Fire Station #8’s dedication ceremony on Saturday included equal nods to the past, present and future.
“It symbolizes struggle, determination, progress,” Arlington Fire Chief David Povlitz said at the formal opening of the four-bay, three-level, 20,000-square-foot facility that is expected to serve until at least the mid-2070s.
The event, which drew several hundred people to the station at 4845 Langston Blvd, came 10 months after the $28 million facility first opened for service. County officials waited until the final phases of the project were completed until hosting the formal opening.
The history of the station and those who have served the community through it goes back more than a century.
Born in the era of Jim Crow
“The fire station, for us, stands for bravery, courage and leadership,” said Wilma Jones, president of the John M. Langston Citizens Association.
It also stands for a bygone era, when daily life in Virginia was rigidly segregated and public-safety services for Black residents were limited at best, nonexistent at worst.
To address the gaps, the Halls Hill Volunteer Fire Department was founded in 1918, one of two all-Black fire brigades (the other in East Arlington near where the Pentagon now stands).
In 1932, the county government began providing some hand-me-down equipment to the Halls Hill volunteers, including a 1929 Diamond T pumper truck.
In 1934, a firehouse was constructed near the intersection of N. Culpeper Street and what was then Lee Highway and now is Langston Blvd. It replaced a small one-story garage nearby that had provided storage for fire-fighting equipment since 1927.
In 1940, the local government established the Arlington County Fire Department and began hiring those in volunteer firehouses as paid firefighters — but purposely excluded those Halls Hill volunteers. It wouldn’t be until 1951 that Julian Syphax and Alfred Clark became the first Black professional firefighters in the county.
The first half of the 20th century is a world far removed from modern-day Arlington. Stories so surreal to modern ears that they must seems legends were, in fact, true true.
All-white volunteer fire stations often refused to respond to calls for service from Black neighborhoods.
In some cases, when the Halls Hill volunteers arrived at a fire in a white neighborhood, the property owner would send them away, preferring to wait for white firefighters even as their homes continued to burn.
The Halls Hill volunteers faced the conditions of Jim Crow with “heroism and selflessness,” Povlitz said.
Black volunteers and the early professional firefighters “cleared a path when they were not wanted,” said the Rev. Ashley Goff of Arlington Presbyterian Church, who serves as chaplain to the Arlington County Fire Department.
“They were expected to fail [yet] they built something unshakable,” she said.
The successive fire stations on the site served the community in many ways during the years of segregation, Goff said.
“It was more than a station. It was safety, it was joy and it was community,” she said.
Controversy over location opened old wounds
The new station that opened last June replaced one built in 1963, but by 2015 was deemed functionally obsolete.
That year, county staff proposed closing the aging existing station and building a replacement several blocks east on Old Dominion Drive. The recommendation was greeted with a firestorm of opposition from residents living around the existing site, who saw the decision as tone-deaf to the history involved.
“I do not know what we were thinking, I really don’t,” County Board Chair Takis Karantonis said of the initial proposal.
Karantonis did not arrive on the Board dais until 2020, but one who was there as controversy unfolded was Board member Libby Garvey.
Garvey was alerted to the tempest via a scathing email from Marguarite Gooden, an educator with family ties to the fire station. In response, Garvey and then-Fire Chief James Schwartz traveled to Halls Hill to address concerns.
“This was not an easy conversation,” said Garvey, who chaired the County Board in 2016 as the matter played out. “We got quite an earful and an education. This was about a whole lot more than a fire station.”
In response to criticism, the county leadership set up a 12-member task force to consider the matter from various perspectives, and gave the body six months to return with recommendations.
Noah Simon, a former School Board member, was put in the unenviable position of leading the group in reaching a final recommendation.
It had been, he noted at the April 26 ceremony, exactly 3,218 days since the panel submitted its final report to County Board members, urging them to build the new station at the existing location.
“I’ve been thinking about this day ever since,” he said as he prepared to speak at the dedication ceremony. “I am going to be the most excited person up there.”
Simon acknowledged that many in the surrounding neighborhood had assumed that no matter what the residents wanted or the task force recommended, Board members would rubber-stamp the proposal to move the facility to Old Dominion Drive.
“There was a sense this was a done deal,” he said.
The task force recommended that the new station be remain where the existing one was, and Board members in mid-2016 voted 4-1 to keep the station in place. They agreed to purchase three surrounding homes to provide space for a temporary station while the existing one was demolished and the new one rose in its place.
Civic-association president Jones said it “was a hard fight,” and that in the end it wasn’t sentiment but hard facts about which location could best serve the most residents that resulted in the final decision.
“The reason this fire station is at this location is that the data backed us up,” she said. “The history and legacy was important, but the data is why this is here.”
Looking to the past, and the future
The ceremony brought out descendants of the original Black county firefighters, which totaled 14 by the end of the 1950s. Receiving standing ovations were retired Battalion Chief Jerome Smith and retired Capt. Hartman Reed, who began their service in those days.
In 1957, Alfred Clark was appointed captain at Fire Station #8, becoming the first Black fire captain in Arlington. At the dedication ceremony, his great-grandson — probationary Firefighter Lukas Hatcher — was on hand.
Hatcher, who is based at Station #8, told ARLnow that the modernized facilities are welcomed by firefighters, including individual bunk stations.
The gathering also was a reunion among those that had participated in what Karantonis termed “a decade of community action and passion” to not only ensure that Fire Station #8 did not move, but that the new station represented the history and values of the surrounding community.
Simon joked that while a number of members of his task force were in attendance, “the others are still in therapy.” More seriously, he noted that the end result balanced a host of needs.
“We were all a little uncomfortable” with different pieces of the final recommendations, he said, but that ultimately proved the power of compromise.
It was worth the effort, Simon said.
“This was so much more than a fire station — this was a place to build community,” he said.
The April 26 event also provided a chance to educate a younger generation on the value of firefighters and emergency-medical personnel. Two fire trucks and an ambulance were on display during an open house that followed the dedication ceremony, and drew large crowds.
The day’s events were hosted by the county government and Station #8 History and Legacy Committee.
