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Inner space

An old firehouse provides plenty of room for a couple's collection of oversize memorabilia.

When Dave Waller was a little boy, he loved visiting his grandfather's vintage diner, the Flying Yankee, near the General Electric plant in Lynn. Today, Waller and his wife, Lynn Riddle, own a similar diner - but this one is parked in the living room of the late-19th-century firehouse they call home.

In fact, the building was bought to accommodate the diner, which came into their lives first. Years ago, a dinner guest noticed a photo of the Flying Yankee in the couple's South End loft and asked if Waller would be interested in buying one like it.

"At first I said no, what would I do with a diner? But he was anxious to sell, so I went to look at it," Waller says. "My grandfather's was a Worcester diner" - made in 1928 by the Worcester Lunch Car Co. in Massachusetts - "and this one was the deluxe model from 1929. Of course, I had no place to put it, but it was a beautiful little diner with clerestory windows on top, so I bought it," he says.

Waller, who owns Brickyard VFX, a video production company in Boston that does special effects for television commercials, and Riddle, a graphic designer with her own firm, Firehouse Financial Communications, then had to figure out where to put the diner. They parked it in his mother's backyard in New Hampshire and went looking for a place that could hold the diner and their growing collection of Americana.

Because funds were limited, the couple looked for a commercial structure that was in bad shape but free of toxic waste. In 1991, Riddle spied the abandoned fire station while on a drive through a city north of Boston. It was a burnt-out shell with holes in the roof, but its brick exterior was intact, and it had 6,000 square feet of floor space. The station had served the neighborhood from 1896 till 1946, then had been used as a city emergency service unit until the mid-'80s, when fire destroyed the interior.

After a year of negotiations, Waller and Riddle bought the place in 1992, then spent another year "filling dumpsters with 17 tons of rubble," says Waller.

They consulted architect John Chapman of Wellesley, a friend, for help in planning the renovation. The firehouse had the wide-open spaces they wanted, as well as steel rods hanging from a truss in the attic to hold up a second floor, so no interior supports on the first floor would get in the way of the diner.

From salvaged materials, Waller and Riddle built a second-story level in part of the building, with two bedroom wings connected by a bridge. The steel for the new stairs was salvaged from a traffic bridge that stood next to the firehouse. The wrought-iron railings for the interior bridge came from Boston's Dudley Street Station when the elevated Orange Line was torn down. "They were going to be melted down," Waller says, "so I offered to buy them."

A dividing wall between the living room and kitchen has a built-in token booth, made in 1906, from the Dudley subway station; it holds the stereo, records, and CDs, serving as "a little control room" for the music that comes from speakers on the roof of the booth. Nearby are an old telephone booth and a jukebox. The walls of the double-height living room are decorated with old signs, some from the penny arcade at Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, that Waller's grandfather also owned.

A door leads from the master bedroom to the "backyard," created on a flat rubber rooftop. It has a lawn with real grass, a deck, and a lookout tower pieced together from salvaged wrought iron, where the couple's two small children can play.

Waller and Riddle still keep an eye out for old gas pumps, vintage theater signs, and other objects of 20th-century Americana. "We take the back roads a lot, or we'll go to architectural salvage shops," says Waller. "It is a bit like a sand castle - you build a little, and then you see how it works, and then you build some more, so it kind of evolves. But you need a large inventory of objects to choose from. That's why there's so much stuff in the basement."