The 100-year anniversary of the Fire Patrol house on West 3rd Street could have been a reason to celebrate.

Many of the patrolmen have been in the neighborhood for decades. Among local restaurants and businesses, the patrolmen and their characteristic red hats are considered friends as well as a protective force. They aren’t the Fire Department, but they are just as good at helping when a small fire breaks out, a pipe bursts, or a scuffle in front of a bar threatens the calm of the historic Greenwich Village streets.

Looming over the barbecue atmosphere in front of the station house yesterday was a date, October 15, which will mark the end of the city’s 98-man force after more than 200 years in New York City. The insurance companies that fund the Fire Patrol to protect commercial assets voted last month to disband it because they no longer consider the patrol worth the cost.

New York City’s Fire Patrol is the last in the country. Fire patrolmen in three station houses in Manhattan and Brooklyn respond to fires across the city, but act as an auxiliary force to the municipal fire department. While firefighters douse the flames, they venture into rooms below and adjacent to the hot zone. They cover computers and merchandise with waterproof tarpaulins, pump out water from the firefighters’ hoses, and stop up pipe breakages. The fire department has a dispatch computer set up in their station houses, allowing them to respond with the same alacrity as firefighters.

“They truly believe in their cause,” a vice president of the New York Insurance Association, Ellen Melchioni, said. “It’s just sad — every other state has done away with these organizations. It’s another tax on the insurance companies. They are not providing value any longer.”

The group costs $8.5 million a year to fund, but the leaders of the union that represents the patrolmen, Local I-26 of the International Association of Firefighters, said they save as much as $80 million in merchandise a year.

In the past, the patrolmen have saved Andy Warhol paintings, equipment at the New York Commodities Exchange, and the personal library of a cosmetics baroness, Bobbi Brown, union representatives and patrolmen said.

With the final days of the patrol approaching, union leaders and supporters have asked the attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, to intervene through legal action. Because a nonprofit corporation, the Board of Fire Underwriters, governs the Fire Patrol, the union said it believes Mr. Spitzer can stop the impending shutdown. A group of union representatives met with Mr. Spitzer’s staff last week, but they have yet to hear if he will support them.

“You wouldn’t know the difference between a Fire Patrolman and a firefighter, except their hats,” a 13-year veteran of the Fire Patrol, Anthony Emanuele, 40, said. During the 2004 blackout, the Fire Patrol rescued five groups of people stuck in elevators. On September 11, 2001, all three Fire Patrol units responded to the World Trade Center site, where they helped evacuate people from the concourse. One 27-year-old patrolman, Keith Roma, died in the attacks, and he has been honored beside those who died from the New York City Fire Department. Many of the patrolmen are now seeking aid for illnesses they say they contracted from working at ground zero in the days after the attack.

“I see these guys every day,” the manager of the Baggot Inn on 3rd Street, Ronin Murphy, 28, said. “Once a resident kept throwing cigarettes outside the back, and it started a small fire. They were here before we even knew. They have an innate sense of smell.”