(soft piano music) - The Wilkinsburg Train Station is really a symbol of Wilkinsburg's history, and the beauty this community once had.

- This train station was really important back in the day, when it was the hub of the community.

- The renovation of the train station is important because it is a catalyst for redevelopment.

- I always like to say they don't build buildings like this anymore.

(train whistle blows) - [Minette] For decades, the Wilkinsburg Train Station stood as one of the borough's most recognizable landmarks.

(light nostalgic music) - [Tracey] The architect was Walter H. Cookson, and it was built in the Beaux Arts style, which is similar to Grand Central Station in New York.

- [Minette] It was built in 1915, and quickly became a source of local pride.

- So this is the main lobby of the train station.

As you can see, it had a skylight originally up in the ceiling.

We've repurposed it as a light fixture, so we'll be able to use it both night and day.

- [Minette] Tracey Evans is the executive director of the Wilkinsburg Community Development Corporation.

- Wilkinsburg was the wealthiest borough in Allegheny County back in the '50s and '60s.

So we have magnificent architecture.

The properties, the homes around here, are beautiful.

And the train station itself is really a symbol, more than anything, of that great time in Wilkinsburg.

(light piano music) - [Anne Elise] This train station was one of the finest train stations from here to Harrisburg.

- [Minette] Anne Elise Morris also knows a lot about this community's past.

She's president of the Wilkinsburg Historical Society.

- When the Pennsylvania Railroad put this one in, they wanted it to be really, really beautiful, and they succeeded.

Marble from Italy, it's got terrazzo floors.

It's spacious, it has high ceilings.

(train whistle blows) - [Minette] All this opulence added to the luxury and excitement of riding trains.

(light orchestral music) - It had commuter travel, but it also had long-distance travel.

So it was a very important stopoff point and a goodbye point for many people as they were leaving.

Many of today's busway stops were the same stops that the train had in the day when commuter trains came through here.

It would come through Edgewood, through Wilkinsburg, through Homewood, East Liberty, into the city of Pittsburgh.

- [Minette] But this was not the borough's first or only train station.

- Trains came through Wilkinsburg about 1853.

And at that time there was a small train station, about two blocks from here.

And at one point that burned down, about mid 1860s, and a second train station was built in the 1880s.

(light somber music) - [Minette] Train tracks running through the middle of town, however, prove not only to be dangerous, but deadly.

- [Anne Elise] People were getting killed because there were five tracks going through towns, and if you were looking in one direction to see if trains were coming, you might easily get hit by a train going the other direction, particularly if you were coming across in a horse-drawn cart.

- [Minette] So the borough came up with a new plan.

(light folksy music) - [Anne Elise] Everybody lobbied to have the railroad tracks raised and the streets lowered, so that there would not be those dangerous crossings.

And that was why we ended up with this beautiful train station.

It took about three years to do.

- [Minette] And what a spectacular site it turned out to be.

Over the next 50 years or so, the station served this community, seven miles from downtown Pittsburgh, a place known for its churches, business district, and population of blue and white collar workers.

Then came the collapse of the steel industry, coupled with the surging popularity of suburban living.

Wilkinsburg's population began to shrink, leaving in its wake, empty buildings and growing crime.

Train ridership fell.

Usage of cars and buses grew.

The Wilkinsburg Train Station was forced to close.

(bus engine hisses) - The building had been vacant since 1965.

They stopped using it as a train stop in 1975.

For a while, the borough owned the building, and there are a lot of people who have memories of it being used as a haunted house.

(soft piano music) So from 2000 on, the building had really deteriorated.

There was very little left of the roof.

Water was coming through, snow.

It was open to the elements all the time.

- Seeing the building in active decay, and trying to picture it to a point where it is now, it almost seemed unfathomable.

- There was so much water on the terracotta floor that it looked like a pond.

The marble was warping.

It was actually falling off the walls.

Most of the architectural, significant pieces had deteriorated and were almost gone.

For instance, the plaster cornice that runs all around the lobby, there was nine feet left, and that was it.

So if we didn't salvage that and make a mold of it, we would lose it forever.

- [Chris] My first thought when I walked in the building was, "Where's the bulldozer?"

The building was in really bad shape.

- [Minette] Chris Michaels was hired by the Wilkinsburg CDC, to help bring the station back to its original glory.

He's a project manager for SOTA Construction Services, and is an expert on historic preservation.

- I started on the project in 2017.

The building on the outside was covered in vines, so we had to remove all the vines.

And then we went into asbestos abatement work, and then into the construction of putting things back.

- [Minette] But restoration would not be cheap, or easy.

- It's a $7 million restoration.

It was very, very extensive work to preserve it back to its original state.

(light contemporary music) - This project, definitely doable, but it was gonna take considerable effort.

- [Tracey] Our first goal was to get a roof on the building and be able to stabilize it.

A lot of steel had to be replaced, much more than we expected.

All of the exterior masonry had to be redone, repointed.

- One of the interesting things that we found out during our process of taking the marble off the walls that could be salvaged, there was quite a wide variety of color variation between all the pieces.

So this is a great example here of, these two pieces here are the original marble pieces that were removed and salvaged, and reinstalled back in the same place, along with these two pieces as well, back here.

These are original pieces.

And this piece right here, this is a new piece from Italy that was to match along with this piece, and the top piece on that column.

So you could see there was even a variation in the new pieces that we got that were mixed in with the old pieces.

- [Minette] Finding craftsmen who could do this kind of specialty work was another concern.

- [Chris] This is very skilled work with the marble, the masonry, the cast iron, the plaster.

(light piano music) We had a gentleman with Steel City Plastering.

He was in his upper '80s, and he was here every day on the scaffolding platform, creating the molds, creating the plastic for the decorative ceilings.

(light orchestral music) - [Minette] And if all of those challenges weren't enough, there was still another big one.

- In 2020, we definitely had to shut down the site for COVID.

It was four to six weeks until we could get back to work.

So that certainly slowed things down, in particular, materials.

We really had trouble getting some of the glass, door hardware.

The clocks that we want to have restored are being done in Indiana, so we couldn't cross state lines during the time.

(uptempo orchestral music) - [Minette] Slowly but surely though, the building began to take shape, and except for a few remaining projects, the bulk of the renovations are complete.

(uptempo orchestral music) - [Tracey] Our goal for the main lobby area is to bring in a restaurant.

Wilkinsburg does not have a nice restaurant to sit down, fine dining, and we think it could be a terrific destination.

In the lower level, which was a baggage area, we're talking to different tenants that are makerspaces, craftsmen, small businesses.

That's in the basement, with a courtyard.

- Three, two, one.

- [Man] Leslie.

(crowd cheers) - [Woman] Yay (laughs).

(light upbeat music) - And when you think about this beautiful building, which is becoming beautiful again, it does represent the future and the hope of where we're going as a community.

- And what the train station means to me, is that you can honor the past while moving forward.

Let's get people in there.

Let's get some businesses in there.

Let's get a restaurant in there.

- [Minette] And now, a century after it rose in Wilkinsburg, this train station is something to celebrate, again.

- This is just a good example of what can be done when somebody puts their mind to all the work that it took to get the station looking like it does now.

There's so much potential in Wilkinsburg, and people are starting to see that.

- Having completed this restoration, saving this building, the Wilkinsburg Train Station, it's a symbol of hope.

It's a beacon of what could be in the future for Wilkinsburg.

(light upbeat music)