Sunday, February 9, 2025
Since September, residents have wondered what was behind a series of eye-catching art panels that hung on the façade of the Sea Cliff Firehouse, at 39 Roslyn Ave. What was revealed recently was the result of a restoration project nearly five years in the making.
The steel casement windows of the firehouse, which date back to 1931, were fully restored in a $700,000 effort to preserve the building’s architectural integrity. The Tudor revival-style structure is listed on the national, state and local registries of historic landmarks.
New York state’s Historic Preservation Office determined that the building’s windows needed to be maintained, having been damaged by rust and water over the years. “All the windows were corroded to some degree, and many were either rusted open or shut,” said Erinn McDonnell, the village’s grant writer. “Much of the hardware was damaged in some way as well.”
The village received a $370,000 grant from the state Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation in December 2017, and put the project out to bid the following month. Contractors from Architectural Preservation Studio, based in Manhattan, worked with McDonnell on the project.
She explained that while the focus of the restoration was the windows, preserving their original design also required masonry work. “The [windows’] sub-frames are set into the masonry, and there had been damage on some of the elevations,” McDonnell said, “so we had to expand the scope of the project to make sure bricks wouldn’t fall out of the building.” The restored windows feature the same brass handle and window stopper hardware of the original windowpanes.
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