In its earliest iteration, the Wauwatosa Fire Department consisted of a hand-pumped wagon with a 50-foot long hose stored in a Harwood Avenue. One can’t help but wonder what the volunteer firefighters who hauled that thing around to barn fires would think of the current Tosa FD headquarters, still located in the Village, at 1601 Underwood Ave.

The “new” place – already almost 15 years old – is a well-thought-out, efficient facility.

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“As you can see walking around here, this is a very nice station,” says Assistant Chief Barbara Kadrich, who showed me around. “Our deputy chief at the time who designed this, Bill Rice – who is chief now in (the Village of) Grafton – did a lot of time looking at fire departments around Wisconsin and around the country.

“Pros and cons at new stations, what they liked, what they didn't like. His goal was to make this station not only a center for Wauwatosa, a community center, but also a center for the fire service. Not just Tosa, but for Milwaukee County and southeastern Wisconsin.”

In addition to working to welcome in the community, as at a recent open house, Tosa FD hosts many training sessions at its headquarters for fire departments of neighboring communities, including Milwaukee.

There’s even a flex office that the department keeps open for other City of Wauwatosa employees that need a work space in the Village.

The open house, says Kadrich, is part of an effort to jumpstart community connections.

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“Our PR stuff has been hard to resurrect after Covid and everything and we don't have someone dedicated full-time to PR, public education and community outreach,” she says.

“We have someone 20 percent of the time and our main priority is fire education with schools.”

A little history

Gone are the days when – as retired Milwaukee firefighter Jim Ley wrote in his book, “A History of the Wauwatosa Fire Department” – “when an alarm was received, volunteers dragged the wagon to the fire. On arriving some men operated the pump, some put the suction hose into the water and others applied the water to the fire” – though this remains the basics of the gig. “This was the only protection from fire that the village had to rely on on the morning of July 10, 1895.”

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That day would alter the future of the Tosa Fire Department.

That morning, at 5:30, a fire that was first noticed on the south side of State Street, just east of Harwood (then Main)  outside the Village Bakery quickly spread to the businesses next door and by the time the volunteer firefighters arrived 35 minutes later, the fire had spread even further.

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Although Village President Emerson Hoyt called Milwaukee Fire Department for assistance, by the time the blaze was extinguished, most of the village center was consumed by flames, leaving 63 people homeless and 19 businesses destroyed.

The day after, the village banned wooden buildings in most of Wauwatosa. But the following year, another fire – this time in a blacksmith shop – reminded the village that it needed a water source to fight blazes, which was among the reasons the Blanchard Street Water Works was built in 1898.

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That same year, the village began renting a barn from C.W. Damon to house a fire wagon across from the grist mill, according Ley’s book, and at the same time they contracted with livery man J.L. Morton to provide a team of horses and a driver to transport the wagon to fires for $1 per call.

A dedicated fire service is born

Then, on Dec. 19, 1899, the Common Council of Wauwatosa (which had become a city in 1897) passed an ordinance that read, “There shall be established in and for the city of Wauwatosa, and hereafter maintained, a paid fire department to be entirely under the control of the city of Wauwatosa, to consist of a chief engineer and 10 active members.”

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J.D. Warren was appointed the first chief of the department, which was to be housed in a new building at 1430 Underwood Avenue that would also, on its upper floor, house the City Hall. That building survives today and is home to the Village Cheese Shop.

That station opened in 1900, the same year the firefighters finished building their first hook and ladder wagon and on July 5, 1900, the first truck company was established.

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It wasn’t until 1917 that the department acquired its first motorized vehicle and it would be another 22 years before the Tosa FD became a full-time department. Its 40 firefighters worked an 84-hour week with trainings on Sundays.

The new equipment and expanded department required larger quarters and on May 27, 1942, at the site of a 1927 former laundry building at 1463 Underwood Ave., Mayor Alfred C. Loose led an official cornerstone-laying ceremony for a firehouse addition.

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“A two-story building of red brick with drill tower attached, it will accommodate five piece of apparatus and the chief's car,” wrote the Milwaukee Sentinel. “Construction began in November, and Fire Chief Fred Hartel expects to move in June 8.”

Ley adds, “The front portion of the building housed the police department and the health department on the second floor. The new fire department building featured a hose (drying) tower, boot and coat lockers, a workshop and a storeroom. The second floor had a kitchen, office space and dormitory. The building cost $56,000.”

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Former Deputy Chief Bill Rice – who is now chief in the Village of Grafton – who oversaw buildings and grounds, among other things, for the department, recalls that there were a number of issues with that building by the dawn of the 21st century.

“There were two really big factors,” he says. “One is the department in 1996 started hiring women, and the building just had one big men’s room with showers (and) that caused problems.

“The other driving force was, the overhead doors on the 1942 station were low, so we could just get a typical pumper in, but we could not get a typical ladder truck in. So we had to buy specialty ladder trucks that were on low profile chassis. The city bought these two low profile ladder trucks, and they did not prove to be great purchases. One of them caused injuries to firefighters due to its design.”

But, Rice adds, there were numerous other issues, too, in what was really a frankenstein building with numerous Band-Aid fixes over the decades.

“It had remodels, but cities are extremely concerned with economics,” he says, “so all of those remodels were short-term fixes.”

One of the remodels replaced the shower heads but the new ones were installed too low for some of the department’s taller firefighters, for example.

“There were ramps because things didn't line up. That was the type of thing that went on for a long time over the years. These temporary fixes improved things, but really didn't in the long run.”

Creating a new home

Once the Common Council saw the need for a new building, a site needed to be chosen and a number of those were floated, according to news reports at the time, including – among others – 68th and Milwaukee, on the site of what is now an Ace Hardware store; at Harwood and Mower Court; the corner of Harwood and Wauwatosa Avenue, and on what is a municipal parking lot and Draft and Vessel and other businesses.

There was even one ambitious proposal by a developer that wanted to buy the property on State Street west of Buckatabon restaurant and cantilever a fire station and headquarters over the Menomonee River to the parking lot near the Little Red Store in exchange for the plot of land on which the previous firehouse stood.

One vocal opponent invoked the names of Boerner and other parks pioneers when talk turned of building the new station on the soccer field on the north side of the Menomonee River Parkway, just west of Church Street.

But, talking to Rice and reading contemporary news reports makes it clear that every potential site had its opponents, which is, of course understandable. In the end, the current location required the City of Wauwatosa to purchase five homes that occupied part of the site.

(When the new complex was constructed, the old one was demolished and the site sold to a developer to mitigate tax loss. There’s now a mixed-use building on that land.)

While this phase was in discussions, Rice was already thinking about how a new station and headquarters building might look.

“I think it was (in) 2004, I started a four-year program at the National Fire Academy and you have to write a research paper when you're done. My research paper I wrote on replacing that station,” he recalls.

“Then once it started to move a little bit, I learned about a new fire station symposium that was held every year in Charlotte. I went there and spent a couple days and learned a ton about what was emerging. I listened to a lot of stories and started collecting those ideas.”

Rice worked in collaboration with Zimmermann Architectural Studios and the lead architect John Sabinash.

The deputy chief led focus groups on tours of newer stations around the area and he gathered ideas from fellow firefighters, who often had useful advice from their years of service in Tosa and other departments.

“A lot of those little ideas went into the place,” Rice says.

There were some bigger ideas, too, of course, like taking advantage of grants from We Energies to put a green roof on one side of the building and solar panels on the other. There was also the decision to ensure that the building would embrace the community.

“We decided that our personnel would live upstairs and we’d have the offices downstairs,” Rice says. “We thought that was much more welcoming to the public when they walked in.”

And that’s how it feels.

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When you walk in you immediately see a rack of turnout gear in a variety of kids’ sizes so that little visitors can suit up like a firefighter. There’s even a section of one of the brass poles from the previous firehouse next door.

Embracing history

Inside, there’s a memorial to Tosa’s two fallen firefighters – James Lorbeck and Lawrence Schampers – who died battling the August 1981 blaze at Alioto’s Restaurant on Mayfair Road – portraits of the current firefighters and some display cases with objects from the department’s history.

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There are photos, scrapbooks highlighting the career of former chief Donald Bloedorn, old helmets, hose nozzles and more.

Assistant Chief Kadrich pulls out an item and quizzes me.

“Are you familiar with this,” she asks. “This is something that some departments still might use. It measures the pressure coming out of a hydrant. That's why it's got a handle. You open up the cap of a hydrant and when the water's coming out full blast, you have to try to hold this (in the torrent) and the water goes through that tiny hole to the gauge.”

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She shows me a few more bits of equipment for measuring air quality and things like that until she opens one especially old looking case that contains some light bulb shaped glass objects full of liquid.

“€‹I've been here 26 years (Kadrich was one of those first four women hired by WFD in 1996) and two more years in the fire service before that, and I can honestly say I have no idea what this is,” she says.

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That’s when Battalion Chief Kurt Trevisan arrives and examines the glass bulbs. On one he spies a label that reads, “Red Comet,” and a quick web search reveals that these are basically fire extinguishing tools that you throw at the fire and the chemical inside helps put out a blaze.

“What's funny about, or odd, is that that everything in the fire service comes full circle,” Trevisan muses. “Here they are in the 1930s doing these fire bombs. Then it goes away and you don't hear about it anymore. Then 10, 15 years ago, we get these frisbees that you throw in to a fire and it blows the oxygen out and puts the fire out.”

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Also in the lobby is a stained glass lunette depicting firefighters racing to a fire on an old horse-drawn steamer. It is believed that this window was once installed in the original firehouse down the block and was later moved to the 1942 station. It was brought here when this building opened in 2010.

One of the coolest objects is the bell that hangs outside the main entrance, which was from the original battleship USS Wisconsin, launched in 1898. Two years after the ship was sold for scrap in 1922, the bell was purchased by Frederick Underwood and donated to Tosa FD, which put it atop its firehouse and used it to alert firefighters of a blaze.

When the department moved to its new quarters in 1942, the bell was put in storage. It re-emerged 18 years later and was installed in the city’s new civic center. Though some wanted it removed to a memorial in Madison, the bell stayed in Tosa, and when the new firehouse was being built, Rice wanted it back.

“In my eyes, it was the fire department's bell,” he says. “So when we built the station, I said, 'the bell is coming back to the firehouse.' My idea was bring it down to the sidewalk and build a holder for it. I envisioned families coming down and little kids coming up and feeling the letters USS Wisconsin.

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“We put it there, and guess what? On any given Saturday afternoon when some family's walking down Underwood to head to Hart Park or whatever, you can see little kids playing with the bell and touching those embossed letters.”

Back inside, along the corridor connecting the administrative offices are framed photographs from the department’s history and that continues throughout. The meeting room has more and many of the offices are adorned with objects and images from the history of Tosa Fire.

Behind the scenes

Upstairs we see where the firefighters live and sleep while on duty. There’s a living room with more historical memorabilia and a big TV, plus a huge kitchen, an outdoor terrace, a fitness center and unlike any other firehouse I’ve visited, private rooms for the firefighters.

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“They started doing studies on sleep quality and having more of private sleep areas,” says Kadrich, who notes that the previous quarters were converted to pods with four firefighters to a room to help improve sleep quality.

Now, there are individual pods with a desk, bed and other basic furnishings.

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But, like every change, it was not an easy road.

“Coming here, everyone was going to have their own bedroom,” Kadrich recalls. “It was very controversial because when everyone was kind of winding down or in bed, it would be story time. They would start talking about their old calls. ‘Oh, remember that time when you did this' and 'oh, remember this?’ And it was just that experience, those stories getting passed down when everyone's just laying there.

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“It was a really unique environment, and some of the senior level people that were in charge of the design were like, 'we already lost (that experience) with the cubicles,' so moving here, they didn't want doors on the individual bedrooms. They said, ‘okay, we'll do it, but no doors’.”

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But that research on how sleep deprivation affects health helped lead to the decision to install doors.

At the far end of the long corridor lined with sleeping rooms, rest rooms and showers – just beyond the captain and battalion chief quarters – is the staircase to the apparatus floor.

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There is one brass pole that is almost never used. Kadrich says it sees action mostly at events like open houses when firefighters demonstrate the pole to visitors.

The staircase has a few wooden structures attached to it and Kadrich explains they are for training purposes, like rescuing people through windows.

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Down below, the equipment floor is huge, but the day I visit is nearly empty except for an ambulance and a car.

 “We have the battalion car, the ambulance and the ladder truck here,” Kadrich explains.”We used to have an engine here, but that pushed over to the Milwaukee station.

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There are two other firehouses in Tosa, including one on Mayfair Road, north of Capitol Drive, and the other on Watertown Plank, just east of Mayfair Road.

There’s also a training ground on the west side of town and, as Kadrich mentioned, runs out of Milwaukee’s previously closed Station 35, on North 64th Street. It serves the east side of Tosa and also takes calls in Milwaukee (which it already did, but can now get to emergencies more quickly).

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“We run three engines, two trucks and two ambulances every day (in Tosa),” the assistant chief says. “Then, if staffing allows, we'll put a third ambulance into service.”

The station also has a room for hanging turnout gear (coats, helmets, boots, etc.), there’s a washing and drying room for turnout gear, too, plus there’s a room for refilling air tanks and a mechanic’s shop, too.

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The guys that used to report for their part-time duty to the original firehouse up the street – earning $20 a year – would surely be amazed if they could see this place.

“It was an awesome challenge,” says Rice about designing it. “I just tried to think of everything I could. I have had a great career and I've been able to do so many interesting things. That fire station really is one of 'em.”