Pittsburgh police and firefighters across much of the city’s East End now have a new home base: a freshly-renovated building with nearly 100 years of history.
Officials kicked off the reopening of the Police Zone 5 and Fire Engine & Truck Company 8 building in East Liberty on Monday morning. Located on North Euclid Avenue near Garland Park, the station was originally built in 1929, under the mayorship of Charles Kline, the last Republican to hold the office.
“It’s all new infrastructure, all new mechanical, electrical, plumbing,” said Claire Mastroberardino, City of Pittsburgh senior project manager over public safety facilities.
“We hope that this is going to work well for both our firefighters, and help them with their response time, and also with our police, just to have a very welcoming and friendly place.”
Police and fire staff worked in the building for decades, but police moved out of the building in 2008, in favor of the Zone 5 headquarters on Washington Boulevard. Firefighters moved out in 2024, and spread out to other stations when major construction on the building began.
City leaders touted the reopening as a step forward for Pittsburgh public safety. The city can now move Zone 5 police out from their previous headquarters, which had been in a flood plain, and into a building that is more centrally located in the neighborhoods it will serve.
“This is where neighbors and residents are going to meet our firefighters, our police officers, face-to-face, [to] talk about their neighborhood issues,” said Mayor Corey O’Connor.
“Being located here in East Liberty gives our officers the opportunity to be more accessible to the community that we serve,” said Police Chief Jason Lando. “We are finally back in an actual neighborhood, walkable to so many. We are back in the community, and that matters.”
The entrance to Police Zone 5 and Fire Engine & Truck 8 in East Liberty.
Making an old building new
When it was first built, the Zone 5 station – originally called the East End Fire and Police Station – was lauded as “the most modern station of its kind in the country,” Mastroberardino said. The rebuilding initiative’s goal was to keep that ethos in mind while also preserving materials from the building’s past, she explained.
The new version of the building has been in the works since 2019, when the roof was replaced. The design process for the renovation started in 2020, according to Mastroberardino.
The building had leaks and structural issues that had to be remediated before it could again serve as a fire and police station. Other changes, Mastroberardino noted, were to bring it in line with modern station standards, including replacing the building’s four fire poles with a private staircase that firefighters use to head out on calls.
The station’s firefighter bunks were replaced with private rooms with their own built-in bathrooms and showers. Firefighters stay at the station during their shifts, and they’ll rotate through these rooms instead of using the old style of shared room with several bunk beds.
“We’ve had women say that they’ve had to wait sometimes four hours to take a shower in one of these old stations where we have one shower,” Mastroberardino said. “So we wanted to make sure that that never happened again.”
Police and fire areas are mixed throughout the building, and the basement includes a shared fitness area and offices for both bureaus.
Upstairs on the third floor, a former magistrate’s office has been transformed into a community space that residents can reserve for meetings or gatherings. Much of the room has been redone, but Mastroberardino said the wood paneling and judge’s bench are all original.
“We wanted to make it welcoming,” she said. “We wanted to make it big enough for people to be able to do things.”
Police moved into the new station on Monday. Firefighters will move in next week.
The new community space at the Police Zone 5 and Fire Engine & Truck 8 station in East Liberty.