New York’s Bravest Poles Removed

The Times investigates how firehouses are being emasculated, their poles ignominiously and unceremoniously removed. Impossible to escape juvenile humor:

Of all the tools associated with the dangerous but sometimes romantic world of firefighting, few capture the spirit of the job quite like the shiny firehouse pole, that simple brass delivery system that relies on little more than gravity to get a fireman to his truck a few seconds faster.

In New York City’s firehouses, veterans have a deep affection, even a zealous sense of protection, for their poles.

Heh. “Pole.”

But now, the department has begun shrinking their number sharply as it builds new firehouses and remodels old ones to bring them up to current building codes. In many cases, ventilation systems have been installed where the poles and their surrounding holes used to be.

The trend is no different around the country, as cities build one-story firehouses and update older firehouses. “It certainly is without any question that firehouse poles are becoming, with each new firehouse, a thing of the past,” said Harold A. Schaitberger, the general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters. “The new firehouse or station would be built with stairways and no poles.”

It is an ignominious slide into obscurity for a century-old tool that has served a fire company perhaps as many as a dozen times a night. As the first daring step before any derring-do, the pole, with its 20-foot-or-so plunge, became a striking emblem of firefighting like the walrus mustache and the Dalmatian.

And while other tools like wooden ladders and horse-drawn engines have been updated and improved over the decades, the pole, true to form, remains the fastest way down.

A new firehouse in the Rockaways in Queens was built without any poles at all. A vast firehouse on Staten Island opened in the spring with a single cast aluminum pole tucked into a corner. (On a recent visit, firefighters, momentarily forgetting it was there, said they did not have one.)

Firehouses under renovation in Brooklyn and Manhattan have had many of their poles removed. And the fire academy stopped teaching new recruits to slide down poles some years ago.