San Diego Firehouse Museum in downtown San Diego's Little Italy occupies Old Fire Station 6, a historically designated 1915 brick firehouse on Columbia Street where San Diego firefighters served the community until 1970. The museum — founded in 1962 and operated by the nonprofit Pioneer Hook & Ladder Company — preserves three rooms of apparatus and memorabilia dating to the 1800s, anchoring a Little Italy museum corridor that includes San Diego Chinese Historical Museum a few blocks east on Third Avenue. Key artifacts include an 1841 Rumsey hand pumper, a 1903 Metropolitan Steamer, La Jolla's first fire engine, a horse-drawn steamer, and a piece of steel recovered from the World Trade Center, with a displayed slide pole tracing back to the 1878 invention credited to Chicago's Engine Company 21. The station's own innovation history is substantial: firefighters here built the world's first gas-engine-powered fireboat, the Bill Kettner, and a battalion chief invented the threading machine that led the NFPA to adopt the National Standard Thread in 1963 — engineering feats on par with the vessel-restoration work at Maritime Museum of San Diego on the nearby waterfront. An interactive Children's Fire Safety Room developed with the Burn Institute teaches escape planning and 911 protocols, while the full-kitchen facility and event hall host private rentals and department reunions inside the original firehouse bays.