HOW A FEW FIREMEN CREATED A SAFE HAVEN

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Lieut. Arthur Lewis can be an exacting critic. As he leafs through a children's coloring book, his mustache twitches, and his eyebrows collide in a scowl. But now, Lewis turns to three small girls standing in front of him, a smile on his face, and pronounces their efforts superb. As a reward, the young artists receive three quarters apiece, enough for each girl to buy a "poor man's" sandwich at Harold's Chicken Shack. In most parts of America, this qualifies as an after-school snack. Here, on the South Side of Chicago, it's dinner.

Suddenly, any impression that Lewis may be running a halfway house for hungry kids in one of the poorest and most wretched neighborhoods in America is shattered by the blare of an electronic siren. The girls know the drill: they file neatly out of the red brick firehouse while Lewis and his crew snatch up their coats and helmets. In a flash, all five firemen are aboard their truck and rocketing out of the station to handle one of the 70 emergency calls they receive each week at one of the busiest station houses in Chicago. The 17 fire fighters of Engine Co. 16, nearly all of whom are black, specialize in more than fighting the high-rise infernos that ravage the Robert Taylor Homes, part of the largest public-housing projects in the U.S. They serve as mentors, guides and surrogate fathers to lost children.

Most of the residents stacked into the 16-story human warehouses of the Robert Taylor Homes are prisoners of their own apartments, marooned in a landscape bereft of opportunity. By day, mothers struggle to keep their children from playing on the enclosed porches for fear they will be shot. Inside, there are rats in the incinerator shafts, cockroaches in the hall and a stench in the elevators. "Robert Taylor ain't no future for no one," says Lasonya Evans, 20, who lives here with her aunt. "People have stopped dreaming. They don't have no more dreams."

Children account for nearly two-thirds of these projects' population, and many of them have fathers who are either missing, in prison or dead. The firemen, therefore, stand among a handful of male role models in this urban wasteland. On their days off, they drop by to tutor children in chess and math and to encourage them to stay in school. Most important, they offer discipline, tenderness and inspiration to a community where such things are in terribly short supply.

Until about 10 years ago, this tiny firehouse served as a training ground for rookies and a house of punishment for white firemen who had fallen out of favor with their bosses. Most of those men took little interest in the neighborhood--with the exception of the few black fire fighters who were there--and treated the station house as a fortress. Residents viewed them as outsiders, and some youngsters vandalized the place with rocks and graffiti. But as white firemen slowly transferred out, a core of African Americans who chose to remain behind began leaving the station's steel door open nearly 20 hours a day. At that point something unexpected happened: people stopped trashing the place, and children started venturing inside.