The phone company switching station turned police station was reduced to rubble Tuesday. (Photo above by Peter Lindner. Click to enlarge)

By JOHN T. WARD

A chapter of Rumson’s history ended Tuesday as wreckers tore down a building that served for decades as the town’s police headquarters and, before that, a telephone switching station.

In its place, say town officials, will likely be two new homes, completing the property’s transformation from an oddity: a classically elegant red brick standing incongruously among modest homes.

A cloud of dust rises during the tear-down. (Photo by Peter Lindner. Click to enlarge)

Mayor John Ekdahl notes that the building, on Center Street, was there first, and most of the homes came later.

The structure, built in the 1940s and converted to police use in the ’60s, was vacated two years ago, when the police department moved into space in the new borough hall on East River Road.

Borough officials later decided that the building was not worth saving because of the cost of updating it.

Town officials will have to go before its own zoning board for approval to subdivide the property into two building lots, both of which conform to area residential zoning, Ekdahl said.

Sometime early next year, he said, the property is to be sold at auction.