(rshsdepot) State College, PA

[I95BERNIEW_@_aol.com]

A article from the Centre Daily Times about the old freight station which  
currently serves as a bus station.
 
Bernie Wagenblast
 
 
 
Group Tries to Save  Station
Centre Daily  Times 


By Mike  Joseph, The Centre Daily Times, State College, Pa.  
Dec. 3--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."  


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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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