The ‘30s Live at Fire Station 4 : Renovation: Care is taken to preserve a fine, lesser-known vestige of the Art Deco era.

SAN DIEGO — Downtown has its share of Victorian-era buildings and modern high-rises, but a few well-designed structures remain from the 1920s and ‘30s, when modern styles, including Art Deco, were coming into vogue.

The city’s finest 1930s building is the County Administration Center on Pacific Highway, designed by Richard Requa, Sam Hamill, William Templeton Johnson and Louis Gill, and completed in 1936.

Another excellent, but lesser-known, example is Fire Station 4 at 8th Avenue and J Street, but city engineers are not sure who designed it. Original plans include three signatures: G. A. Hanssen, Abrams and Phelps, none recognizable as top local architects.

Now, thanks to a $690,000 renovation completed last spring under the direction of Solana Beach architect Richard Friedson, the simple, two-story white concrete fire station looks as good as it did when it opened in 1937.

Back then, the Works Progress Administration, a program founded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in response to the Depression, resulted in several new public building projects that provided work for unemployed architects, contractors, artists and others. Many of these buildings were done in a simple, modern style with Art Deco accents, including assorted relief patterns in stucco and concrete.

Station 4 is a masterpiece of understatement, a simple composition of basic geometric shapes, with just the right amount of subtle decoration. There’s a raw immediacy to the board-formed concrete, with horizontal striations still visible from the original forms. Rows of steel-frame windows add functional, orderly detail to the building’s solid white walls.

The 9,000-square-foot station’s sleek tower on J Street is one of the few stately architectural landmarks in a neighborhood dominated by low warehouses, just east of the Gaslamp Quarter.

Long lines of fluting emphasize the tower’s vertical thrust. A narrow band of Deco-style crosshatched relief accents the place near the top where the tower steps back before it rises to its unadorned pyramidal crown.

Traditionally, towers mark entrances. From outside, this one looks purely decorative because the entrance to the station is around the corner on 8th Avenue.

But Fire Station 4’s tower once served a vital purpose. Sitting near the back of the first-floor garage, it was a drying tower for fire hoses. Today’s hoses are self-drying and don’t require this treatment, but it’s good to know that utilitarian concerns shaped the building.

Friedson credits San Diego city planner Ron Buckley, an expert in historic preservation, for helping preserve the exterior in its original state.

“The city told us we needed new emergency exits, but Ron kept emphasizing the historic value of the building, and how those would detract from it,” Friedson said. The city relented, and the building remains in original form, without new exits.

When it came to stripping off layers of old stucco and paint to get back to original concrete, without ruining the concrete’s fine decoration, Buckley was instrumental again.

“We were going to water-blast, and he told us to keep the pressure under 300 pounds per square inch, to be safe,” Friedson said. “We found that 300 wouldn’t do the job, so he helped us come up with wet sandblasting at an angle, and it worked.”

Over the years, the building had been many colors, but the bottom layer of paint was off-white. The station has been restored to a color that is close to the original, Friedson said.

Besides sprucing up the exterior, the renovation added important creature comforts for the eight firefighters on duty each 24-hour shift.

“It’s a lot more livable,” said firefighter James Barnett as he opened a big can of split-pea soup in the station’s larger, remodeled kitchen, with its new cabinets and food preparation island on the second story. “It’s nice to have it air-conditioned.”

Barnett laid out 18 grilled cheese sandwiches on the station’s new commercial range. A few yards away, in a new, adjacent living-dining area known as the “bullpen,” several well-padded recliners were lined up in front of the television, as if in anticipation of the World Series or the next edition of “Monday Night Football.”

Friedson’s renovation plan divided the second-floor living space into 10 individual rooms and added three new bathrooms, the bullpen and an exercise room.

Although firefighters are most appreciative of the improvements made to their second-floor quarters, they are also pleased with the changes in the first-floor garage, which houses two trucks: a pump truck, for putting out fires, and a rescue truck, which responds to emergencies such as heart attacks and other distress calls.

New exhaust hoses attach directly to the trucks’ exhaust pipes, sucking fumes away when trucks idle before departing on a run. When the trucks leave, the hoses slide free automatically.

Fire Station 4 is one of only half a dozen or so San Diego fire stations that have fire poles. Access doors at the tops of the station’s two poles have been specially sealed, to prevent exhaust fumes from reaching living spaces.

Barnett, finishing up his lunch duties as hungry station mates looked on, said the renovation is a big improvement but has some drawbacks.

“We had one large dorm room for sleeping before, divided by lockers and shelves,” he said. “There was a lot of camaraderie. Now, with individual rooms, people isolate more. They tend to disappear. You do sleep better, though.”

And, said firefighter Kevin Ester, waiting for his grilled cheese, “one comment we get a lot is about the color.”

The station’s interior walls are pale yellow, selected by Friedson and approved by Fire Department officials. Some of the firefighters don’t like it.

But Battalion Chief Ralph Edwards said the yellow is an attempt to get away from the traditionally drab institutional look.

“We have a history in fire stations--for a number of years everything was beige or Navajo white,” Edwards said. “We’ve given architects freedom with different colors inside the stations. We’re trying to go with colors that lend themselves more to establishing a character for a station.”