A Dayton Vistas reader recently wrote in to share that the building at 1500 W Third Street (the SW corner of 3rd and Euclid) was listed for sale for $55,000.
The listing indicated that a complete rehab is needed, but that it “will be a beautiful building once back to its glory!”
It was updated to “Under Contract” a few days later and is currently “no longer advertised,” so hopefully something will be in the works.
For many decades the building was Dayton’s Fire House No. 13, which a Dayton Daily News article explains is a former horse barn and “one of the oldest firehouses in Dayton.”
(I’ve previously profiled Dayton’s oldest surviving firehouse, built in 1884 on Xenia Ave, as well as the 1899 Fire House #14 at North Main and Forest in Riverdale).
According to another article, the West Third and Euclid fire station was built in 1903, not the 1920 listed in county records, and that for many years “Engine Co. 13 was the busiest firehouse in the city.”
In 1977, for example, the firefighters at the station had battled 160 fires that year by late November (and also answered well 100 false alarms). One fireman at the time said that “fires here seem to come in spurts. One month we’ll be out every night. The next month we might not have hardly any runs.”
Those slower times gave them the opportunity to share some of the stranger things that had happened to them at the station:
“‘One night we came back from a false alarm, and, when we looked across the street, we saw a guy standing in a phone booth over there,’ (18 year veteran Clarence “Bussie”) Dice recalls laughing. ‘He was wearing one of our fire helmets!’ (Rick) Steuve recalls the time a man walked through the front door and said ‘I was wondering if you could help me. I have a knife in my back.’ And sure enough, he had a knife in his back,” the fireman said.”
It would close as a fire house three years later in 1980 when the current Fire Station 13 was built just a couple blocks away at West Third and James McGee (then Western Ave).
The building at Third and Euclid sat vacant for 4 years and went unsold at two auctions. The city was about to demolish it at a cost of $12,000 when a company with a connection to the building’s previous use offered to buy it for $3,500 and invest in the property.
That company was Firequip, a major producer of fire equipment. The business would go on to produce fire helmets there before moving to a much larger location in 1998.
The building sold again in 2002 for $145,000 and in more recent years was connected to a potential business known as The Flying Poet.
Third Street is Dayton’s primary east-west thoroughfare, but after the neighborhoods surrounding West Third lost residents and suffered decades of disinvestment, piecemeal demolition chipped away at the urban fabric until some blocks were completely cleared of structures.
Today, the blocks within the Wright-Dunbar Business District are by far the most intact, but this building is a corner location with a decent amount of neighbors remaining on the block, such as the Mt. Enon Missionary Baptist Church across West Third, formerly the Euclid Ave United Brethren Church whose congregation once included Orville Wright.
Sources: “Station Gets the Action for Firemen Who Enjoy It,” DDN 11/24/77
“Fire Station Sales Please Only Some,” DDN 12/3/84
I remember the fire station. I lived on West Second street and walked by the fire station each time I went to the Carnegie library where my older sister worked. It was located on West Fifth street. I beleive that Euclid street which went along the firestation was a boulevard in that area.