The Chesterton Police Commission’s meeting on Thursday afternoon, Sept. 12, hadn’t yet been called to order and its members were hobnobbing about the CPD’s shiny new station house—in whose spacious training room they were now sitting—when one of them thought to ask Police Chief Tim Richardson a question.
“Do me a favor,” Mike Orlich said. “Whey they start demoing, can you get me a brick where the fire station used to be?”
Because—and this is something only the old-timers probably know—once upon a time the Chesterton Police and Fire departments were both jammed cheek-by-jowl into the same footprint of the town hall complex built in 1963.
“You went in the west door and it split,” Richardson said. “One way was the Police Chief. The other way was the Fire Chief.”
Orlich remembers. He would grow up to be a firefighter himself and later served as the CFD chief until his retirement, but in those days he was a Chesterton Tribune paperboy whose route included the fire station. “Where those glass windows were on the front, those were the bay doors,” Orlich recollected.
“You can still see if you look above,” Richardson replied. “You can see the arch where they were, covered by the metal eave.”
Pete Duda, another member of the Police Commission and a long-serving CPD officer until his retirement, wondered whether Richardson might save him a brick as well.
Turns out, a lot of old coppers are asking him the same thing. “I’m going to grab quite a few because there are some officers who’d like a brick,” Richardson promised.
The CPD and CFD shared those quarters until 1977, when an addition was built on the east end of the town hall. That addition became the CFD’s new digs, while the CPD was left to itself on the west end, to enjoy a little more leg room. Until, of course—more than half a century later—the department had roughly quintupled in size and the Town Council decided it was finally time to build a new police station, immediately across the street from the old one.
Now contractor Larson Danielson Construction is preparing to demolish the old CPD station, calving it off the rest of the town hall complex along a north/south axis and then converting that footprint into a public parking lot.
“All the flooring is gone,” Richardson reported to the Police Commission. “A lot of the walls, they’re either gone or opened so they can assess what’s inside them. And they’ve been getting ready to separate the roof of the police station from the town hall.”
“We watched the new building go up across the street,” Richardson added. “Now we’ll watch the old one go down. It’s a bittersweet moment. It has history, because a lot of our people worked there for many years.”
