My Fire Alarm Boxes

The second appears to be an old Gamewell box interior. We used to have such a Gamewell alarm box on a telephone pole outside our house, like this:

Only difference was inside it said “PULL HANDLE DOWN ONCE - LET GO”.

In 2003, they replaced it with the current type of Gamewell master box, but it still functions the same way.
Ah, another perk of living in a city that still uses those old fire alarm street boxes!

Simplex_4051 · July 23, 2014, 1:52am

A picture of our street when my mother was 7 or 8 showed that there was a FA box outside on a telephone pole at one point, but now its gone. Actually its been gone for quite a while since it was in the 50s!

system · July 23, 2014, 12:16pm

A lot of cities have gone wireless. Here in Worcester, the second largest city in New England, the fire boxes are long gone.

chris_s · July 23, 2014, 1:10pm

FA street boxes are a New England thing anyways, I’ve never seen them anywhere else.

I can’t say I’ve ever really understood the point of them? Not since the wide spread proliferation of telephones anyways.

Retired_STR-SG · July 23, 2014, 2:33pm

For anyone interested, here is a web site I found a few years ago dedicated to municipal fire systems.
http://plaws.net/fire/box.html
Unfortunately some of the links on this site are no longer valid, but it still is interesting.