A piece of Gainesville's historic train depot moved a quarter-mile Wednesday afternoon.
The Old Gainesville Depot, which has stood at the corner of Depot Avenue and Main Street since 1907, is being moved into storage to make way for soil cleanup, roadwork and revitalization of Depot Park.
"A lot of our historic community are quite excited about it," said Commissioner Jeanna Mastrodicasa, chairwoman of the Community Redevelopment Agency. "This is why the city of Gainesville came about. This is a railroad hub."
The depot building, which sits in the city's Depot Park, has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1996. It needed to be moved to clean soil pollution left over from a 1950s coal plant, said Patti Hart, Gainesville Regional Utilities project services director.
In the 1990s, GRU acquired the site and the responsibility for its soil cleanup, Hart said.
After two weeks of preparation, eight workers took more than three hours to move the first and largest of the building's four sections Wednesday, using steel beams, dollies, wheels and a semi-truck. The three remaining smaller sections should each take a week of preparation to move to the fenced storage site, Hart said.
Once the building is in storage, Hart said, Gainesville officials will work on a separate project: the reconstruction of Depot Avenue. The road, which curves around the depot, will be widened and straightened for safety reasons, Mastrodicasa said.
The building will be moved 28.5 feet south of its original location to accommodate the newly widened Depot Avenue.
It will cost $440,000 to move the building, Hart said. The Depot Park project, including construction of a storm-water pond, will cost more than $24 million, according to a Gainesville Capital Improvement Projects report.
The revitalized Depot Park will include features such as a boardwalk, a fountain and a museum in honor of Robert Cade, one of the inventors of Gatorade.
