designed by Earl P. Carlin. Venturi et al. criticized the “Heroic and Original” architecture of the brutalist building, that seemed to threaten its surrounding and they argued instead for the “Ugly and Ordinary” (8). We can see the ordinariness of the building and its representation of the civic functions contained inside (9).

The building, in its centering of the “shed with a sign” retains one duckish aspect. Namely, the building itself recalls the very firetrucks within. The small windows just above the entrance evoke the windows of a fire truck, lifted far off the ground by the engine. The windows on the south side of the building look like a fire truck’s side windows. Additionally the red color evokes yet again the red of a fire truck. Even the signage, bisecting the building and indicating the fire companies within, resembles the labeling on a fire truck. The whole building features a “plain metal window trim” (10) around the windows and the top of the building. This metal trim again evokes the metal detailing on a fire truck. Altogether the building itself, like its signage, speaks to its function.

In older photos and plans, on the south side of the building there used to be six small white brick patches between the two layers of windows and six between the lower three windows and the ground (11). These patches are no longer visible except in the white mortar that must have been stained by their presence (see media gallery, South side of the building with weathered patches). In older photos, they somewhat resemble vents. Venturi Scott Brown and Associates say of the colored pattern, “the polychromatic brick pattern on the front enriches the facade and enhances its quasi-civic scale” (12). They appear to be another form of quirky ornament, perhaps to draw attention to the windows and the façade.

Just as the building wraps around the street, the cozy interior of the building wraps around the large apparatus room, a spacious bay for six firetrucks (12, 13, 14). The apparatus room extends to the second floor—giving the building only one floor in this area and two floors in the more human-oriented, fireman space (thus, 1.5 floors). On the first floor of the non-apparatus bay side, there is a lounge, kitchen, watch booth, training room, shower and storage, along with a space for mechanics. The second floor contains a large bunk room that fits twenty beds and extends for the majority of the space, along with more showers and four offices (14). Connecting the first and second floors are two staircases as well as a brass fire pole. The interior is first marked by a mosaic and is checkered with colorful yellow and red linoleum tile, which is ordinary yet fun. 

1. David B. Brownlee, David G. De Long and Kathryn B. Hiesinger, Out of the Ordinary: Robert Venturi Denise Scott Brown and Associates, (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001), 38-39.

2. “ GOFFE STREET FIRE HOUSE; DIXWELL FIRE STATION,” New Haven Modern, http://newhavenmodern.org/goffe-street-fire-house .

3. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1972) 90.

4. Charles Holland, “Leaving New Haven,” Fantastic Journal , April 27, 2010, http://fantasticjournal.blogspot.com/2010/04/leaving-new-haven.html .

5. David Dunster, ed., Architectural Monographs 1: Venturi and Rauch The Public Buildings (London: Academy Editions, 1978), 66-67.

6. Marisa Angell, “Dixwell Fire Station,” Pamphlet inside station. Urban Museum of Modern Architecture New Haven.

7. “Dixwell Fire Station,” Venturi Scott Brown and Associates, http://venturiscottbrown.org/pdfs/DixwellFireStation01.pdf

8. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1972) 129-130.

9. “Dixwell Fire Station,” Venturi Scott Brown and Associates, http://venturiscottbrown.org/pdfs/DixwellFireStation01.pdf

10. Peter Haller, “Goffe Street Fire Station,” Historic Resources Inventory, May 1984,

https://web.archive.org/web/20170322113512/http://newhavenmodern.org/system/dragonfly/pro duction/2013/12/10/13_18_04_222_HRI_Goffe_125_FireStation_Venturi.pdf .

11. David Dunster, ed., Architectural Monographs 1: Venturi and Rauch The Public Buildings (London: Academy Editions, 1978), 66-67.

12. “Dixwell Fire Station,” Venturi Scott Brown and Associates, http://venturiscottbrown.org/pdfs/DixwellFireStation01.pdf

13. David Dunster, ed., Architectural Monographs 1: Venturi and Rauch The Public Buildings (London: Academy Editions, 1978), 66-67.

14. Venturi and Scott Brown: What Turns them On. (T ōkyō : Ēandoyū, 2009).

15. Vincent Scully, “Robert Venturi’s Gentle Architecture,” in

The Architecture of Robert

Venturi

, ed. Christopher Mead (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 8-26.

16. Marisa Angell, “Dixwell Fire Station,” Pamphlet inside station. Urban Museum of Modern Architecture New Haven.

17. David Dunster, ed.,

Architectural Monographs 1: Venturi and Rauch The Public Buildings (London: Academy Editions, 1978), 66-67. Diagram.

18. Marisa Angell, “Dixwell Fire Station,” Pamphlet inside station. Urban Museum of Modern Architecture New Haven.

19. Jennifer Hock, “Political Designs: Architecture and Urban Renewal in the Civil Rights Era, 1954-1973” (PhD diss., Harvard, 2013). 71-72.

20. Marisa Angell, “Dixwell Fire Station,” Pamphlet inside station. Urban Museum of Modern Architecture New Haven.

21. Jennifer Hock, “Political Designs: Architecture and Urban Renewal in the Civil Rights Era, 1954-1973” (PhD diss., Harvard, 2013). 71-72.

22. Marisa Angell, “Dixwell Fire Station,” Pamphlet inside station. Urban Museum of Modern Architecture New Haven.

23. Fire Insurance Map of New Haven, Sanborn Inc., 1886, Vol. 2, P. 53.

24. Fire Insurance Map of New Haven, Sanborn Inc., 1901, Vol. 2, P. 154.

25. Fire Insurance Map of New Haven, Sanborn Inc., 1924, Vol. 2, P. 242.

26. Fire Insurance Map of New Haven, Sanborn Inc., 1973, Vol. 2, P. 242.

27. Fire Insurance Map of New Haven, Sanborn Inc., 1924, Vol. 2, P. 242. Edited version found at the New Haven Museum.

Building data was collected from

1. “125 Goffe Street,” City of New Haven Online Assessment Database, last modified 2016, http://gis.vgsi.com/newhavenct/Parcel.aspx?Pid=18524

2. Peter Haller, “Goffe Street Fire Station,” Historic Resources Inventory, May 1984,

https://web.archive.org/web/20170322113512/http://newhavenmodern.org/system/dragonfly/pro duction/2013/12/10/13_18_04_222_HRI_Goffe_125_FireStation_Venturi.pdf .

3. Marisa Angell, “Dixwell Fire Station,” Pamphlet inside station. Urban Museum of Modern Architecture New Haven.