Engine House No. 8 (Columbus, Ohio)
former fire station in Columbus, Ohio

Engine House No. 8, also known as the Twentieth Street Engine House, is a former Columbus Fire Department station in the Mount Vernon neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio. The building was constructed in 1888, designed in the Romanesque Revival style. The station was decommissioned in 1968. In the 1980s, a supermarket was built around the original structure; today the firehouse and supermarket buildings are used as the Franklin County Department of Job and Family Services' East Opportunity Center.
Attributes
The Engine House No. 8 building is today a portion of the larger East Opportunity Center. The office, at Mount Vernon Avenue and 20th street, is at the busiest intersection of the Mount Vernon neighborhood, once a bustling and thriving area in the community. The office has approximately 60 social workers managing caseloads for 15,000 people.
In the present-day, the office is used to help residents find employment and end reliance on welfare programs.
“Engine House No. 8 (Columbus, Ohio)” enters the record as former fire station in Columbus, Ohio. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Engine, House and Columbus can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Engine House No. 8 (Columbus, Ohio)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Engine, House and Columbus provides the most credible route into that argument.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 22, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q119726444. Authority coordinates are 39.971, -82.974. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1888 and 1968.
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This entry incorporates text from “Engine House No. 8 (Columbus, Ohio)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.