(rshsdepot) State College, PA

[Jim Dent <jdent1_@_optonline.net>]

Posted on Sat, Dec. 03, 2005	
Group tries to save station

Residents want to give new life to old bus terminal

By Mike Joseph

mjoseph_@_centredaily.com

STATE COLLEGE -- At age 75, the one-story house of faded red bricks that 
is the bus station on North Atherton Street stands like a poor, distant 
and undersized relative of the big buildings nearby:

# Penn State's shapely new Information Sciences and Technology Building 
just up the street.

# The also glassy and even newer Rec Hall wrestling and fitness center 
nearing completion a little farther up the street.

# And Penn State's expanding campus to the west, an assemblage of 
academic strongholds around the bus station.

But this station has seen a lot of comings and goings over the decades: 
 From its first life as a rail freight station, where materials for Penn 
State and State College were unloaded to build a community, to its 
present career as a bus depot, a hub where thousands of homeward bound 
students -- 1,300 over Thanksgiving last week -- catch a Greyhound or 
Fullington Trailways bus to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and elsewhere.

Now a few community-minded residents have come forward with hopes to 
keep the old structure alive somehow -- to find a new home and new 
purpose for it -- before progress bulldozes the bricks and mortar laid 
in 1930 into a cargo of rubble for the 21st century's dustbin.

"We continually are tearing down our past and replacing it with 
something new," said Bob Donaldson, retired county planning director and 
Centre County Historical Society member. "Aren't there some things from 
our past that have enough interest and value that we can retain some of it?"

Maybe.

Although the urgency surrounding the fate of the station at 152 N. 
Atherton St. has been eased by Penn State's decision to build an $80 
million research center near Shortlidge Road, the university says it 
will someday likely remake the site that is no longer on the campus 
periphery.

"Certainly, I think long-term we need a different solution, but we 
really are not feeling as pressed," said Dan Sieminski, Penn State 
assistant vice president for finance and business.

Trying to stir up support for an idea to keep the station alive when the 
pressure resumes are Donaldson, historical society President Jackie 
Melander and State College Borough Planning Commission Chairman Arthur 
Anderson, among others.

It is their idea to have a contractor raise the building, whose concrete 
base sits on I-beams, and move it to a place where it can be put to use 
as a home for a restaurant, coffee house, novelty shop or the like.

Donaldson sees parallels with other former train stations that survived 
the demise of the railroad, including the Whistle Stop Restaurant in 
Centre Hall and, in Bellefonte, the old station that now serves as a 
visitors center and chamber of commerce headquarters at the doorstep of 
Talleyrand Park.

"Isn't there some functional reuse -- combining them into a little 
historical plaza, a good, attractive, adaptive reuse?" Donaldson said, 
referring collectively to the bus station and the nearby Greyhound 
Posthouse, now a restaurant with Vietnamese cuisine.

But Donaldson's idea has been a motion without a second. There have been 
no buyers: No one willing to put up the $18,000 or so to move it, plus 
tens of thousands more to redo it into something useful -- and no one 
willing to yield a piece of land to put under it.

A possible location, because it is nearby and thus a less costly move, 
Donaldson said, would be a borough-owned parking lot on Sparks Street at 
Railroad Avenue, next to Penn State's West Campus and a few blocks from 
the station's present site.

The Sparks Street site is also one of four places a Centre Region 
Council of Governments committee is evaluating for a new bus station 
location, and the committee chair, State College councilwoman Elizabeth 
Goreham, sees how the old buildings could fit in. "I'd like to save them 
myself," she said.

Among those who haven't been sold on the idea is State College Mayor 
Bill Welch, who like Donaldson was reared in State College but unlike 
Donaldson sees the bus station with less tender regard.

"It's just not clear to me that it's a building of sufficient 
architectural or historic interest to be worth the amount of money it 
would take to pick it up and put it down somewhere else," Welch said.

Michael Bezilla, author of a forthcoming history of the Bellefonte 
Central Railroad, says Donaldson's idea will be a "tough sell" because 
of its appearance and because it was a freight-only station that does 
not hold the fond memories that passenger stations do.

"It has a certain social detachment from the community -- it was not 
centrally located as far as pedestrians were concerned, and you kind of 
had to go out of your way to get to the station," Bezilla said. 
"Honestly, it's kind of plain. It has a certain attraction, but it 
doesn't have that kind of gingerbread look to it that older stations have."

A sometimes argued presidential link to the station fails to withstand 
Bezilla's research. When Dwight Eisenhower in 1953 became the first U.S. 
president to visit Penn State, he arrived in State College by way of a 
special train over the Bellefonte Central Railroad. But he didn't go in 
the station.

"He never went inside, I'll guarantee it," Bezilla said. "I've read all 
the newspaper accounts, everything. He and Mrs. Eisenhower never went 
inside."

Mike Joseph can be reached at 235-3910.

© 2005 Centre Daily Times and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.centredaily.com

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

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End of RSHSDepot Digest V1 #1259
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=================================
The Railroad Station Historical Society maintains a database of existing
railroad structures at: http://www.rrshs.org