By Bill Bleyer
Newsday
 Photo courtesy of the Firefighters Museum The apparatus has a range of old apparatus on display. |
EAST GARDEN CITY, N.Y. — Eighteen months after opening with a small, $3-million fire-safety education exhibit in a Mitchel Field hangar, the Francis X. Pendl Nassau County Firefighters Museum and Education Center has doubled its space to 10,000 square feet.
The expansion is making its debut with the opening today of “Fires of Nassau County.” It includes seven restored firetrucks and apparatus, miniature firetrucks and other fire memorabilia, and photographs and video of fires back to 1921.
The East Garden City museum is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is $4 for adults and $3.50 for children and those 62 and older, volunteer firefighters and the disabled.
“We have an 1832 hand-drawn pumper with a leather hose that they used at the time from Hempstead Fire Department,” said board chairman Angelo Catalano.
“We have a 1952 Ward LaFrance lighting truck from Manhasset-Lakeville that was rusty garbage and we took it apart and painted it and put it all back together. It took about 6,000 man-hours.”
Also on display: a steam pumper from 1903 from Roslyn; a hand-drawn hose wagon from Bellmore from around the turn of the 20th century; and an Oceanside horse-drawn ladder truck from 1903.
Photos and videos document famous fires and emergencies such as a 1947 Long Island Rail Road crash in Rockville Centre, an Avianca jet crash in Cove Neck in 1990 and crashes at the old Mitchel Field airfield.
Over the next three years, the museum will create a classroom and restoration workshop on the first floor to be shared with the Cradle of Aviation Museum, where visitors can watch projects under way, said exe- cutive director Alana Petrocelli.
Catalano said the expansion is being done for “maybe a couple thousand dollars for Sheetrock” because volunteers are providing the labor. Sony donated 18 display cases for the models, miniatures and artifacts such as nozzles and fire extinguishers.
After the museum raises an additional $2.5 million, it plans a 2,000-square-foot mezzanine for exhibits, a meeting room and archival storage.
There are also plans for the Nassau County Police Department to shift its museum from headquarters in Garden City to a 4,000-square-foot space ad- jacent to the fire museum in Hangar 2 by this time next year.
Copyright 2008 Newsday, Inc.