Buy This Rogers Park Firehouse

By Chris Bentley in News on Feb 23, 2013 9:30PM

If you’re looking to buy a firehouse, now’s the time. The old Greenleaf Avenue Firehouse at 1723 W. Greenleaf Ave. in Rogers Park is up for sale.

Rather than selling at a fixed price, the city is soliciting proposals for reuse of the property. “This means the City does not necessarily intend to sell the firehouse to the highest bidder,” Ald. Joe Moore wrote the 49th Ward website, “but rather will work with my office and community residents to ensure a use that is most beneficial to the surrounding neighborhood.”

Suggestions, anyone? The two-story firehouse is 6,420 square feet and zoned RT-4, “residential two-flat, townhouse & multi-unit district.”

There is ample precedent for adaptive reuse of fire stations. The Kendall Hotel in Cambridge, Mass. was once a Victorian firehouse. A firehouse not far away from the Greenleaf station became Firehouse Studios. And a 19th-century firehouse in Brooklyn is on track to become the new headquarters of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. (This writer has nothing but fond memories of The Nines, Ithaca, NY’s former No. 9 Fire Station turned restaurant and bar.)

So what do you want to see?