Every young city lived in fear of fire. Old wood houses were a veritable tinderbox, and there was no dearth of combustion sources; this was an age of wood- and coal-fired ovens, of gas lamps, of railroads putting off sparks, of incautious industry tossing smoldering, chemical garbage into the dumps. These were times when oily rags were a collector’s item, days when men passed out drunk in hostels with still-lit cigars dangling from their lips.

Despite this, very few cities had a well-organized fire department. For the most part, the militia approach was taken; ring a bell until people show up, and then get them to work putting out the threat with buckets. As Rochester grew denser, fires became more of a common occurrence and access to water more complicated; around the 1820s the first official fire-fighting companies began being organized, with hand-pumpers introduced in the 1830s. Fire-fighting became more organized throughout the rest of the century, with the employment of pump wagons, hydrants, and full-time firefighters.

Despite these improvements, the bells remained. When a fire occurred, bells in churches and City Hall would draw out the firefighters and, of course, the gawkers and rubberneckers. In addition to those bells, there once existed a forty-five foot wooden tower containing an alarm bell. Built in 1860, this tower stood on the corner of Brown’s Square and rang out a warning when fires broke out.

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The First Bell

In 1860, the old Brick Church at the corner of Ann [now Allen] Street and North Fitzhugh Street was torn down, to be replaced with a new edifice.

While construction of the new church was undergoing, the bell from the steeple had to be kept somewhere.

The bell would be granted to the Fire Department Committee for use as an alarm bell.

To make use of this bell as a fire alarm, a forty-five foot high wooden tower was constructed. Though the article above places the tower at the northwest corner of Brown’s Square between Kent Street and the railroad track, in actuality it would be built on the southwest corner, and to the east of both Kent Street and the tracks, between neither.

Also mentioned above, Dr. James Boylan Shaw, the high priest of the Brick Presbyterian Church, who lamented the bell being removed from the church’s belfry where he could not hear its tolling. Shaw lived at No. 46 Jay Street at this time, his home until 1867 when it was sold to undertaker Charles V. Jeffries.

Shaw’s house on the corner of Jay and Kent would have been, as the article above notes, very close indeed to the originally-planned site of the tower at the northwest corner of Brown’s Square. However, the tower was not built there, preventing him once again from hearing the chiming of his beloved bell–which I’m sure he would have appreciated all the more blasting away full volume during a fire emergency.

The site of No. 46 Jay is now a driveway for No. 435 Smith Street.

When the new Brick Church was completed in 1861, the bell was removed from the fire tower and placed back in the church steeple.

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The Second Bell

On December the tenth, 1859, an enormous fire gutted the Second Baptist Church at the corner of East Main and Clinton Streets.

In response, the congregation purchased a church formerly belonging to the Third Presbyterian on North Street between Franklin and Achilles. There, they would erect a new church, which was completed in 1861.

A new, steel bell was procured for the church and hanged on April 30th, 1861:

However, it was felt that the tone of the new bell, well, sucked. It was unpleasant, far more of an alarm bell than a church bell. Thus, arrangements were made for it to be taken to the tower in Brown’s Square and hanged there instead. The article refers to the tower as the “Second District bell tower”, a term I have not seen used anywhere else.

Another new bell arrived and was installed in the tower later in July of 1861.

However, it seems even this bell sounded weird. The next year, the bell at the Second Baptist Church was removed once again.

During all this squabbling over the tone of bells, the Civil War erupted and threatened to tear the Union in half. Big deal, ding-dong not sound good! Need new ding-dong!

From what I can surmise, the bell from the Second Baptist Church remained hanging in the tower at Brown’s Square for the rest of the tower’s life. According to the below article, at the time of its removal it was “cracked”; this happened often to bells used to sound alarm; in fact, the Second Baptist Church in 1853 made a claim against the city for a crack in its bell caused by “ringing an alarm of fire“. What happened to that bell, which would have been the bell hanging in the tower during the 1859 fire, I could not ascertain.

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Bell Transfer to School #5

The alarm tower began to grow decrepit even after its short age. Its simple, all-wood construction led to rotting timbers. Between being a toppling hazard and an attractive nuisance for the neighborhood’s juvenile climbing enthusiasts, the decision was made to retire the tower. As a preliminary step, the bell was removed and relocated to another structure.

According to the above, the bell from the alarm tower was transferred to the “old” #5 School building. As the “new” School #5 was built at Jones [Verona] and Dean [abandoned] Streets in 1875, “old #5 school” would refer to the recently-vacated 1842 school building at the corner of Fish [Commercial] and Jones [Verona] Streets, on Centre Square. That building is pointed out in the below map:

Which corresponds roughly to this grassy patch outside Innovative Field stadium:

This old School #5 building is the last place I can trace the bell as having been. Either its removal/destruction failed to make the record, or that record has failed to come to my attention.

The old school building remained as of the 1880 View of Rochester, below:

In 1882, the first School #5 building was torn down and replaced with a large brick industrial building, owner Michael Henry FitzSimons. This would become the picture frame factory of James Lockhart. James Lockhart would go into business with John Joseph Powers, Sr. as Lockhart & Powers in 1883. The partnership was dissolved in 1888, and the business carried on as Lockhart Moulding Co. (Limited).

Next door, where Trinity Episcopal Church previously stood, a large factory was built for Lorenzo S. Graves, founder of the Graves elevator company. Known at this time as L. S. Graves & Son, the company made elevators and dumbwaiters and lifts. In 1898 this company would merge with nine other companies to form Otis Elevator Company.

James Lockhart, after some legal troubles, sold off his factory to Wilson Soule, a son of Asa Titus Soule who was primarily known for the creation and sale of Hop Bitters “plant medicine”. Lockhart would briefly leave Rochester, but would return and manage the N. L. Lockhart Co. mouldings factory at No. 373 North Street.

Wilson Soule died shortly after, in 1894, and the factory assets of Lockhart Moulding Co. passed on to a relative Herbert C. Soule, who in turn sold it off to the Fitzsimons Brothers.

Naught seems to have come of the FitzSimons Brothers investment, as come 1895 the building became the factory of Heckel & Bolton.

Heckel & Bolton were builders of heels and shanks, parts of shoes. John Heckel patented a type of “turn shank”; a shank being a thin piece of rigid material helping the shoe keep its shape, the “turn” shank allowed for a more stylish curvature to the bottom of the shoe, much prized in women’s footwear. The paperweight advertisement below shows a shoe with the signature Heckel’s turn shank at left, exhibiting a sexy curve. At right, the decidedly unsexy curvature of the conventional shank. Boo, hiss!

Heckel and Bolton would dissolve around 1897. After that, Ray Camera Co., moved in; they were manufacturers of cameras and photo supplies, as the name suggests.

In 1899, Ray Camera Co. would merge with four other optics companies to create the Rochester Optical & Camera Co.

Rochester Optical & Camera Co. lasted until 1904, when it was purchased by Eastman Kodak, dissolved, and its assets redistributed to Kodak managers.

I just realized I’m getting pretty in-depth into this building site. How was it pertinent, again? The bell from the fire tower once hung in the bell-tower of School #5, which was on this site before the building we’re talking about now. That’s a really tenuous connection; why am I still digging so deep? I literally can’t help myself, can I?

Oh well.

The below photograph is taken from North Plymouth Avenue south of the Central railroad trestle, looking north towards Commercial Street. Our two buildings are in-frame, with the FitzSimon building at left and the Otis Elevator Co. building to the right of it.

At this time, the FitzSimon building is home to the Star Headlight Co., which is barely legible through the trees. Here’s a clearer photo from a 1915 Star Headlight Co. Catalog:

A major shift in this block’s shape took place when, around 1915, Frank Street was widened between Dean and Commercial Streets. Otis Elevator Co., in the same building as its predecessor Graves, was severely affected; the newly-widened roadway would cut at a sinister angle directly through the old elevator plant. Over Otis Elevator’s objections, the necessary pieces of property were condemned and a sizeable section of Otis’ factory building was cut into.

Otis would take its money from the city and renovate the building and the neighboring FitzSimons Building into a single new building, No. 214 Commercial Street.

This new angle of the west side of Frank Street agreed with the course of North Plymouth Avenue as it met Commercial Street; eventually, this would lead to Frank Street being annexed by the Plymouth Avenue name.

When No. 214 Commercial Street was truly demolished is hard to say. A massive fire struck the complex of buildings on June 20th, 1949. It burned for hours, punctuated with explosions; it drew a crowd of onlookers some 10,000 strong, and 20 people were injured over the course of fighting the fire. Most dramatically, a wall collapsed and crushed a fire department water tower and pump truck, burying them in brick. The ruins smoldered for over a day afterwards.

Despite that, the 1950 Sanborn map doesn’t seem to indicate anything had changed. Were the buildings repaired? The addresses Nos. 214-216 Commercial Street disappear entirely from the newspaper records after 1949, suggesting the building was not used afterwards. Therefore, the options are thus: 1.) The buildings were fixed up enough to use as storage; 2.) the buildings were destroyed, but too late to be reflected in the map, or 3.) the buildings were destroyed but this digitized version of the Sanborn maps did not receive the amendments. I seriously don’t know. If you have any leads on whether the 1949 fire was, in fact, the end of the building at Commercial and Verona, please let me know.

Regardless, I think we’ve agonized the former #5 School site long enough. Suffice to say, eventually it was selected as part of the site of the new Frontier Field, now Innovative Field, constructed in 1996.

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Tower Toppled

I realize at this point that I spent more time describing the history of the plot once occupied by the first School #5 building than anything involving a fire alarm tower. Are you actually surprised? Is this your first Gonechester read? Anyhow, I always loop back to the main topic, eventually.

The bell tower was pulled down for good on or shortly before September 14th, 1877.

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Resounding in Memory

The old watch-tower with its signal bell was mentioned at the end of the following article about the City Hall bell:

In the below article, retiring fire chief of fifty years James Malcom recounts some recollections of fire alarms past, including a mention of our erstwhile Brown’s Square tower:

Interest in lost bells was buoyed by the discovery of a bell from the old courthouse. A call went out in search of the old fire alarm bell from the Brown’s Square tower.

That’s a bit faded so I’ll transcribe it:

“Back in the nineteenth century, which sounds a long way off, a bell used to be a necessity in Rochester. For instance, when one wished to call out the fire department, he or she pulled a rope in the fire tower, and the department which consisted of anybody who lived near enough and had a pail, would come to the rescue.

One of these bells hung on the southwest corner of Brown’s square in the section of the village then known as “Frankfort.” An attempt is now being made to locate that bell. Those interested in the movement have been urged by the fact that the bell which hung in the old court house has been found.”

Democrat & Chronicle
Wednesday, January 07, 1920

Below, a reproduction of the first court house; when the second court house was built 1850-1851, a new bell was ordered for it and the first court house bell taken elsewhere.

Either directly or indirectly or indirectly, the court house bell ended up at St. Paul’s German Evangelical Church on North Fitzhugh Street.

I could not, unfortunately, divine what happened to the bell that was there, but I presume it was removed. The building itself lasted until 1962, when it was razed in favor of a parking lot.

Again, that’s not our main focus, but the tangents are half the point, aren’t they?

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Whither the Bell?

Alas, though many could recall the old fire tower in Brown’s Square, nobody seemed to have any leads concerning the whereabouts of the bell it once bore.

The above article describes, strangely enough, the bell having lain in Brown’s Square after its removal, being beaten upon and struck with stones by neighborhood children. This seems to disagree with the article stating the bell had been removed to the old School #5; perhaps it did sit around for a bit beforehand, but it could not have remained in the park until the destruction of the tower.

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The Bell Not Saved

From all available evidence, the bell from the Brown’s Square fire tower was never located. Despite the diligence of past historians, the thread was lost. Perhaps the bell ended up hanging somewhere and the story of its significance forgotten. Perhaps it came down in a fire, or ended up broken and melted down as scrap metal. The record doesn’t hold a clue for me to follow. Thus, this must be the ultimate end of the fire tower’s tale.

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