New Morris Fire Station officially open on Armstrong Street

The Morris Fire Protection District unveiled its new Armstrong Street fire station Saturday morning, showing off everything that’s new and honoring its past.

The grand opening and open house filled the fire engine bay with past members of the department from the days when it was a volunteer organization, and gave Judge Scott Belt the opportunity to raffle off a piece of art, a colorized photo from the 1950s of firefighters working on the old steam firetruck that now sits in the museum section of the Armstrong Street fire station.

The winner of that raffle, by what Morris Fire District Trustee Dave Bonomo called an act of God, was longtime Morris Fire Chief Bob Coleman. Coleman was chief for over 50 years.

Belt said he colorized the photo to create a large aluminum print that will be hung in the Morris fire station. What Coleman received is the original, the copy that Belt colorized in the first place to create the aluminum print. Belt found the picture at retired firefighter Cal Hammond’s print shop on Illinois Ave. while visiting.

“You never know what you’ll find walking into Cal’s, but I found a beautiful 11-by-14 black and white photo,” Belt said. “However, it was only black and white. I immediately had a vision, and this was before the station was being planned.”

Belt took the photo, scanned it, and thought it would look beautiful colored. He split his screen using the actual colors of the items in the picture he could track down, and used educated guesses as to the photo of the clothing worn in the photo.

The new Morris Fire Station cost $5 million and is fully-featured with a kitchen, day room, seven bedrooms, a shower space, workout room, bell tower, lobby space and the aforementioned museum. Inside the museum is the department’s 1868 Steamer fire truck, along with a 1927 American LaFrance fire truck. This portion of the station is open to the public, and it’s a room covered in murals commemorating the department’s past.

“The station is beautiful,” Bonomo said. “If you walk through it, you’ll see why we think it’s special. The history and tradition for many of us in the department lives on. We have sons in the fire service.”

Bonomo said the district promised three things after a referendum passed in 2018 allowing the fire district to raise its tax from 10 cents to 35 cents: It wanted to increase the pay of part time employees in order to retain them, improve emergency medical services to match the city’s growth, and to build a new downtown station since the former downtown station was seriously out of date.

The new fire station opened on Saturday achieving each of those goals and importantly, the new station is fully paid for.

“What I like about this building is we’re downtown, but we’re not in downtown,” Chief Tracey Steffes said. “We could be downtown if 15 seconds. We could be on the east side of town in 30 seconds. We could be north in about a minute and 15 seconds, and we could be south of town. This is just a good location. We don’t have to cross 47 to go north.”

Steffes said the station will have improved response time to the east side of Morris, and he referred to that side of town as where many of the blue collar workers live.

“That was the paper mill over there, and everybody worked at the paper mill,” Steffes said. “I remember as a little kid driving by there and looking in to see the men working inside. With that paper mill building in the city of Morris, I say now that it’s killing us. We have to correct that, and we’ve been trying to correct that for several decades.”

Mayor Chris Brown thanked the firefighters for their service, commitment and courage in doing the job.

“It represents a promise that we will always prioritize the well-being of our citizens, and it represents a partnership between the city of Morris and the Morris Fire Protection District,” Brown said.