Newport Beach firefighters bid farewell to beloved ‘dump’ they called home for almost 70 years
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It’s practically a miracle the building that used to serve as Newport Beach Fire’s Peninsula Station #2 on 32nd Street and Via Oporto was still standing by the time Chief Jeff Boyles started his career there as a paramedic intern in the late ’90s. He and other firefighters used to say “the termites and the dry rot are holding it up.”
“I couldn’t believe, when I came to this station in ’98, how old and how big of a dump this fire station was,” he told about 70 people gathered outside of the building Monday afternoon.
The crowd included Mayor Joe Stapleton and other members of the City Council, as well as current and former firefighters like Todd Knipp, who helped renovate the structure over the years. He spent 30 years with Newport Beach Fire before retiring in 2015.
Knipp fondly remembered adding the third floor expansion over the station’s garage and converting one of its rooms into a women’s restroom in 1999 to accommodate the department’s first female firefighter, Erin Alexander. As they strolled through the vacant building’s cramped, empty corridors Monday, the two of them reminisced about family-style meals interrupted by the ring of alarms summoning them to an emergency.
“It was the quintessential Newport Beach Fire Department experience,” Knipp said. “It was the busiest station. You were responding to the beach. You had Pacific Coast Highway. You had those crazy summers. Fourth of July was crazy ... You were out having doughnuts at the pier at 5 o’ clock in the morning because you’d be up all night.”
The station was built in 1953 and used to house just four firefighters running two engines, said Mel Kiddie. He joined Newport Beach Fire at the age of 21 in 1958, and got sent out on a call during his first day on the job.
“The bell went off and there’s a fire, and they said, ‘You’re driving that truck,’” Kiddie recalled. “And I had no experience at all!”
The number of firefighters living at the station more than doubled by the time Knipp and Alexander were working there. But it has been vacant since the department moved operations to a new facility about a quarter of a mile away in 2022.
The defunct station opened its doors one last time to let firefighters and members of the community sign its walls before its demolition. They cheered as the arm of a bulldozer punched through the upper floor walls Knipp and others once helped erect.
An expansion of the neighboring Lido House hotel will be built in its place. That project includes the enlargement of three existing guest rooms and the addition of five new cottages as well as a greenhouse sitting room.
The development will add space for new restaurant concepts as well as much needed parking, Mayor Joe Stapleton said Monday. He added that the hotel’s growth will likely lead to additional revenue for the city via the transit occupancy tax.
Meanwhile, the city expects to begin the demolition and renovation of Fire Station 1 and the adjacent Balboa Branch Library by the fourth quarter of this year, Stapleton said. That upgrade is expected to cost about $18 million.
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