(rshsdepot) Mountain Ave. Montclair, NJ

[I95BERNIEW_@_aol.com]

From today's Star-Ledger.
 
Bernie Wagenblast
 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 
 
The station agents
Mother, daughter call Montclair depot home 
Thursday, February 14, 2008  
BY JENNIFER WEISS
Star-Ledger Staff 
When Catherine Valero tells people where she lives, some assume she's  
homeless. She and her mother, Karen, live in a train station.  
But the pair aren't squatters -- they're renters. For seven years, they have  
called Montclair's Mountain Avenue Station home.  
Theirs is the only home that doubles as an active NJ Transit station,  
according a spokeswoman for the transit company.  
"At first, it was really, really neat," says Catherine, 17. "I was 10 years  
old. I got to tell people I lived in a train station and brag about it."  
The station's stone exterior and "Mountain Avenue Station" sign hardly betray 
 the homeyness of its two-bedroom interior, which includes an upright piano 
in  the living room. And the station is active in every sense of the word. On 
an  average weekday, 51 trains pass by. The first one triggers the bells of the 
 gates and rolls in, engine rumbling, brakes hissing, at about 5:30 a.m. 
That's  early, considering the bedrooms are directly over the platform.  
Karen and Catherine have gotten used to the bells and whistles. "It really  
isn't as noisy as you might think," Karen says.  
She chose the place in part because of its age; the station was built in  
1893. "I've always been attracted to older, historic places," she says. "I  
visited this when my friends lived here and really liked it. The moment they  said 
they were moving, I said, 'okay, how can I get your house?'" Her friends,  the 
previous tenants, were artists who raised two small children there.  
Still, some of charm has worn off for both mother and daughter. Catherine  
loves HGTV's "Extreme Homes," but wouldn't mind if her next home was less like  
one. Karen is thinking about leaving in the next few years, especially since 
her  daughter will head to college soon. But she'll miss the place when she 
goes.  
"I love the space and the character," she says. "I love all the wainscoting." 
 She will probably choose another old home next: "With new homes, the 
character  piece is just missing."  
The two-floor house is spacious, with two bathrooms (only one has a toilet),  
two offices, a living room, den, mudroom, laundry room, eat-in kitchen, 
basement  and attic, not to mention the high-ceilinged public waiting room the pair 
use on  weekends, when there is no train service -- NJ Transit had planned to 
add  weekend trains by the end of the year, but the change was postponed.  
If any kind of space is lacking, it's storage space -- Karen had a closet  
added to Catherine's bedroom to help solve that problem.  
When she and her daughter moved in, they kept many things the way their  
predecessors had left them. Some things, they changed. They chose a light taupe  
for the living room walls, which had seemed too dark. The room's windows, all  
original, had been covered over with wooden panels -- Karen had them removed,  
exposing ribbons of red and yellow stained glass, and added custom-made 
screens.  She re-varnished the wood floors downstairs and painted some of the wood 
floors  upstairs.  
Karen calls the place a bargain, and it is, considering Montclair's strong  
rental market. She says her monthly rent started at $750 seven years ago and 
has  since increased to $1,170. This winter, she has had to tack on another $290 
per  month in heating costs because of the building's poor insulation.  
High heating costs aren't the only downside to life in an old train station.  
Karen says she can't have a phone in her home office, the former ticket 
office  -- she'd have to run a phone line through the basement, which is too damp 
and  used to flood (she has since had a sump pump installed, which takes care 
of the  problem).  
In addition, the house lacks a true shower. Sure, there's a shower head over  
the clawfoot tub upstairs, but the ceiling slopes downward, making it 
somewhat  difficult to use.  
"You kind of just adjust," she says.  
Then there are the commuters, the transient housemates who drift into and out 
 of the waiting room that adjoins the house and sometimes peek in the 
windows.  
Karen furnished the waiting room with care, filling it with the same kinds of 
 antique and secondhand pieces she keeps in the rest of the house. Under the 
old  ticket window, she put a dresser she had before she was married. On the 
other  side of the room, she keeps a china cabinet that belonged to her 
grandmother.  She lined surfaces with knickknacks and added a pool table with the 
requisite  cues, balls and triangle. Sometimes, she'll come back from New York 
with a stack  of train schedules, leaving those for people, too.  
For their part, the commuters leave food and papers, but are largely  
respectful -- a good thing, since Karen, as part of her lease, must clean the  
waiting room and its tiny bathroom. (She, in turn, subcontracts the job to her  
daughter.) In seven years, Karen says only an ashtray has disappeared.  
The commuters also need help from time to time. At 11 a.m. on a recent  
morning, Karen heard someone banging on the door that connects her home to the  
waiting room. The man doing the banging was trapped, or so he thought -- he  
didn't know he had to press a button to exit the room, whose door unlocks  
automatically during rush hour and stays locked the rest of the time. Karen  helped 
him get out.  
She has aided people on other occasions. Once, she gave phone numbers for  
cabs to a man who seemed drunk and had ended up at the wrong station. Another  
time, she drove an elderly woman to a neighboring station.  
"I always tell people, 'Just ask. Don't get off unless you're really sure,'"  
Karen says.  
Some people think she and Catherine work at the station, and don't realize  
they are just being nice.  
"Some of them are grouchy and have this perception, 'You're supposed to give  
me tickets! Why are you directing me elsewhere?'" says Catherine.  
LIFE ON THE TRACKS has changed Karen's perspective on work and how we get  
there. When she first moved to the station, she took the train daily to a job in 
 New York. After three years, she left; her next job was in Montclair, close 
to  home.  
"I feel bad when I see people walking to the train at 5:30 in the morning,"  
she says. "I think about how long a day they put in, because, of course, I 
hear  them when they come home."  
Observing them, she says, "makes me think about how much time we spend in  
that kind of commuting mode. It just makes me question if it's really worth it." 
 
And so she and Catherine spend most of their time in the waiting room  
entertaining guests, listening to music and catching up with each other. Not  
waiting for a train to take them anywhere.  
Contact Jennifer Weiss at 973-392-7896 or jweiss_@_starledger.com. 



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