Fire alarm boxes—especially those engine-red cast-iron cylinders with the torch on top—are pieces of old New York. Flickering ghosts of men with bowler hats and handlebar mustaches seem to hover around them. But they aren’t just nostalgic sculpture. They’re actual pieces of City infrastructure. And beginning in the late 20th century, they brought City Hall and the disability community into direct conflict, in a little-remembered episode that highlights both technological change and some of the nuances that go into making public policy.
A torch-topped, 19th Century fire alarm box, retrofitted for modern use.
Fire alarm boxes first appeared around 1870, replacing older fire watch towers and key-operated alarms. Eventually more than 16,000 of them were installed (many much less snappy-looking than the Victorian originals). In 1994, the Giuliani Administration announced a plan to begin removing the boxes, arguing that they were expensive to maintain and inefficient in that they generated mostly false alarms. People could use pay phones or home phones instead, the City argued.
Several Borough Presidents and the City Council lined up in opposition, contending that the boxes were critical in neighborhoods with low phone coverage. Preservationists also opposed the idea, out of affection for the torch-topped old street fixtures. Mayor Giuliani vetoed a bill by the Council to delay the removal plan, only to have it halted for a time by a Court injunction. The Council voted to override the Mayor’s veto, but later approved a test program to disconnect several thousand boxes.
In October 1995 came a new challenge—a federal lawsuit challenging elimination of the fire alarm boxes. The lead plaintiff was a Manhattanite named Stephen G. Younger II, president of the Civic Association of the Deaf of New York City. The plaintiffs argued that the plan violated both the federal Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, because it would deprive them of the ability to call for help. As Mr. Younger put it, “What if I picked up the phone and it was dead and I couldn’t tell?”
The case was assigned to District Court Judge Robert W. Sweet. Sweet had been a Deputy Mayor in the Lindsay Administration and had played a role in the City’s landmark disability policymaking during the late 1960s. In a 37-page decision, Judge Sweet certified the case as a class action, representing some 65,000 hearing impaired New Yorkers, and issued an injunction against removal of the City’s fire alarm boxes. The Court found that the City’s proposed alternatives, including a beefed-up 911 system, had not been sufficiently developed or were technologically inadequate to bear comparison to the older alarm system when it came to people with hearing impairments.
Council Speaker Peter Vallone announced that he would introduce a bill requiring reconnection of the test-program boxes. Several other ideas were proposed in the Council, and the Mayor said that the Fire Department would mount hidden cameras that would activate when fire alarm boxes were triggered in a test number of spots where false alarms were frequent. The upshot, in April 1996, was an agreement that about 10,000 fire alarm boxes would be retained, primarily in the City’s poorer areas, and many would be upgraded to a two-way system in which a caller would press a button to speak with a 911 dispatcher.
The City went back to federal court, arguing that this new plan was sufficient to lift the injunction. Mr. Younger and his group asked the Court to order all the boxes restored and all the older ones upgraded. The Court approved the upgrading, but declined to order restoration of the disconnected boxes (having to travel an extra block or two to find an alarm box did not make them “practically inaccessible,” said the Court), and otherwise kept the injunction in place.
There matters stood until 2010, when the Bloomberg Administration again asked Judge Sweet to lift the injunction, on the basis that technological advances now permitted an enhanced 911 system through public pay phones, which could identify the location of the call without voice communication, and that callers could use a tapping protocol to call for an emergency response. The City also argued that cellphones had become so commonplace that the alarm boxes were no longer necessary.
The motion was denied by Judge Sweet, who found that the number of pay phones had declined substantially, that they were neither always operable nor equipped with telecommunications devices for the deaf, and that the tapping system had not been adequately proven. They were not, in short, good substitutes for fire alarm boxes for the class-action plaintiffs. Even though technological changes like cellphones had caused use of the fire alarm boxes to decline overall, the plaintiffs continued to rely on the system.
The Court noted the cost to the City, and looked ahead to the day that text-based communication would obviate the need for the boxes. “Regrettably,” the Court concluded, “that alternative is not yet at hand … The injunction remains an equitable solution.”
The DeBlasio Administration made some noises about changing the old system, but so far as I know nothing came of it. The fire alarm boxes are still in place.
A great city is an organism of almost unfathomable complexity, with its past and present constantly coexisting and remixing. In 2024, about to enter the second quarter of the 21st century, we think of ourselves as all but transformed by digital, well past merely post-industrial. Yet the ancient Victorian alarm boxes continue to be salient even into the new millennium for a segment of citizens that went almost completely ignored back when they were built.
For more of Warren Shaw’s work in disability history, please go to www.DisabilityHistoryNYC.com