Ladder Company 8 of the Fire Department of New York has been in this handsome little building since 1903, but that’s not why anyone knows the building. They know it because of Ghostbusters. Putting aside the fictional use of the building for paranormal investigations, it has an interesting claim to fame: it is literally half of what it used to be. The west half of the building was demolished in 1913 and a new west wall constructed for the remaining half. The west wall – the long wall in the picture – was very carefully matched to the front (north) facade.
Most New York firehouses are either one-bay wide and house one engine or ladder truck or are two bays wide and house both an engine and a ladder truck. There are a few three-bay houses, with the extra slot usually reserved for a battalion chief’s vehicle. The building at 14 North Moore Street was constructed as a two-bay house, apparently for two hook&ladder vehicles. The only picture I’ve seen of it in its original state is at Daytonian in Manhattan’s blog, here. Because of the Ghostbusters fame, the building shows up in a number of places on the web, and the reason given for its radical surgery in 1913 is that Varick Street was widened. That’s true but a bit misleading. Varick Street, which had been an ordinary downtown street, was widened to roughly the same size as one of the main north-south avenues in the numbered grid and connected to Seventh Avenue so that they are effectively one long street.
It might seem like extending the major avenue south via the line of Varick Street was an early example of modern traffic improvement, but that wasn’t the main reason. The success of the IRT subway in Manhattan and the Bronx, and the success of the BMT elevated system in Brooklyn, led to the “Dual Contracts” expansion of the subway system. This created most of the pre-IND (Eighth and Sixth Avenue lines) system that we have today. The planned extension of the west-side IRT south from Times Square (what is now the 1 train from Times Square to South Ferry) ran through Greenwich Village. For those unfamiliar with Manhattan, the street pattern in the Village, originally a separate village that was eventually swallowed up by the city, bears no resemblance to the general Manhattan grid. A chunk of it is a grid, but turned at a sharp angle to the main grid, and some of it is quite irregular. There was no realistic street-based path for the new subway line through there, and at that time the vast majority of New York subways were built in the streets cut-and-cover. The obvious solution was to plow a new street through the built-up portion of the Village, and use Varick Street as a rough template for it.
In other words, when half of the firehouse was torn down, so were dozens of nearby buildings, but it was the beginning of five years of construction that led not just to a wider street but to a new subway line.
