Fire Station #23
225 East 5th St.
Los Angeles, CA 90013
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* Front
* Rear on Winston St.
History – written by Lindsay Blake from IAmNotAStalker.com (used with permission)
Fire Station #23 actually has quite a storied, and sometimes scandalous, history. The structure, which first opened on October 2, 1910, was designed by the prominent architectural firm of Hudson & Munsell and served as the headquarters of the Los Angeles Fire Department for over a decade. The three story building, which cost between $57,000 and $60,000 to construct and measured 26 feet wide, 167 feet deep and encompassed 13,600 square feet of space, has been mired in controversy ever since the day it was first dedicated. In the beginning, angry citizens deemed the construction costs far too steep for a public building, especially since tax payers were footing the bill and considering the extravagance with which the place was built. And it has been said that no other fire station in the country is as opulent. The top floor of the structure housed the Fire Chief’s suite, an apartment which every fire chief from 1910 to 1928 called home. The suite featured a marble bathroom complete with a double bathtub, Peruvian mahogany wall paneling, imported Italian tile detailing, oak flooring, a private elevator, a brass bed, a roof garden, a marble fireplace, and French bevel glass mirrors. The second floor contained the captain’s dwelling, a library with built-in bookshelves, and bunks for twenty firefighters. The bottom floor contained an open arcade with enamel tiled walls, 21 foot high pressed tin ceilings, and stalls to accommodate ten horses. Pretty amazing for a fire house, huh? The Los Angeles Times even dubbed the place “the Taj Mahal of fire stations”.
Fire Station #23 remained in operation for fifty years, whereupon its men responded to over 60,000 fires. But with the city moving towards building more modernized stations, Engine Truck Company #23 closed its doors for good on November 23rd, 1960. Because a station in Pacific Palisades adopted the “23” company number, the shuttered station took on the name “Old 23”. For the next six years, the fire department utilized the space for medial records storage and as a training facility. In 1966, the same year it became a City of Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, the fire house was shut down by the department completely. For the next ten years, as the area surrounding the building became more and more impoverished, the station fell into serious disrepair and suffered from extreme vandalism and looting. In 1979, the Fire Commission decided to renovate the property and eventually turn it into a firehouse museum. A non-profit organization named Olde 23 was set up to oversee the restoration process and to raise funds for the massive undertaking. In 1980, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Nine years later, though, in 1988, the plans for turning Old #23 into a museum were nixed and the city opened their Los Angeles Fire Department Museum at a location in Hollywood instead.
Seven years later controversy came raining down upon the fire house once again when Los Angeles Times staff writer Robert J. Lopez authored a front page article accusing the Olde 23 corporation of misuse of funds. According to the article, Olde 23 had been collecting massive amounts of money (over $210,000 to be exact) thanks to the numerous film shoots that had taken place on the premises over the years. Not only had the company failed to turn that money over to the city, no one had even informed the city that any sort of filming was going on! Being that a city department is responsible for handing out film permits, I’m not quite sure how this even happened, but I guess it’s just another case of a beaurocracy’s right hand not knowing what the left is doing. Causing further scandal was the fact that even though the city had moved the museum location to a different site seven years prior, Olde 23 was still collecting not only filming fees that would supposedly go into the museum fund, but also donations for the project. AND (yes, there’s more!) the supposed non-profit was ALSO collecting filming fees from production companies for shoots that were taking place at other firehouses in the area firehouses that the Olde 23 company had no jurisdiction over! President and C.E.O. of the Olde 23 company was none other than Los Angeles Fire Chief Donald O. Manning himself, who resigned from his post just eight days after Lopez’s newspaper article hit the stands. Following his resignation, Fire Station #23 continued to host film shoots, with the money going to the City of Los Angeles, the property’s rightful owner. In September 2009, the building was designated surplus property and the city is considering selling it to several different private investors, including a restaurant developer and a non-profit arts education group.
Daniel Taylor, who has been caretaker of the property since 1985 and who the city is currently trying to evict, has different plans for the building, though. He formed the Corporation for History, Arts, and Culture (CHAC) with the hopes of restoring the old firehouse to its original grandeur for use as both a cultural center and a filming location. He estimates the restoration project to cost upwards of $8 million and is trying to raise funds now. If you would like to learn more about the cause, you can do so on CHAC’s official website. And while the future of the historic firehouse remains to be seen, in the meantime I highly recommend visiting it, as it is a truly beautiful and unique building.
Fun Facts
“The Mask” (1994)
Stanley Ipkiss (Jim Carrey) takes his car to Ripley’s Auto Finishing, which is located in the firehouse. The Ripley brothers are your stereotypical crooked auto mechanics, so later when he’s transformed into The Mask, Stanley tears the place apart, and literally tears the brothers a new one.
On the DVD audio commentary, when this scene comes up, director Chuck Russell talks about the firehouse:
“This is the building that was used in Ghostbusters as the Ghostbusters’ garage. When you’re on a limited budget, you’ve gotta find the most fascinating locations available, and go with them. Sometime’s it seems like a coincidence, but really isn’t. There’s only certain period buildings in L.A. that are this unusual.”
“Flashpoint” (1998)
This adult movie is about the lives of the firefighters at station #23 (the same number as the one that used to occupy the firehouse in real-life), and in true Ghostbusters fashion, the exteriors of the station are filmed at a complete different location. Unlike Ghostbusters, the exterior doesn’t match the interior at all. However, the “suicidal jumper” scene was filmed on top of the firehouse, even though it was supposed to take place at a location far away from Station #23 headquarters.
In case you’re wondering, YES, people screw in the firehouse…several times, too. The first sex scene of the movie features adult film legend Jenna Jameson and Mickey G. on a bench on the right side of the main garage/lobby area. This is followed by a threesome with adult film legend Jill Kelly, Johnni Black, and Steve Drake in an upstairs rec room. Later on in the movie we get the final firehouse sex scene with Missy and Jonathan Morgan knocking boots on a firetruck in the main garage/lobby area. These may not be the people some Ghostbusters fans want to see get some action in the firehouse, but at least some people got their fires extinguished in the building.
One of the first big budget, multi-studio colaborations (Adam & Eve and Wicked) in adult film history, this movie was filmed in September 1997 (the re-released DVD states October 1997) and was originally released in 1998 under the title Flashpoint on a dual-sided DVD. Ten years later it was re-edited and re-released as a 4-disc DVD set under the new title Flashpoint X. Because the newer DVD has a better quality image, the screen captures below were taken from that copy of the movie. However, it should be noted that the commentary and “making of” featurette from the original DVD do not appear on the re-release; having been replaced by a new commentary track and a whole bunch of new featurettes and bonus features. A lot of footage from the original “making of” featurette appears in the new “making of” featurette, but not all of it. The original “making of” featurette is of VERY poor quality, as you can see in the screen captures from it.
Comments from director Brad Armstrong, taken from the original 1998 DVD audio commentary. (I have not yet listened to the 2007 DVD audio commentary, so I don’t know if it contains any firehouse information.)
More Information
Back in 1998 Troy Haslewood sent an e-mail to the Los Angeles Fire Department to gather more information about the firehouse. This is the e-mail he received from them, which he graciously posted on my forum on 10/12/1998.
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