A two-story red brick engine house on a rough-cut stone base, its front crowned by a pressed-metal pediment with raised red letters reading ENGINE CO. 29 around a scrolled iron ornament. The wide apparatus opening at the center of the ground floor is set in a round arch with a sawtooth brick hood. It now holds a glazed storefront and arched transom under a small awning, with narrow doorways and iron lanterns on either side. White-painted stone bands cross the front, set with red rosettes at the ground floor. A corbelled brick frieze runs below the second-floor cornice, where a center pair of windows sits between single windows. Diamond-shaped iron tie-rod plates dot the side walls, and a square brick hose tower rises at the rear.
Engine House No. 29 was built for the St. Louis Fire Department’s Engine Company No. 29 at the eastern edge of what is now Forest Park Southeast. Fire department lists date the building to 1888; city property records give 1887. Its architect has not been identified. In 1909 the street in front was still Old Manchester Road. The Sanborn fire insurance map of that year shows the house as two stories of brick, 28 feet wide, with a 55-foot hose tower at the rear, and lists the company as 10 men and 4 horses with a third-class Ahrens engine, a combination hose wagon and a 40-gallon chemical engine. City accounts for 1905–06 record roof repairs and a new pair of doors. By 1951 the address was 1219 S. Vandeventer, and the Sanborn map still labeled the building Engine Co. No. 29, with the hose tower marked at 40 feet. The city sold it into private hands in 1982, according to city property records, and it was on the market again in 2016. Engine Company No. 29 now runs from a station at 200 S. Vandeventer Avenue in Midtown.
