Charlotte City Hall

Starting as bucket brigades before evolving into firefighting companies, Charlotte’s first firefighters were all volunteers. By 1865, three volunteer companies served the city. Charlotte, like other growing industrial and commercial cities in the late 1800s, experienced a construction boom that resulted in new buildings clustered closely together, many soaring to unprecedented heights and constructed with highly combustible materials. Because such conditions put urban dwellers at risk, Charlotte needed a more systematic and reliable means to fight fires and prevent widespread destruction. Also, volunteer companies in Charlotte and throughout the country at that time were generally viewed as a "public menace" because many of their members were considered rowdy and ill-behaved.  

Charlotte established its municipal Fire Department on August 1, 1887, after its volunteer firemen resigned over disagreements with the city. It was not until the late nineteenth century, after firefighters became municipal employees focused on saving lives rather than protecting property, that the heroic image of firemen as rescuers emerged. Many of the first municipal fire stations were grand brick structures lavishly decorated with stone carvings. It was hoped that such attractive living quarters would help with the recruitment of moral and civic-minded men to serve. Like many cities, Charlotte hired locally renowned architects to design municipal buildings as public art and to placate suburbanites, many of whom became irate over the placement of institutional buildings in their upscale neighborhoods. As most of West Fifth Street in the 1920s was composed of two-story brick commercial buildings, Hook selected a similar motif for Fire Station No. 4. The station served as a firehouse until 1972, when it was replaced by a new fire station on North Church Street. 

C. C. Hook – a native of Wheeling, West Virginia, and graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri – originally moved to Charlotte in 1891 to teach mechanical drawing in the city’s public schools, but soon became Charlotte’s first fulltime professional architect. By 1892, he was designing structures for the Charlotte Consolidated Construction Company, the developers of the Dilworth community. Hook designed some 800 to 1,000 homes and buildings across the Carolinas, including Charlotte’s U.S. Post Office and Courthouse, Charlotte City Hall, the Carolina Theater, Myers Park Elementary School, and many buildings on college campuses across North Carolina (including the Chapel Hill and Greensboro campuses of the University of North Carolina, Davidson College, N.C. State University, Duke University, and Queens University). Hook also designed James B. Duke’s Myers Park mansion and the William Henry Belk House in Elizabeth.