Preservation Red Bank’s efforts to address what it calls serious structural deterioration at the borough train station is featured in the online version of Preservation magazine, a publication of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
“In a good wind, it looks like it could be knocked over,” Mary Gilligan, a Preservation Red Bank member, is quoted as saying about the structure, built in 1875.
“The stick-style Victorian station’s troubles started sometime around 10 years ago, when the building’s slate roof was replaced with a temporary asphalt one—and it was all downhill from there,” the magazine reports, citing Gilligan as its source. “NJ Transit says the station is ‘structurally sound,’ but agrees that it could use some work.”
Gilligan tells redbankgreen the best thing about the article is NJ Transit’s statement about the building’s soundness, which she believes would make it harder for the agency to tear it down anytime soon. “Not that I think (demolition) is foremost in their minds,” she says, “but any excuse not to put money into fixing it…”
The station is listed on both the National Register of Historic Places and the state’s historic sites inventory, and has seen the likes of Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin D. Roosevelt on its platforms. In 1939, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England popped in.
According to Preservation Online, the trust is “the only private, nonprofit organization chartered by Congress to encourage public participation in the preservation of sites, buildings, and objects significant in American History.”
Gilligan, who is a member of the trust, said her relationship to the organization had nothing to do with the story, and that the magazine apparently learned of the train station’s plight via an article in The Hub.
