Former Salisbury fire headquarters available for lease

By Liz Holland
Posted 1/16/23

The former Salisbury Fire Department Headquarters building that once housed the Headquarters Live music venue and more recently served as offices for The Daily Times, is being offered for lease.

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Former Salisbury fire headquarters available for lease

Posted

The former Salisbury Fire Department Headquarters building that once housed the Headquarters Live music venue and more recently served as offices for The Daily Times, is being offered for lease.

Located on South Division Street along the Riverwalk and sitting opposite the public library and the city’s parking garage, the 12,000-square-foot space has been updated and remodeled in recent years, according to Christian Phillips, an advisor with NAI Coastal.

“The building offers an elevator, open air warehouse space and a private parking lot, a luxury in the Downtown corridor,” Phillips said in a company news release. 

It will be available on April 1 with lease rates starting at $12 per square foot for the entire building.

Meanwhile, the newspaper’s corporate owners, Gannett Co. Inc., does not plan to lease another building in Salisbury.

“Gannett has implemented a flexible workplace model for our local newsrooms,” a company spokesman said in an email. “As the lease expires at The Daily Times office, the staff will work remotely, as many staff currently do. We believe this model aligns with our values and reinforces our commitment to our employees and the communities we serve."

The nearly 100-year-old building has played an interesting role in the history of Salisbury and the fire department. In 1927, the city paid $55,000 for the construction of the fire station, according to “At the Crossroads: The Architectural History of Wicomico County, Maryland” by Paul Baker Touart. The building was dedicated on Feb. 4, 1928.

Eighty years later in 2008, the Salisbury Fire Department moved to its new, much larger headquarters on Cypress Street.

After several years of debate over the future of the property, the City Council finally agreed to sell the old fire station to Gillis Gilkerson. The company paid the city $85,000 for the property in 2013, according to Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation online records.

The development company operated Headquarter Live for a few years, then leased the building in 2017 to The Daily Times and DelmarvaNow.com.

The newspaper rented the entire building, with the newsroom taking up most of the second floor where the firefighters’ locker room and chief’s quarters were once located.

The building at South Division and Market streets was just around the corner from the newspaper’s old offices at 115 East Carroll St. where hundreds of reporters, editors, advertising representatives, press operators and numerous others worked from 1958 to 2008.

After Gannett sold the Carroll Street property to TidalHealth Peninsula Regional for $1.8 million, the paper moved to the Northwood Industrial Park in 2008. The Carroll Street building has since been razed.

The paper began publication in 1886 as The Wicomico News, a weekly. In 1923, it became a daily paper. Gannett bought the paper from Thomson Newspapers of Toronto, Canada, in 2000.

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