A New Life for Liberty Hose Firehouse

1007

By John Burton
RED BANK – The home to Liberty Hose volunteer fire company for a century could be destined to become a restaurant and residential development.
The owners of the 40 White St. building and property that had been a firehouse, have applied to borough planning and zoning department to renovate the site for the multi-use.
Owners Michael Morgan, Amal Morgan, John Morgan and Michael Morgan Jr. are seeking to renovate the site to accommodate a restaurant on the first floor, and expand the second floor to accommodate two residential units.
The borough planning board is tentatively slated to hold a hearing on this application on March 7.
Michael Morgan Sr. said he would be seeking the approvals to make it less burdensome for a future commercial tenant. Ideally, he would like to see it a restaurant, believing that would allow the public to enjoy the unique building. “It’s a fun space.” If not a restaurant it could easily be adapted as possibly retail space.
“Our intention from Day One was to clean it up and take it back to its original form,” Morgan explained, “to really beautify it so the public can enjoy it.”
The property owners are proposing to renovate the building’s second floor as two two-bedroom rental apartments with outdoor space, Morgan said.
The brick building dates back to 1910 and has housed the Liberty Hose volunteer fire company for almost all of that time. The slightly more than 2,700 square foot structure, which sits on a 0.0919-acre property, was one of the two borough firehouses actually owned by the borough. The others are owned and maintained by the independently incorporated volunteer fire companies. Liberty Hose was aging and deteriorating, requiring substantial renovations and mold remediation. The extent of the work needed, estimated by a borough official in 2013 at more than $2 million, precipitated borough officials to offer the site for sale at public auction.
Michael Morgan was the purchaser of record in 2014, paying $400,000 for the building and property.
“There’s a lot of history there,” Morgan observed.
Longtime Liberty Hose Company member Arcalo “Herk” Forgione knows much of it. He remembered the building in recent years with “The bricks were really loose and getting ready to fall,” as the borough council considered selling the site.
“The water would just come pouring through the windows,” in the building’s second fall when there was a storm. And Super Storm Sandy, “really destroyed the upstairs for us,” Forgione conceded.
But there was a time…”It was our second home,” for himself and the other company members, he remembered. “I loved that building so did a lot of other members.”
Forgione, 76, who now lives in Manchester, has been a member of Liberty Hose since 1963 and spent many a day and evening at the firehouse. Back 52 years there were about 30 active members of Liberty. The company now has 25 “and not all of them are active,” he pointed out.
Back then volunteer members didn’t go to the county fire academy; they were trained in that building. “All the older members taught the new ones,” Forgione said.
When he started with the fire company the back part of the 40 White St. firehouse was actually the borough’s maintenance garage where fire trucks, police and public works vehicles were serviced. When the borough built its Public Works facility on Chestnut Street in the early 1970s, local officials let the fire company have that portion of the building. “We used to come every night for three, four hours, cleaning up the grease,” and applying new cement floors, putting up paneling and laying new carpets.
The company held annual holiday parties for youngsters with development disabilities, with a heavy set member playing Santa and distributing presents to the kids.
Over the years the walls were lined with photos of former trucks, ex-chiefs and members who have passed on, Forgione noted.
Those mementos are currently in boxes, stored in the First Aid Squad building, where Liberty hose moved its equipment in 2012.
There was talk at one point of the company trying to purchase the site and rehabbing the building, but, as Forgione pointed out, it would have been too expansive. “We didn’t have the money.”
As for a restaurant, Forgione had an idea for the owners: “I suggested to make it a barbeque place,” he offered. “I said to call it the old smokehouse restaurant.”