Nestled among a row of brownstones on Bloomfield Street, behind a brick façade and an arched garage door, is an Ahrens Fox hose wagon, 1932 vintage. 

"It's the Cadillac of fire apparatus," said Bill Bergin, former deputy chief of the Hoboken Fire Department and the volunteer curator of the department's museum, which sits at this address. 

The shiny red fire truck has served as a rallying point for the museum since its dedication some 35 years ago. A mechanic with the city's water department, Willy Dietrich, had renovated the vehicle during his spare time; since then it has made public appearances at special events and parades around Hoboken. 

"And the engine was just rebuilt," Bergin added with a laugh. "I'm telling you, it runs better than my car." 

A space for history 

The narrow two-story building, a combined museum, garage, and meeting hall, is a treasure chest of Hoboken history as viewed through the eyes of its fire department. 

Bergin, who runs the museum together with retired firefighter Joe Kennedy, said hundreds of Hoboken school children get the tour every year. The Museum is open on Saturdays and charges no admissions fee. 

Two paces away from either side of the Ahrens Fox are walls filled with photos, newspapers, old uniforms, flags, and helmets. Behind the truck is a rack filled with vintage firefighter magazines, and the back wall, which Bergin calls the Bad Wall, is filled with documentation from Hoboken's most disastrous blazes. 

A city of dense development on narrow streets, Hoboken has a storied history of fires. The all-volunteer department became professionalized in 1891 to help deal with an increase in frequency and intensity of the fires – a landmark event in the legacy of the force. 

At first it wasn't the firefighters' salaries that cost the most money, Bergin said, but the upkeep of the horses, which ran carts full of either chemicals or steam (depending on the decade) used to extract water from hydrants.

Eventually the department converted to gas engines, and they functioned in pairs: a "chemical hose wagon" like the one displayed in the museum, and a front-heavy "pumper" that exerted water pressure on the hose.

Also on display is one of Hoboken's old call boxes – number 47 – that were scattered throughout the city and which the department used to respond to fire alarms. 

But they were eventually phased out. "95 percent of the calls were false alarms. They were just kids playing around," he said. 

At one point, Bergen added, the whole city had been equipped with an intercom system, which the department used to rally off-duty firefighters in the case of large fires; it also was a method for announcing school closings. 

Despite the false alarms, a number of large fires have made their mark on Hoboken. 

Near the front of the museum is framed a newspaper clipping from 1900, written in prosaic voice, depicting the epic fire on a pier in the Hudson River that killed about 300 people. (Paragraph five reads: "River and bay were enveloped in a pan of black smoke, through which angry flames, bursting as from volcanoes on the Jersey shore and in the water itself, leaped like red spheres into the sky.")

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, a number of suspected arsons unnerved the city. 

"It was a period of condo conversion, and we had a lot of large and suspicious fires," Bergin said as we surveyed the Bal Wall. "Arson was assumed. It went along quite a bit in Hoboken." 

One newspaper article from 1982 depicts a dispute between City Hall and the Fire Department over who would be responsible for preventing arson in buildings that were suspected targets. 

Then Mayor Steve Capiello had argued that the fire department should make hourly checks at night for arsonists, but the fire department insisted it should be the job of the police. 

Bergin himself, at the time a fire captain and the president of the Hoboken Fire Fighters Association, was the first to be quoted in the article. ''We are willing to go along with any constructive plan, but we're not going to be scapegoats," he was quoted as saying. 

A space for memory  

But it's far from a museum of doom and gloom. There are photos of the firefighters on and off-duty, goofing around on ladders during trainings. There are collections of badges and helmets from early fire chiefs. On the second floor, still used as a meeting hall for each of the department's four squads, the walls are covered in photos of picnics and union pickets. 

Right next to the tables is a photograph of Frank Sinatra and his father, Martin Sinatra, a fire captain in Hoboken. 

At a wall of old fire helmets and badges, one golf leaf crest reading "Mayor – Hoboken" set Bergin laughing. Every new mayor is given a ceremonial helmet, but apparently one had not been accepted. 

"There was one mayor who didn't want his badge," he remembered, alluding to the often-strained relationship between the city's officials and its well-unionized fire department. 

Near the back of the garage is a framed photo of Taps, the last fire dog on the department, with 12 – or 13 – pups nursing from her black and white spotted belly. 

And, on a shelf adorned with gold-leaf helmets from past fire chiefs, sits a "life gun," a tool resembling a Batman-era tool which shoots a bullet with a small rope attached, so as to transport tools to firefighters from a distance. 

"Yeah, they were phasing these out by the time I joined the force," Bergin said of the gun. "I only got to polish it."

Story of a curator

Bergin – an Irish version of the word for New Jersey's most northeast county –   served on the department for 31 years, from 1960 to 1991, and since then has turned his attention toward the museum. 

It became clear the place is a labor of love for the retired deputy fire chief. He revealed that he had collected most of the picture frames from the street or secondhand stores, and had cut the glass – usually collected from leftovers from condominium developments – himself. 

"I learned very quickly how to cut glass – and how to cut my own fingers," he joked. 

Bergin also refinished, using several shades of semigloss paint, the detailed molding on the ceiling of the second floor. Angels are holding two fire helmets and ceremonial fire trumpets, and a tiny plaster fire hydrant holds up the lights in the center of the piece. 

He and another retired firefighter together keep the place afloat. They are looking for younger firefighters to takeover the upkeep of the museum, though they're not yet sure who will be interested, Bergin said. 

One of the last things we inspect is the collection of record books hidden away in a safe. There is a ledger listing, in scripted calligraphy, all the volunteer firefighters in the 1800s. Some were dismissed early – "drunks, probably," Bergin said.

Another book dating from that historic year of 1891, documents the firefighters' leaves of absence, usually for sickness.

Many artifacts were saved from a dumpster when the museum was first organized, which was done mostly using funds raised by the department from bus trips to Atlantic City and from t-shirt sales.

Bergin said he hopes someday the record books can be scanned for safekeeping -- "God forbid this place ever caught fire," he said. "This is our history."