A Castle for Cops
A couple of months ago I loaded photos of an old police station that was renovated for offices, and now here’s another renovated station, also dating to the 1890s.
It’s somewhat similar to the previous station, which is pictured here for reference, along with its more recent addition on the left:
This week’s station is much bigger, and it looms up over the neighboring houses as you walk toward it.
It fills most of a city block.
And when you turn the corner, it keeps going.
The details are fantastic, especially considering this building was designed for holding and processing people who were considered lowlifes, and police weren’t held in particularly high esteem either.
And one of the big indications of how this was built in a different time becomes obvious on the side of the building.
You can see a huge arched entry port, like something you might expect from a castle, which was designed for horse drawn carts, presumably paddy wagons, coal carts, and wagons bringing in hay for police horses and bringing out manure from the stables.
View from the inside.
It opens into a big interior courtyard which is now a parking lot, but you can tell once held stables.
I really like how the architecture wasn’t just designed to be utilitarian with the occasional signage and instead wanted to visually be a nice building!
I’d love to know the reasoning at the time for going this far. Most homes of rich people weren’t so ornate.
Civic pride, of which we used to have in abundance. There are also all kinds of 19th-century things that were built by popular subscription. Not just a lot of the statuary, but things like bridges. In DC I know that lots of the statuary was built this way, by various interest groups, and there’s a very beautiful bridge that crosses…I can’t remember, not the Potomac, but it crosses Rock Creek maybe? There are lion statues that meet you when you enter from the west side. Meg might know what I’m talking about. The Smithsonian’s American Art Museum was basically funded and built by Andrew Mellon, of the Mellon banking dynasty and was Coolidge’s Secretary of the Treasury. And that’s where a lot of the original art came from.
All the Carnegie libraries. My local library is a lovely Victorian structure that’s a Carnegie library. Unfortunately it’s administered by the City so the offerings are almost laughably slim and bad, but it’s the gateway to the whole system so you can order whatever you want and pick it up there.
Lots of public parks and gardens are like this nowadays. There’s a group called the Central Park Conservancy that levies a special assessment of residents and businesses that border the park, and plenty of others chip in. I think Prospect Park in Brooklyn has something similar.
thats clearly a fire station tho….i mean..look at it?
its all red
everyone knows police stations are blue
And larger on the inside than the outside.
I live across the street from a police station. It is a concrete Brutalist “Fort Apache The Bronx”-style building from 1969 or 1970. I think it’s beautiful in its way but it hasn’t aged well. Few concrete Brutalist buildings have. It has almost no windows so the effect is almost Medieval.
The thing I most love about it is that it’s a police station so the chaos on my block is kept to a minimum, and also it’s only two stories high, so the neighborhood won’t ever let it go away, even at the height of the daft “Defund the Police” movement, and the City won’t ever make it any bigger and better, so my views and the natural light are preserved. That’s to my south. To my west (we have a corner unit) is a wide avenue, and across the avenue is a small park, so that will also never be developed. More vistas and natural light!
If we ever sell the Casa Encantada I am going to be right by the realtor’s side pointing out these not-so-obvious quality-of-life features. People who’ve visited have asked about noise, like police sirens, but there really isn’t any. They’re very good about not unleashing the sirens until they’ve hit the road on their way to their thankless tasks.
Looks too nice to be a police station. More like a library, an old Victorian Hotel or sex dungeon.