Behind the Scenes Tour of the Old Town Firehouse

Which is older, Old Engine House No. 6 or the Baltimore City Fire Department? If you picked the firehouse you would be correct. Completed in 1853, this venerable fire station predates the Baltimore fire department by four years. It is located on Gay Street in the Jonestown neighborhood and was built not for Baltimore City but for the Oldtown Independent Fire Company. In its day, this fire company would fight battles with rival companies over who would have the honor of putting out a blaze, a practice that helped give Baltimore its notorious name, “Mobtown.” In addition to its age, the building boasts notable architecture, especially its 103-foot Italianate-Gothic tower that was copied from Giotto’s campanile in Florence, Italy.

On the inside, Engine House No. 6 was home to a steam engine named, appropriately, the “Deluge,” that weighed 8,600 pounds. During the great 1904 Fire, teams from the firehouse helped pump water from the Jones Falls to prevent the fire from jumping the river and destroying East Baltimore, and also operated as a sort of field hospital for injured firemen. In 1960 Baltimore’s Fire Board recommended razing the tower because it had outlived its usefulness. The tower and the station, however, hung on in active use until 1976 when the building closed as a municipal fire station and transformed into the Baltimore Fire Museum. Today the building is included on the list of landmarks that the city is evaluating with regard to use and ownership. Please join us on a tour this wonderful historic space and its rich collection of artifacts to learn about this fascinating part of Baltimore’s history.  We will have the honor of our tour being lead by Deputy Chief/Fire Marshal Raymond C. O’Brocki who will share his research on the firehouse.

Tour Details

Baltimore City Fire Museum
416 N. Gay Street, Baltimore, MD 21202
Thursday, August 9, 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm
$15 members | $25 non-members (wine & cheese will be served)
RSVP for this tour today!

Stop by the Baltimore Farmers’ Market for our new Looking Up Downtown tour

Did you know that there are hundreds of lions peering down on unsuspecting pedestrians on Calvert Street, that a piece of the Berlin Wall is now embedded in a downtown church, and that an unexploded bomb from the War of 1812 is perched along the sidewalk on Redwood Street? There are even a pair of 15th century squirrels gathering nuts on a doorway that is an exact copy of a door at the Basilica di Sant’ Andrea in Mantua, Italy by 15th Century Renaissance father Leon Alberti.

Whether its every day for work or occasionally for jury duty, most of us walk the streets of downtown Baltimore without realizing the wealth of grotesques, carvings, and statuary that abounds throughout the core of downtown. With help from Baltimore historians Fred Shoken, Wayne Schaumburg, and Matthew Mosca, we’ve put together a tour to explore the architecture, serious and whimsical, and the wonderful history in our city center. From noble lions and hellish fiends, from neo-Egyptian sphinxes and squirrels of Renaissance Italy, we bet you’ll be as amazed as we were to learn about the veritable menagerie of wildlife downtown.

Please join us this Sunday as we host the first in our new Looking Up Downtown tour series. If you can’t join us this Sunday, we’ll be offering the tour on the first and third Sunday of each month from August through November. So grab your shopping bag for the Farmers’ Market and your walking shoes for the tour and get ready to be surprised at how much is going on downtown above our very heads.

Looking Up Downtown Walking Tour

Sunday, July 29, 9:30 am – 10:30 am
Baltimore Farmers’ Market – Meet at the southeast corner of the market (Gay Street and Saratoga Street)
Tours ongoing every first and third Sunday from August through September.
$5 for adults. Children under 16 are free!
RSVP online today!