Historic Train Station Renovations Aim to Bring New Business Downtown

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

The old passenger train station downtown had spent decades as a kind of a curious civic ghost: an odd-looking building to many, that had found a few tenants over the years, but no longer doing the thing it was built to do.

Passenger service ended in 1951, and the building moved through later lives — offices, a furniture store, then abandonment — until Anderson Attorney Steve Krause, his wife Linda and a small circle of partners began imagining what it might mean to give the place back its original shape without pretending it could ever become what it once was.

The project began almost by accident and then, prompted by a series of converging desires. Dana and R.J. Apozaga, who own Maki Sushi Bar & Bistro, had been hoping to expand the restaurant, and R.J., the executive chef, wanted to move his kitchen out of the basement and upstairs into a room that made more sense for both his work and the building’s bones.

Krause happened to know the owner of this side of the property, and one thing led to another, resulting in an expansion for a sushi restaurant that became, almost inevitably, an argument for restoring a downtown landmark.

What made the project more than a renovation was the decision to restore the depot to its railroad-era appearance. The outside design of the building reflected the era in which it was built, complete with the undulating swoop of a Mission parapet—a feature sometimes known as a curvilinear parapet or, perhaps less lyrically, a Mission gable.

It was a style that reached its zenith of appeal between the 1890s and the Roaring 1920s, seizing the imaginations of small-town boosters and burgeoning metropolises alike. We The Santa Fe and Southern Pacific railroads get credit for its sheer ubiquity; as they pushed their railways westward, they dressed their train depots, grand resort hotels, and surrounding commercial outposts in this highly romanticized, picturesque garb. Before long, the Mission silhouette had leaped its Southwestern boundaries, surfacing on residential avenues, grammar schools, municipal halls, and the commercial facades of Main Streets across the America.

A casual stroll through downtown will reveal a number of other structures with this feature, but the old train station goes full-in on the style.

Krause said the team worked with local historian and former mayor Rich Otter, who helped locate archival photographs of the building, many taken in adventurous sessions by Otter himself. Those images, along with the work of preservationist Kyle Campbell and general contractor John Glenn Constructors, guided the exterior restoration. The result is a replica of the building as the railroad originally constructed it, with the mission-style exterior that once seemed a little out of place in Anderson to some is, part of the city’s heritage.

There were, of course, rules. Historic preservation is a discipline of limits, and Krause learned that quickly. Some features could be retained, some replicated, others only approximated. The building’s distinctive arch had to stay. The old railroad offices upstairs, once later used by insurance and other service businesses, could be converted into something new only if the new use respected the old structure.

Even the windows, doors, fixtures and flooring were subject to the kind of oversight that can make a lawyer briefly nostalgic for his legal work.

But the building’s history is key to its appeal. When the depot was first built, the railroad offices were upstairs and the waiting rooms downstairs, and that the building had once served a practical civic role that extended beyond passengers. Some Andersonians still remember being told that the railroad building was the place to go during a tornado. It was steel-reinforced concrete, solid, safe. The renovation uncovered remnants of that life: the old stair landings, the traces of an elevator passages once used for luggage and access to the tracks.

The next chapter is as important as the restoration itself. The Apozagas have already expanded Maki into the station’s lower level, where their kitchen now sits where it can be used more efficiently, with a larger hood, a walk-in cooler, and room for grilling, sautéing and the restaurant’s broader seafood-and-steak menu.

Upstairs, the former offices are being turned into two furnished corporate apartments — a two-bedroom and a one-bedroom — aimed at the kind of business traveler who comes to Anderson for a month or six months and wants to live, for a little while, in the middle of a city that still behaves like one.

Krause said downtown Anderson has come full circle since he arrived. When he and Linda moved here in 1978, the downtown was hollowing out under the pressure of the mall era. Today it is once again growing with the city’s ambitions. He argued that Anderson’s future lies in the same thing that is already drawing people downtown: restaurants, residential life, and spaces that make the city feel both walkable and inhabited.

The train station, in that scheme, is not an isolated object but a node — sushi to one side, breakfast across the street, ice cream nearby, and, eventually, perhaps other businesses that will make the block feel less like a preserved artifact than a working neighborhood.

That larger vision is familial in tone. Linda Krause said the project has been fun, if occasionally overwhelming, and that friends have been eager to see the building come back to life, even if they had to cross dust and use flashlights to see it.

Dana Apozaga said drawing more people downtown helps everyone downtown. Her husband R.J. Apozaga, who named Maki by combining the first letters of the couple’s children’s names, said he would like to see an Italian restaurant next door. Linda Krause also liked that idea and the broader principle behind it: restaurants, she said, feed off one another.

In that way, the historic passenger train depot has become more than a restoration project. It is a test of whether Anderson can keep converting old structures into usable hope without sanding off the historical grain that makes them worth saving. The answer, at least for now, seems to be yes.