From a nightmare fire to a dream come true

NORTH CANAAN — First Selectman Douglas Humes remembers getting the late-night phone call, between Oct. 12 and 13 in 2001: The historic Canaan Union Station building was on fire.

He got dressed and rushed to the center of town.

“The sky was orange,” he said during a groundbreaking ceremony last Friday, Sept. 9, on the site of the building known informally as “the depot.”

It took 15 years, but the contracts have been signed and the workmen have been scheduled (their first day of work was expected to be Wednesday, Sept. 14). The job is expected to take 240 days.

Everyone came to help

A decade and a half has passed since the arson fire that destroyed half of the former train station (which had been home for many years before the fire to offices and a restaurant). But even after all those years, the memories of that night remain vivid to those who witnessed the flames and the destruction of the landmark building. 

It wasn’t just the trauma that they recalled. It was also the way that fire companies from all the area towns pulled together to help — succeeding in saving half of the structure. 

Selectman Charlie Perotti was the fire chief of the all-volunteer Canaan Fire Company at the time.

“I didn’t expect to get the call to come fight that fire in October 2001,” he said during Friday’s ceremony. “And I didn’t expect to be put in charge of rebuilding it.”

Over many years, he has patiently guided the renovation project through miles and miles of red tape and setback after setback. The work was begun by Tom Gailes, who was a selectman in 2001; until 1994, Gailes and his wife had owned the restaurant that was destroyed by the fire.

Relics and framing inside

After the groundbreaking ceremony ended, Perotti walked through the interior of the building, which has been stabilized and cleaned up over the years. 

There is wood framing up, and a shaft where an elevator will be, in the middle of the space reserved for a new restaurant on the east-west side of the building. There are two stairways on that side of the building, one of which will be removed. 

But those are just regular building features, a staircase here or there, one more or one less. What matters is what was saved: the old windows, with their arched tops; the old scales and the ticket window from the days when trains still picked up freight and passengers here;                                                               the copper weather vane in the shape of a steam engine that was rescued on the night of the fire by the volunteers from Sharon. The weather vane was made by a railroad employee named Hotter Zucco in the 1960s, Perotti said.

The way it used to be

John Lloyd of AI Engineers in Middletown is in charge of the building project and has spent years thinking about how it all should look when it’s done. 

“Our goal,” he said on Friday after the ceremony, “is to clean it up and bring it back so that it looks like something everyone in town can remember and relate to.”

He pointed out that the building had been changed and updated many times over the years; the rebuild will take it back to how it looked just before the fire. 

“The structure will remain the same, but there will be new windows that will match the old windows, new siding, new doors.”

The exterior paint color will match the existing cream-colored paint. 

The interiors will be completely redone. Repairs will be made, to get rid of any structural damage from the fire and from the 15 years that the building sat empty. Electricity will be updated, as will connections for things like the internet.

“This building had been here for 100 years,” Lloyd said. “The idea is to fix it so well that it can be here for another hundred years.”

‘We’ve seen worse’

Contractors Larry Brunoli and Dan Neagle of Lawrence Brunoli General Contracting in Farmington were on hand for the ceremony, and joined Perotti as he walked through the building. 

“We’ve seen worse,” Brunoli said confidently.  

“I think we’ll be fine,” Neagle agreed, adding that AI Engineers and John Lloyd had presented them with exquisitely detailed drawings, “painstakingly prepared.”

It was the east-west wing of the building that was destroyed before the firefighters could step in and save it. Perotti recalled that there used to be an old train caboose parked under that end of the building, with a platform on it. The restaurant at that end of the building used the train car as an extra refrigerator, for storing liquor and other supplies. 

On the night of Oct. 12, some local boys were playing near the train car and started a fire that came up underneath the old wooden depot building and shot up to the second story. Upstairs was the office of an accounting firm, filled with paper files that helped feed the flames.

The paper wasn’t the worst of it, though. To one side of the building were four propane tanks.

“One of the tanks fell and ruptured before the firefighters could get water on it,” Perotti recalled. “It went up in a ball of fire.”

After the flames were finally put out on the morning of Oct. 13, Humes recalled sitting down on the grass and looking at the smoking wreck. 

“And I remember Debbie Garfield Martin saying to me, ‘It’s going to be OK. We’ll bring it back.’”

And they have. At the groundbreaking ceremony, Humes thanked all the volunteers and community members and state and federal officials who have helped get the funding for the rebuild and who have helped maintain the building until the renovation could begin. 

The station is now owned by the Connecticut Railroad Historical Association (Humes is its president). Ownership by a nonprofit was a condition of getting federal funds. 

When the depot is rebuilt, it is expected that there will once again be a restaurant in the east-west wing (the side closest to Collin’s Diner). The north side (which used to have office space) will become a museum of the Connecticut Railroad Historical Association.

As the groundbreaking ceremony came to an end, Litchfield County Probate Judge Diane Blick presented Humes with an antique railroad lantern, “for the museum’s collection.”