Red fire alarm gallery

These red fire alarm boxes, standing like sentries on street corners all over Boston, are wired into Boston history. The first were installed in 1852, making Boston the first city in the United States to implement a telegraph-based fire alarm system. The one on this corner, the junction of Union and Hanover Streets, was among the original 39 fire alarm box locations in Boston.

Inside each box is a mechanical system that, when activated, automatically transmits the box number to the Boston Fire Department’s fire alarm office. From 1895 until 1925, the office was located in this 1890s South End building, at the time the Boston Fire Department headquarters. (The tower was used for training recruits.) Today, it’s the Pine Street Inn, an emergency shelter for homeless men and women.

Faneuil Hall, which opened in 1742, was among the first locations in Boston to get an alarm box. Installed on the east end of Faneuil in 1852, Box 1254 was moved to its current location on South Market Street at Merchants Row in 1961.

Other Boston landmarks served by an alarm box include the Old State House, built in 1713 to house the government offices of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. A fire alarm box has been on duty outside the historic building since 1878. The Boston Town House had been built on the same location in 1657-8 but was destroyed by fire in 1711.

In his famous 1920 poem “Fire and Ice,’’ Robert Frost predicted that the world would end in fire. When Frost rented a Beacon Hill apartment at 88 Mt. Vernon St. from 1938 to 1941, there was a fire alarm box nearby. Since 1913, Box 1374 has done duty on Mt. Vernon Street.

Today, there are some 2,200 fire boxes installed throughout the city, the maintenance of which cost $1.8 million annually as of 2008. In 1852, a box was installed out front of the 1807 Charles Street Meeting House, just down the hill from Frost’s old apartment. Originally built by the Third Baptist Church on a design by architect Asher Benjamin, the Meeting House is today home to a condominium and retail.

The alarm boxes originally weren’t painted red. That came after the disastrous Great Boston Fire of 1872, the same year this 1872 apartment building at the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Exeter Street was built. The building, constructed for banker Henry Higginson, who also founded the Boston Symphony Orchestra, has been protected by an alarm box since 1897.

Since 1979, box 1259 has been located by Boston City Hall, which opened in 1969. The city put out a call for ideas in 2012 on how to repurpose the alarms boxes. According to the city’s request for information, “Although modern communications systems have largely supplanted the need for these public fire alarm boxes, they remain an important part of our history and an iconic symbol of Boston.’’ Possible ideas, they said, could include turning the boxes into Wi-Fi hotspots, phone recharging stations, and Charlie Card refill machines. So far, no word from City Hall about any of the suggestions being implemented.