You could say things are really moving at the Waterbury state office complex as an epic task of housecleaning gets under way.
With plans progressing to renovate, rebuild and demolish parts of the historic office complex flooded by Tropical Storm Irene last August, Vermont is laying the groundwork to empty the complex of desks, file cabinets, electronic equipment, phones, lamps, chairs, rugs, you name it.
The state hopes to begin demolitions of some buildings that are damaged or in the floodplain or not worth saving by August or early fall.
Agency of Natural Resources (ANR) Secretary Deb Markowitz has told her 250 or so employees that they need to get any personal items and decide what they want to keep, or in some cases buy, from their former offices by Friday, June 22.
“Anything left unlabeled after the 22nd will be considered trash or surplus,” she told staffers via email, with regional offices getting a first dibs on any items not taken.
ANR staffers were dispersed to several office spaces around the state in Winooski, Barre and in Fayston but the state is planning to reunite the agency in new space at National Life in Montpelier, a move expected to be completed by December.
Meanwhile state curator David Schutz and assistant curator Tracy Martin have been scouring the roughly 50 buildings in the complex documenting and salvaging pieces of history worth
saving.
“We’ve been combing the entire complex,” says Schutz, looking for historic furnishings that came from the original state hospital buildings as well as for other items of note that state agencies might have saved over the years.
Portions of the handsome red-brick state office complex date back to the 1890s when it opened as a state insane asylum. Schutz says he’s found historic furniture, hospital equipment, and various other artifacts from the asylum, where patients used to make furniture, sew, garden and do art as part of their therapy.
He’s also found an old examining table and some lead weights that were used on patients’ feet to keep them from running away.
Many of the items were saved by state hospital employees to preserve a record of the hospital’s past. Schutz says the plan is to turn them into exhibit material that can “interpret the history” of the complex. He’s also compiling an archive of wonderful photos of the complex through the past century.
Schutz said his meanderings in the buildings also revealed a lot of historical materials that the Agency of Natural Resources had accumulated through the years that are part of ANR’s “cultural identity.”
These include a slice of the pine tree that served as the model for the state seal of Vermont and a long, old-fashioned “stadia rod” used by surveyors. He is also keeping some really old file cabinets he’s found that hint at the state’s thrifty use and reuse approach to furnishings.
“We’ve actually saved some of the file cabinets because they’re so unique,” he says.
Once state workers have taken personal belongings and ANR staffers have identified what they want to keep, the buildings and general services department will go through and decide what can be reused. The rest will go to surplus where it will be made available to the public at some point.
Think of it as a “giant es-state sale.”
