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. 

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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).