• Posted: September 16, 2020
• better construction, Crosstown Electric, Taylor Electric

Powering Chicago contractors deliver better construction throughout the City of Chicago and suburban Cook County day in and day out, 365 days per year. Several recent projects and one ongoing one, each of which was possible because of ECA Chicago electrical contractors and skilled union electricians from IBEW Local 134, were showcased in the September 2020 issue of Electrical Contractor magazine in a story by Susan Casey.

One of the projects featured was a new fire station for the Chicago Fire Department in the city’s historic Pullman neighborhood currently under construction by Taylor Electric and Crosstown Electric. Keep reading to learn more about the project.

Engine Company 115 Fire Station

Taylor Electric bid and won a Public Building Commission for the 2019 construction of a new fire station in the Pullman area, a historic Chicago neighborhood that is currently rebuilding.

“We just came off another job for the City of Chicago, a warehouse and maintenance facility that houses fire trucks, so this was right up our alley,” said Kendra Dinkins, president, and CEO of Taylor Electric, a Chicago contractor that has been family owned and operated for some 95 years.

The 27,000-square-foot brick-and-concrete fire station will house 20 firefighters and has a training facility, a commercial kitchen, an eight-bay apparatus structure with hose towers, and eight officers’ quarters. It will feature daylight-harvesting; dimmable lighting using mostly LEDs; and public address, wireless antenna, and surveillance systems.

Since the structure has a cinder-block interior and brick exterior, the electricians and the masons coordinated closely.

“On other projects, if you did miss something, you could cut the drywall open and install it,” said Gloria Miles, estimator and project manager, Taylor Electric. “But on this project, if something was missed, the wall would have had to come down and we would have had to hire masons to build it up again.”

Taylor took steps to avoid that situation.

“We marked where the boxes were to be installed so the masons knew that location,” said Larry Orr, project foreman, Taylor Electric. “We prepped all the boxes, putting in connectors and pipe so that everything was ready to go when it was time to go in that wall, and our guys were stationed near the walls as the masons built them.”

“It was kind of exciting working on a project that everyone—including Mayor Lori Lightfoot—came out to look at. It makes you feel proud that everyone is going to enjoy it and that it will be useful for the community,” Miles said.

“Being given opportunities to rebuild portions of the city has always been near and dear to us,” Dinkins said.

For the Engine Company 115 Fire Station project, Crosstown Electric, a subcontractor of Taylor Electric, did the site electrical work: underground pipe and wire installation, light-pole base installation, and electrical service and communication pipe sleeve installation.

“All electrical work required to be installed underground, we do it, turnkey,” said Rich Hoff, supervisor, Crosstown Electric. “On the Firehouse 115 project, we used a 12,000-pound mini excavator to excavate the site, then installed the underground primary conduit sleeves, concrete transformer pad, secondary conduit sleeves, generator pipe sleeves, communication pipe sleeves, and concrete light pole bases.”

Crosstown’s slogan shows it is the perfect EC for jobs like the Engine Company 115 Fire Station: “We do the dirty work.”

To read about the other projects featured in the September issue of Electrical Contractor, read the blog posts about Countryside’s Municipal Complex and Navy Pier.