RE: [Fwd: (rshsdepot) East Williston, NY]

["Jim Guthrie" <jguthrie_@_pipeline.com>]

Seth writes:

> In our minds it is "criminal."  In their minds it is ridding themselves of
> an eyesore, and at the risk of upsetting you, there is no choice
> but to lay
> you out on this one:  the salvation of a historic building is the
> RESPONSIBILITY of the people of that community and they didn't care.

Keep in mind, all that LIRR station repair and maintenance has been a county
responsibility since the mid-1960s -- before the state purchased the LIRR.
The biggest loss of station buildings came right after the agreement,
because the counties and the LIRR negotiated agreements based on a total
cost with the railroad charged with fitting the station budget into the
cost -- hence the loss of a host of neat buildings at the outset.

This also became an issue in the closing of all those stations a few years
ago when the new bilevel diesel cars came on line with no traps. In Queens,
all the Montauk branch stations were closed -- even Richmond Hill which had
a high level platform (and in cases of strikes closing Penn Station has been
used as a subway transfer point) because getting rid of stations impacts
local government budgets. There's good reason that Suffolk did not protest
closing of popular stations like LIU-Southampton College, for example.

The dynamics of the situation are thus quite different than in most
communities when it comes to saving stations or adaptive re-use because of
these long-standing agreements on Long Island, so one cannot fairly compare.
One of the things that happens is that the incorporated villages or
townships (depending on local form of government) must negotiate with the
county and the LIRR and the MTA on everything. This is not a "deal with the
railroad."

In Nassau County, years of political corruption further severely limited the
options for things like station maintenance -- hence the loss of East
Williston and probably others in the next few years.

Cheers,
Jim Guthrie (who still misses Flowerfield, Parkside, Brooklyn Manor and
A&P-Bronze <g>)



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The Railroad Station Historical Society maintains a database of existing
railroad structures at: http://www.rrshs.org

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