(rshsdepot) Tecate, Mexico

[Bernie Wagenblast <brwagenblast_@_comcast.net>]

Photo of Tecate depot:
http://www.sdmrrc.org/Odds-n-Ends/TEdepotBW.jpg

Preservation gets on track

Groups in U.S., Mexico are joining forces in an effort to restore Tecate's
decaying train depot

By Sandra Dibble
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

February 7, 2002

TECATE - It's just a small-town train depot, the size of someone's house,
worn down by years of neglect and vandalism. The ceiling is leaking, the
wood trim ripped apart, the front door left to swing in the wind.
Hidden behind the city's famous brewery, the 83-year-old building has
quickly deteriorated since it was shut down by the Mexican government in
1996.
Groups from the United States and Mexico are joining forces to save Tecate's
little station, arguing that its unique heritage belongs to both nations.
Beams of light poured through the broken windows one recent morning and
shone upon the wood benches, the porcelain water fountain and the ticket
counter with the sign that reads boletos.
"This was a life, a whole style of life," said María Eugenia Castillo as she
fairly danced from room to room as she considered the station's many
details. "It's a building that takes you back."
Castillo, a preservationist from Tijuana's Colegio de la Frontera Norte,
dreams of restoring the building as part of a binational cultural heritage
corridor built around railroads, dubbed the Iron Road of the Californias.
The station's long overhangs and gently sloping roof make it a prime example
of the airy, open Prairie style championed by the famed U.S. architect,
Frank Lloyd Wright, in the early 1900s.
The San Diego-based Save Our Heritage Organization twice named the building
to its annual list of endangered structures. SOHO, in turn, asked for help
from the Great American Station Foundation, based in New Mexico.
"It's truly a treasure, a treasure for both sides of the border," SOHO
executive director Bruce Coons said.
This week, the Station Foundation named the Tecate Depot and four other
stations to its latest list of Most Endangered Stations. It is the only
station outside U.S. territory to be included, and comes with a $1,000 award
to support local preservation efforts.
The station, built in 1919, was an important stop on the 148-mile San Diego
& Arizona Railway, which ran from downtown San Diego to Seeley, west of El
Centro, where it met up with the Southern Pacific line. To save money, the
railroad's owner, sugar magnate John D. Spreckels, got permission to lay a
44-mile stretch of track through Mexico, between Tijuana and Tecate.
"The only reason it went south was because of the geography," said Erich
Strebe, the foundation's director of planning and economic development.
Passenger service ended in the 1950s, but the depot remained open through
1996 to serve freight trains. Two years ago, Mexico's federal government
conceded the track and station to the state of Baja California.
Today, under an agreement with Baja California, the Lakeside-based Carrizo
Gorge Railway runs freight on the track. Cars loaded with lumber, plastics
and regular shipments of hops and barley for the Tecate brewery stop at the
empty station.
In conjunction with Carrizo Gorge, the San Diego Railroad also offers
passenger train rides from Campo to Tecate twice a month.
Though U.S. support is crucial, it isn't just Americans who love the
station.
Mario Ortíz Villacorta, a Tijuana high school teacher, remembered the
station in the 1950s, when his family rode the train from Tijuana's Colonia
Libertad to Tecate for picnics. With few monuments to mark the region's
past, "we have to save what we have," Ortiz said.
Tecate native Víctor Ontiveros, now 55, talked about peeking through the
waiting room's door as a boy - "I was too scared to go inside" - and waving
at passengers as the trains pulled away.
Now Ontiveros belongs to a Tecate civic group, the Comité de Defensa y
Participación Ciudadana, which is fighting to restore the building.
Politicians have paid lip service to the idea, Ontiveros said, but the
cash-strapped city of about 80,000 has no money to spend on preservation.
Milford Wayne Donaldson, a San Diego preservation architect, estimated that
restoring such a station in California would cost as much as $360,000. But
the Tecate station's location in Mexico, plus the use of volunteer labor,
would reduce expenses.
Donaldson found the station in good shape last year, with 90 percent of its
historical fabric intact. But as the months pass, it is rapidly falling
apart. A chain-link fence has failed to keep out vagrants and drug addicts,
who have been tearing down the wood trim and burning it to stay warm.
If the building is destroyed, said Castillo, the preservationist, a piece of
the border's past will disappear.
"This is regional history," she said. "The region doesn't end because of the
border."

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