Mayor Bloomberg has acquiesced to threats of legal action by the City Council and released the list of 20 fire companies that could be closed as a result of budget cuts -- a list which includes at least one legendary building.
From The New York Times:
Eight of the fire companies are in Brooklyn, four in Queens, three each in Manhattan and the Bronx, and two in Staten Island. They make up about 6 percent of the 341 ladder and engine companies that reside in the city’s 218 firehouses (some firehouses are home to both an engine and a ladder).
Included in the list is TriBeca's Ladder Co. 8 which, as The New York Post has fun pointing out a case of "fact following fiction", was the station closed by the city in "Ghostbusters", before being occupied by Bill Murray and crew in the 1984 comedy blockbuster.
Bloomberg had previously refused to release the list in an effort to mitigate public outrage, a move that infuriated City Council and prompted them to threaten the mayor with a subpoena if the list was not released, according to the New York Daily News.
Bloomberg's office claims that if all 20 closures were implemented, the city would save $55 million. The cuts come as part of a painful budget plan announced earlier this year that also includes teacher layoffs and the closing of city homeless shelters.
City Council has vowed to rescue as many of the fire companies from the ax as they can , the New York Post reports.
"To even think about closing two fire companies in lower Manhattan, the No. 1 terror target in our country, is unconscionable," said City Councilwoman Margaret Chin, whose district includes Ladder 8, according to the Post.
Captain Al Hagan, head of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association, talked to 1010 WINS about the closures, warning "severely diminishing fire coverage on the 10th anniversary of the World Trade Center amounts to civic insanity."
At his news conference earlier Wednesday, Bloomberg told reporters the cuts were tough but necessary.
“It will be great to have a firehouse or company on every corner,” he said, according to the Times, “but that’s not the real world.”
Here's the full list of firehouses proposed for closing (pdf).