Instead, as a community continues to mourn the loss of the facility and the protection it once provided residents, the city will build a new Emergency Medical Services station at the site.
The scaffolding and façade of the previous Truck 39 home is gone, with its full demolition underway.
“We strongly opposed the closure of the fire house, and feel the Bloomberg administration and fire department made a very dangerous decision,” Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz said.
The FDNY said response times in the area are still under the national average and remain sufficient to the department. They added having an EMS station in Woodlawn would diminish response time for medical rescues.
“The house got to a point where it was beyond repair,” FDNY spokesman Jim Long said. “The new EMS station will centralize our operations and improve our overall response time to Woodlawn and the surrounding community.”
“I would estimate, and other sources close to the situation have also said, that response time for a fire in Woodlawn was once one or two minutes and has now jumped to six or seven,” said Community Board 12 vice-chairman Carl Stricker, a Woodlawn resident.
Stricker questioned the logic of the new construction in response to previous comments about the cost effectiveness of rebuilding the firehouse. “It is going to cost a lot of money to tear down the firehouse and build a brand new EMS station,” he said. “If it is going to cost the same amount of money, why not rebuild the site as a firehouse and keep the community safer?”
Truck 39 joined Fire Company 63 on Byron Avenue, approximately a mile to the east, leaving no fire station in the immediate vicinity of the former Woodlawn Heights site, and its surrounding neighborhood of wood-frame homes.
Having lived near the former station for 40 years, Stricker said the facility has always been on the City’s short list for closings, and nearly closed on three other occasions.
“The fire department is playing a clever, silly game with statistics,” added CB 12 chairman Father Richard Gorman. “Woodlawn now has no fire apparatus, while Wakefield has two.”
