Newest articles on The Sacramento Press tagged as "richard rich"

Railyard shops cleanup, preservation underway

2009-11-11T06:25:04Z

Piles are growing at the city's old railyard.

Inside the long-abandoned Southern Pacific railroad shops, there are piles of metal, wood, debris and contaminated junk. Up on roofs, white-suited, specially trained abatement workers are pulling up roofing material and roofing adhesive containing asbestos. Outside one of the shops lies a makeshift salvage yard.

Georgia developer Thomas Enterprises and a contractor, Allied Environmental of Placerville, are three months into a $5 million cleanup of the historic "Central Shops," which will form the centerpiece of a 244-acre mixed-used district dubbed the Railyards.

The developers envision the shops as the cultural heart of a district that will include the future a regional transportation center and retail, office and residential use. The centerpiece will be an open-air market and adjacent plaza. There also has been talk of a $500 million arena/entertainment center, a performing arts center and even a new $500 million county courthouse.

During a tour of the shops Tuesday, Railyards Development Director Richard Rich said workers are setting aside everything connected to Sacramento's railroad history to be recycled and used in the district.

"We want to save every single piece of this," Rich said as he pointed to old metal lockers and train parts inside the former Paint Shop. "Part of our job is to retell the story of the railyards as we rebuild this and bring it back."

Very little remains from the 1930s or earlier, when the shops were the center of the locomotive industry on the West Coast and that industry drove the city, he said. For more railyard photos, go here.

The railroad company took most items of value long ago. Then, squatters and vandals carried off everything they could.

Still, workers have already dug up tons of gnarled, rusted iron during soil remediation. Rich said he would like to hire an artist to create a large sculpture from the salvaged iron. The sculpture would go in the future Market Plaza.

"That's a dream at this point," Rich said. "I don't know where we'd find the money."

Hundreds of heavy locomotive drive wheels and axles were found on the site, which lies next to the Sacramento Valley Station train depot. California State Parks gathered up most of them, and two drive wheels left with the developers may become sculptures. Thomas Enterprises is talking with the parks department about placing drive wheel sculptures at intersections throughout the district.

"I would like every single intersection that we do to have some calling card of rail history there," Rich said.

Central Pacific established the Sacramento railyard during the steam locomotive era. The company, which later became Southern Pacific, built the first shop in 1868 — before Sacramento gained fame as the western start of the first transcontinental railroad with the driving of the last spike on May 10, 1869.

In the 1930s, Southern Pacific slowly began abandoning the railyards. Rail traffic was down because of the Depression.

The company set up maintenance shops for newer diesel locomotives in more rural areas as Sacramento grew, and the shops began falling into disrepair. The shops officially closed in 1999, four years after Union Pacific bought Southern Pacific.

Now, eight Central Shops — seven brick and one metal — are all that remain of what was once at least 243 buildings. The developers are giving the metal Boiler Shop and the Erecting Shop, the largest and grandest, to state parks for its future Railroad Technology Museum. State parks will handle abatement of those.

The buildings' exteriors will be preserved following the Secretary of the Interior's guidelines for rehabbing historic buildings. Abatement work, Phase 1 of shop restoration, is expected to be completed by March.

On Tuesday, 50 workers worked on various abatement projects including removing the badly peeling lead-based interior paint, junk contaminated with heavy metals and polychlorinated biphenyl or PCB, and asbestos sheetrock, floor tiles and pipe insulation. They're also removing extensive graffiti.

"Our job now is to clean these buildings so we can start to do the major work on the renovation," Rich said.

British Environmental Resources Management is providing construction management. The company initially was hired by Southern Pacific and has done all cleanup at the site for 20 years.

"Our primary challenge was to make sure we could abide by California environmental laws to take toxics out but not damage these historic buildings," Rich said. "It's something we have to watch very carefully."

Workers can't remove all the lead-based paint without damaging historic interior bricks. So remaining paint will be encapsulated in new paint, in a process created by the city's environmental office, he said.

The Railyards are the country's largest infill project. Most of the six shops are expected to be filled by restaurants, clubs, retail shops and small museums. Organizations have expressed interest in setting up museums for model railroads, carousels and blacksmithing in the 3,800-square-foot Blacksmith Shop.

The 56,000-square-foot Paint Shop will house an open-air market with Central Valley products including produce, cheese, wine, meat and fish -- similar to San Francisco's Ferry Building. It will be near the extended 5th Street.

An open space next to it, once a turntable that moved locomotives and train cars to the Paint Shop, will be turned into Market Plaza. Plans call for landscaping, water features, public art and a small outdoor performance area.

"That plaza is going to be the cultural living room of this region," Rich said.

On the other side of the plaza, clubs, restaurants and shops are expected to open in the Planing Mill, Car Shop and Machine Shop, where locomotives, passenger cars and flat cars once were built. The first building constructed on the site was a machine shop in 1868. Upper floors could contain art lofts and archive space.

Small shops and restaurants could go into the "Tower of Jewels," a three-story brick craphouse built in 1878. The plaster facade is peeling off the brick building, so the mortar on that and the rest of the brick buildings will be repointed.

The shops are expected to be ready for tenants in two or three years. The city has committed to building a 2,000-space parking garage east of the market. The garage will serve the regional transportation center and the Central Shops, said Suheil Totah, Thomas Enterprises vice president.

The county is considering the site for a new courthouse, said Totah, adding that Thomas Enterprises likes the idea of the city building an arena there as well.

Rich said he expects all electrical cables at the site will be underground. He said he hopes to use a line of old above-ground electrical poles to hold a 30-foot-high, 300-foot-long lighted landmark "Sacramento Railyards" sign.

That's just one of the efforts to preserve as much as possible. Restoring the historic buildings that once played such a large role in Sacramento is the key, Totah and Rich said.

"It would actually be cheaper to knock them down and rebuild them. But there's an ambiance you can't get with a new building," Rich said. "So they're priceless in that way."

Photos by Eric Whalen. Suzanne Hurt is a staff reporter for The Sacramento Press.

Railyards shops cleanup to start

2009-07-02T03:28:08Z

Cleanup of historic Southern Pacific railroad shops is expected to begin late this month as the next phase of the Sacramento Railyards project kicks into gear.

Hazardous materials including lead paint, asbestos, metals and other industrial toxins need to be removed from the shops, which were built starting in 1868. Georgia developer Thomas Enterprises has put the abatement project out to bid and expects to award the contract in the next few weeks, said Richard Rich, development director for the Railyards project.

In its heyday, Southern Pacific practically owned the town. The railyards drove Sacramento's economy, and nearly a third of all the city's residents worked there. The shops lay at the center of the railyards.

The Railyards project, the country's largest infill project, will not only double the size of downtown, but the mixed-use district is being designed to recapture the importance of the former railroad site. The Central Shops being redeveloped near the Sacramento Valley Rail Station depot are the key to that, Rich said.

"Right now, the depot is kind of in a forgotten corner of downtown," he said. ""That'll put enough urban fabric around the depot that it becomes the center of the city again."

On Monday, the city won $55.8 million in Proposition 1C infill redevelopment funds from the California Department of Housing and Community Development. About $30 million will go to the $6 billion Railyards project. The new funding brings the project's state public bond funding to $115-$120 million, although none of that has been received, said Thomas Enterprises Vice President Suheil Totah.

The Railyards project also won $20 million in federal stimulus money this year and another $8 million in federal funds for a freeway connection project. The city and developer are pursuing another $100 million in federal stimulus money to help fund the city's future intermodal transportation facility. Developments are expected soon on the city's bid to get National Enviromental Policy Act approval for the facility.

The city has committed funding to the project and promised to build a city parking garage there as well. Thomas Enterprises has invested $200 million in the project so far. Private investment is expected to total about $5 billion, Totah said.

Central Pacific originally established the railyards during the steam locomotive era. The company later became Southern Pacific. The 244-acre site grew to contain at least 243 buildings.

The shops and other buildings began falling into disrepair in the 1930s when the Depression brought reduced rail traffic.

About the same time, diesel locomotives began to gain favor over steam locomotives. The Sacramento Railyards had been set up to produce and repair steam locomotives. Some diesels were worked on there, but retooling the railyards for diesel proved too difficult.

In addition, Southern Pacific moved most of its maintenance work to rural areas like Roseville as Sacramento grew. The railyard shops officially closed in 1999, four years after Union Pacific bought Southern Pacific.

Seven brick shop buildings were all that remained when Thomas Enterprises bought the site for an undisclosed amount in December 2006. All seven will be preserved and rehabbed for adaptive reuse. The massive Boiler Shop and Erecting Shop will be used for the state's Railroad Technology Museum.

Thomas will rehab the other five shops. The 56,000 former Paint Shop will contain a public market selling Central Valley products including produce, cheese, wine, meat and fish — similar to San Francisco's Ferry Building — near an extended Fifth Street. Other former railyard shops will house restaurants, nightclubs and retail stores. In the center, a football field-sized plaza will be built to hold large city events, a farmers' market or small performances.

"These buildings, which will surround the public open space, will form the nucleus of the cultural district," Rich said.

Hazardous materials abatement work is the first step to rehabbing the shops. About 80 percent of the work will be to remove lead-based paint from interior brick. Ten percent will be to remove sheetrock, floor tiles and pipe insulation containing asbestos. The rest involves other contaminants including heavy metals and polychlorinated biphenyl or PCB, he said.

The "significant" cost of abatement won't be known until crews get into the work. Thomas Enterprises tested methods to remove the paint without damaging the hard, fired surface of the brick. Nothing worked, said Rich.

"That put us in a difficult position of how to do it without damaging the brick," he said.

Standards set by the U.S. Secretary of the Interior dictate that the interiors of historic buildings that were originally covered with paint must likewise be covered with paint during rehab. Workers will gently scrape as much lead paint off the walls as possible and the brick will be encapsulated with lead-free paint, he said.

Thomas Enterprises broke ground on the infrastructure phase last winter. Initial grading of Railyards Boulevard and northern portions of Fifth and Sixth streets has been done. Extending Fifth and Sixth streets into the site will help connect the railyards with downtown, said Totah, adding that more infrastructure work will start once the developer gets the state funding it's been awarded.

Building construction is expected to start next year on 5th, 7th and Camille streets. Construction may include housing, mixed-use and office.