Historic Moncton building has a 'pretend second storey'

Walking down St. George Street, people might notice a red brick building with a plaque reading "No. 2 Fire Station, 1899."

They might notice its three bay doors and the windows above them. But what most people don't notice, according to museum curator James Upham, is that the last window on the left looks not into a roombut into the sky.

It has no roof, and is, in fact, a "pretend second storey."

The story behind Moncton's No. 2 Fire Station building stretches back to 1899, when it was built to succeed the creatively named No. 1 Fire Station.

Halfway through construction ofNo. 2, the No.1 fire hall burned down, proving that "early Moncton has a solid sense of irony," said Upham, who's in charge of public programming at Resurgo Place.

No. 2 became the only fire station in the city for a while. But by the 1960s, there were at least two more, so the firefighters moved out and the library moved in for a short time.

"A lot of things burned down back in the day," Upham said, including the library, which needed the temporary home.

The tides really turned for No. 2 when Ford's Pharmacy set up shop there in the early 1960s. The owner decided to expand, sohe added a section to the left side of the building.

Perhaps because the pharmacy didn't need extra room up top, the owner stopped renovations there, leaving three bay doors below but only two rooms.

Andto avoid having theaddition look like "a sore tooth hanging there," the owner put acap on the top half of the building,

The building stayed much the same until early 2000s, when Youth Quest Central, a drop-in service for teenagers and young adults, decided to go in and renovate.

Now, the roof of the addition section can be accessed by staff of the centre and acts as a patio,with extra shelter from the street.

Using bricks from the inside of the building, Upham said, developers built a facade over the extra bay door to improve the esthetics of the building and ensure symmetry.

"It's not something that most people are going to notice," he said. "But when you do, you start to notice that we're surrounded by all these amazing things just regularly."