Fire Alarm Call Boxes

     Remember the old fire call boxes that you found on just about every other corner of the larger streets to call the Fire Department back in the day? They were hard to miss, painted red to catch your eye with the word FIRE on each side and shaped to look like a house. You could find stand-alone boxes on pedestals or on telephone poles. In today's high-tech world, they just don't make sense. But even before the cell phone became popular those boxes started to disappear from the streets of Philadelphia. Even the payphone made them less-needed, being it didn't cost anything for an emergency call, especially once the 911 system became active.
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     The call boxes made perfect sense back in the days when many or most homes didn't have telephones. But in the early 1980s, the Philadelphia Fire Department figured they had become obsolete. And they were right, those call boxes got way more activity with false alarms than for actual working fires. Wanted to shake things up on the street a bit? All you had to do was go over to the corner, break the glass on the box face, and pull down on the handle and run. Firefighters would be there in just a few minutes, hoping to find a citizen to direct them to the site of the actual fire. I remember reading in one book that an FDNY firefighter was killed when reponding to a false alarm, losing his grip just as the truck swiftly turned a corner. Those were the days when they rode on the trucks standing. That's another thing that's dissapperared for reasons just like this. In the later years, the citizens beat feet and didn't stick around after pulling the box, sometimes even for legitimate calls. So the PFD pulled them from the corners before we could zip halfway through the 1980s. A bit of nostalgia, but they're not useful at all today.

                                      Fire Call-Box In Front Of Fairfax Drugstore.
                                                                        (Click for a larger photo)

AND YOU MAY REMEMBER...

...that some boxes were painted black. I never could find out why. The legend was that the box was painted black when a firefighter died when responding to a fire there. But there were many boxes painted black that had no fatalities attached to them. Being they started to go black near the end of their effective lives, I would think it was done to show that they were no longer active.
...the days when you had to call 231-3131 for the police, or dial "0" to reach the Operator to connect to be connected with the fire department. I wonder today if there are even operators on duty today, or if it's an automated system. Nor do I want to check. What do you do if you find a warm-body (live person) on the other end? "Oh-uh, hey...just checking..."

...the old police call boxes. I never saw an active one, but I remember numerous abandoned boxes around South Philly through the end of the 70s. Useful for cops on patrol before two-way radios became widespread. 

Now the average citizen can't even listen to the police on their analog obsolete scanners since they went digital a few years back. So a few of us have somewhat expensive paperweights with speakers and digital displays. You have to buy a digital scanner to listen to public service radio. Or, save a good bit of cash and go to https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/ctid/2291/?rl=rr
You'll find live feeds to police and fire frequencies for all police districts and citywide frequencies as well as the North and South dispatch frequencies for the Philadelphia Fire Department.