Ghostbusters Frozen Empire is released on home media today, so we thought it would be a good time to look back on our visit to the headquarters of our ghost hunting heroes: the HOOK & LADDER FIREHOUSE in New York City!
It seems crazy to us now but in summer 2017 we went on a 14 mile trek around Manhattan to visit famous landmarks and noteworthy locations without an internet enabled cell phone! We plotted it all in our Times Square hotel room using a printed guide book and a laminated map of New York City and we set off early one sunny morning for the subway with a handwritten list of the places to visit and a prayer that there’d be Wi-Fi to help us along the way!
Our route included many of the obvious New York spots but we’d also added in a small and obscure street called North Moore St., in the lower part of Manhattan, in a district known as Tribeca. As every fan of Ghostbusters knows, North Moore St. is home to the FDNY’s historic Hook & Ladder Company #8’s firehouse, the exterior filming location of the Ghostbusters’ iconic headquarters.
There was something strange in this neighborhood: when we stepped onto North Moore St. we expected it to be packed with ghostheads eager to photograph the hangout of Ray Stantz, Egon Spengler, Peter Venkman, Winston Zeddemore and Janine Melnitz. But there wasn’t a soul about (perhaps they were all locked up in the Containment Unit?!).
Of course our visit on August 2nd 2017 was long before the release of the movies Afterlife and Frozen Empire, when the core franchise had been dormant since 1989’s Ghostbusters 2, so there was us and nobody else on the street.
The firehouse didn’t look like it did in the movie.
Not because in reality things never look the same same as they are on the big screen, but because the firehouse was covered in scaffolding and black mesh, while the frontage was blocked by traffic barricades and reflective traffic drums.
We could just make out the familiar shape of the building behind the mesh. The design of Hook & Ladder’s firehouse is of course recognisable to anybody brought up in the 1980s. Not only did it play a big part in the Ghostbusters movies and cartoons, but Kenner’s toy firehouse even appeared in the finale of Roald Dahl’s The Witches movie in 1990: during the last scene, protagonist Luke is unexpectedly transformed back from a mouse into a child by a friendly witch as he sleeps in the firehouse playset. As the spell is cast, Luke bursts out of the toy, growing in size and smashing the firehouse to bits!
In the Ghostbusters universe, their firehouse headquarters was badly damaged during the events of the first movie when the Containment Unit exploded. By Ghostbusters 2 it was repaired, but that was fiction and here was the actual firehouse building looking like it had gone ten rounds with a poltergeist! What was going on? There was only one way to find out!
We crossed the street and peeked inside the open doors of Hook & Ladder. The bay inside the firehouse was packed full of equipment, machinery, boxes, paint cans and ladders – but no sign of “any spores, molds or fungus!”
We heard a noise in the corner: a workman was sat on a chair having a break and must have got a fright as we suddenly appeared in the doorway. He kindly consented to us taking a photograph of the interior, but there wasn’t much to see. In the original Ghostbusters movie, the firehouse interior was a blend of a Hollywood set and a disused fire station in Downtown Los Angeles.
The New York fire station in front of us dated from 1903 and was originally twice the size - unusually not depicted as such in the 1904 flashback opening scene of Ghostbusters Frozen Empire - but was cut in half in 1913 to make room for expanding the neighboring Varick St.
We didn’t know it at the time, but Hook & Ladder 8 were some of the first responders to the September 11th attacks. Sadly they lost a firefighter, Lieutenant Vincent Halloran, a 20 year veteran of the FDNY, in the line of duty while evacuating the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Lt. Halloran was later commemorated when a portion of North Moore St. was renamed in his honor.
In 2011 the Hook & Ladder firehouse was slated to close but was thankfully saved after New Yorkers and Ghostbusters fans alike were outraged at the news. We arrived at Hook & Ladder as a $6.5 million dollar restoration project was well underway.
We admired the two printed ‘NO GHOSTS’ Hook & Ladder logos on the sidewalk before we headed off for the rest of our adventure in New York City, and while we felt disappointed that the firehouse was hidden from our view and not looking its best, it was good to know that the historic building was being saved.
We are revisiting New York in summer 2024, some 7 years after our last visit, and while we are only ‘passing through’ on our way to New England, we plan to retrace our steps to North Moore St. and hopefully see the Hook & Ladder firehouse in all its restored glory (read about that visit HERE).
We also hope to pick up one of the collectible FDNY patches which features a ‘NO GHOSTS’ element, much like the Ghostbusters’ logo! Word is if the door is open and you ask nicely you might be given an informal tour of the firehouse by one of the firefighters – just don’t do a Walter Peck and forget to use the magic word!
