Windsor Locks Train Station Effort Stopped In Its Tracks

The back of the WL Train Station

www.courant.com

Tom Condon

To borrow Tolstoy's thought about families, successful historic preservation projects follow a similar pattern; unsuccessful efforts fail in their own ways.

In a successful project, when a historic property is threatened, someone sounds the alarm, people organize, public officials get on board, the media cover it, and pretty soon the owner is reconsidering.

In an unsuccessful project, things go uniquely awry. This week I've been trying to figure out what in the name of heaven has — at least thus far — blocked the preservation of the handsome-but-decaying 1875 railroad station in Windsor Locks. If this important piece of local history — it is where native daughter Ella T. Grasso boarded the train to go to her inauguration in Hartford in 1975 — isn't preserved quickly, it will be lost. Bricks are beginning to fall out of the facade. It needs immediate attention.

The brick station has an elegant pragmatism; it was built with a pronounced overhang roof to allow passengers to wait for trains outside in the shade. But it has been closed since the late 1970s; the current Windsor Locks station is essentially a bus shelter on a concrete block in a parking lot by I-91, with no nearby development potential.

In 2004, a group of citizens organized the Windsor Locks Preservation Association to save the historic Main Street station, one of the few buildings in the area to survive an ill-advised urban renewal project (were there any that were well-advised?) in the 1970s. The association gathered a couple of hundred members and, with town support, raised nearly $300,000 in grants, the largest of which was $225,000 from the state's Small Town Economic Assistance Program, known by its acronym STEAP.

With the money in hand, the volunteer group began negotiating with Amtrak, the owner of the station. Buying real estate from Amtrak is a lengthy and labyrynthine process that, according to preservatilon association co-founder Barbara Schley, involves 11 separate approvals.

By 2009 the group had collected eight of the necessary approvals and now had a letter from Amtrak saying it would sell the station as long as the town supported the project and agreed not to use the site as a train station. You may think it odd, as I did, that a railroad would demand that a train station not be used as a train station, but there you have it. Amtrak spokesman Cliff Cole ducked the question, curiously, saying only that Amtrak wasn't planning to reuse the station but is "working with the State to further rail options at this site."

In any event, this might have worked out, but for one more wrinkle. A new adminstration at town hall had initiated a study that concluded that the catalyst for economic development would be bringing the train station back downtown. The site they picked was just north of the historic station. It turned out that the site for the new station slightly overlapped with the footprint of the old station. Since Amtrak said the "site" could not be used as a train station, officials believed the overlap would threaten both the transfer of the old building and the building of a new station.

You'd think this could have been worked out with Amtrak, but thus far it hasn't been. Town officials told the preservationists to just take the station, not the land around it. But, said Schley, that would have violated the terms of the STEAP grant, which demands public access. So after a year and a half of impasse — Mickey Danyluk of the preservation association actually wrote to President Obama asking him to intervene — the Windsor Locks Preservation Association took the extraordinary step of dissolving itself, its leaders extremely unhappy with town officials and the lack of progress.

Now, without the help of the preservationists, the town has to save the old station and build a new one, and First Selectman Steve Wawruck says he is committed to both goals. There really is a remarkable opportunity to create transit-orietned development in the center of town; Windsor Locks is on the New Haven-Hartford-Springfield line and likely to get both commuter and high-speed rail stops in the next several years because of Bradley International Airport. There's a massive empty factory building, the Montgomery mill, near the tracks awaiting development. (The building has changed hands a number of times in recent years, one of the owners was Joshua Guttman, the New York developer who owns the blighted Capitol West building in Hartford).

I hope Wawruck and his staff can pull this off; but I can't help but think that the old train station ought to be in hand and under renovation by now. There's doubtless some mix of local politics and personality at play here, as in most towns, but there still should be something to show for seven years of preservation effort. Late 19th-century rail stations were well-built and much beloved, and are centerpieces in the towns that had the foresight to save them. The jury is still out in Windsor Locks.