fire-alarm box

I ran outside to the fire-alarm box on the corner.

Of all the calls made from fire-alarm boxes, he said, 93 percent were false alarms.

He has also suggested removing fire-alarm boxes from city streets, to stop hoax calls.

The city had also installed 194 fire-alarm boxes allowing citizens to sound the alarm if a fire was spotted.

It also made it illegal for anyone to block access to an abortion clinic and voted to begin turning off some fire-alarm boxes.

Thus, details such as name plates, waste-paper baskets, fire-alarm boxes are all subject to the artist’s imagination and it is this which gives each station a unique profile.

During a recent radio show, Mr. Dinkins was talking about Mr. Giuliani's attempts to shut down the city's fire-alarm boxes.

On a corner at every other block, however, a red fire-alarm box stood - deactivated last fall when the Fire Department was testing the effects of removing the alarms.

Hobbling along the fortieth-floor corridor toward the light that came from the open reception-room door of the Harris Publications suite, Harris saw the fire-alarm box.

At the same time, though, he headed the effort to disconnect the city's sidewalk fire-alarm boxes, a move that stalled after a lawsuit and opposition from the City Council.

He said more than half the emergency calls the department received last year were false alarms from fire-alarm boxes, which are activated by pulling a lever or pushing a button.

"We were lucky today," Ms. Messinger said, adding that "the first report of the fire came in through a fire-alarm box fully two minutes before the first phone report."

The bill would also force the department to keep the entire network of 16,300 sidewalk fire-alarm boxes in place, at least until the city can come up with an alternative to the system.

The Mayor called the alarms a more reliable alternative for fighting fires than the fire-alarm boxes that the Fire Department last week started turning off in a 45-day pilot program.

False Alarms Drop Q.: In the mid 1990's the city began removing street-corner fire-alarm boxes, arguing that they were used primarily to send false alarms.

Though firefighters responded promptly, there were questions about alarms that never rang in the building, and the fire added to the controversy over the city's plans to shut down many fire-alarm boxes.

Fire Department officials said yesterday that budget cuts would force them to begin eliminating the red fire-alarm boxes that have stood sentinel on sidewalks throughout New York City for more than a century.

"That light indicates that somewhere within the four corners of that intersection, there's a fire-alarm box," he said, either of the mechanical variety, where you simply pull a lever, or at voice-activated box.

So when the Fire Department announced in October that budget cuts would remove red fire-alarm boxes from sidewalks, the outcry here was louder than in other poor neighborhoods where many do not own phones.

Agreement Over Fire Boxes Stymied in his efforts to remove all the city's fire-alarm boxes, Mayor Giuliani agreed to a City Council plan that would retain almost two-thirds of them.

So when the Fire Department announced last month that budget cuts would force the removal of fire-alarm boxes from the city's sidewalks, the outcry in the district, especially in Jamaica, was even greater than in other poor neighborhoods.

Responding to the Giuliani administration's plan to begin dismantling fire-alarm boxes throughout the city, a City Council committee passed a bill yesterday that would create a three-month moratorium for removing the boxes, so the Council could review the plan.

The City Council voted Wednesday to allow the Fire Department to begin a pilot program to deactivate fire-alarm boxes for 45 days in approximately half of Brooklyn, and portions of Queens, Manhattan and the Bronx.

The City Council Speaker, Peter F. Vallone, said yesterday that the Council would block the Giuliani administration's plan to dismantle the city's fire-alarm box system because the proposal would leave thousands of New Yorkers with no way to report fires quickly.

Sheldon Leffler, the chairman of the City Council's public safety committee, clashed with Mr. Safir over the Mayor's plan to disconnect hundreds of the city's sidewalk fire-alarm boxes, and said he was often surprised at Mr. Safir's vehemence.