Ceremony marks start of 100-year anniversary of Macon's Terminal Station

Macon-Bibb County officials came out Friday to start celebrating the 100th anniversary of a building they said is the sister of New York's Grand Central Station.

The ceremony at the Terminal Station was described as the start of a yearlong salute of the downtown landmark, designed by Alfred Fellheimer, the lead architect behind the historic New York terminal.

The Macon-Bibb County Transit Authority is working to complete a full week of events that will showcase the station in early October, the same month it opened in 1916.

Rick Jones, MTA's general manager, said he remembers a starkly different scene at the station when he started working for MTA in 2009.

"We've watched this building being changed from a place that was in danger of being torn down, a place where the homeless were sleeping on these floors with no heat, no water, with fires they would start on a marble floor to keep warm," he said.

"What you see around you now is a building that looks better today than she did in 1916."

Over the last decade, the transformation of the station has included changes in ownership and a multimillion-dollar restoration.

In 2002, the city of Macon bought the station from Georgia Power and federal funding was identified for the building. After several years of delays with some grant funding, the city officially secured a $5.3 million grant by 2006. A couple of years later, NewTown Macon, a downtown booster agency, took over management of the property. It was later handed over to MTA, and the authority has since received the title to the building.

Renovations have included new heating and air conditioning, painting of the ceiling and floor repairs. The station also has become a popular rental space for various events and is now self-sufficient, with about $100,000 saved up, Jones said.

"Between what we have in the (business) occupancy that's currently here and the increase in the event rentals, we've seen Terminal Station have a pretty positive bottom line financially," he said.

For years after the Terminal Station first opened, it was a place where thousands of people arrived and departed on trains.

By the late 1930s, though, buses came on the scene in the city. In Macon and other places across the nation, many public transit systems began to face troubles by the 1960s and 1970s as cars became more common, Reichert said Friday.

"A few years have gone by now and the transit system has been struggling ... to make ends meet," he said.

Trends now show that young people are becoming more open to using public transportation, Reichert said, since it can offer a cheaper alternative than vehicles.

"Our transit authority here in Macon is rising to the challenge of building a 21st century transportation system," he said.

And, while the MTA continues to seek funding for more environmentally friendly electric buses, Reichert has been advocating for a passenger rail system connecting Atlanta to Macon. That persistence may eventually lead to more people using the Terminal Station, said MTA board vice chairman Chuck Howard.

Now, the Terminal Station and a transfer station bring in 70,000 to 90,000 people on average a month, Jones said.

At the end of Friday's ceremony, those on hand released balloons as banners were unfurled noting the anniversary outside the building.

"She lives again," Jones said. "It is our honor to help breathe life into this great building and make her what she should be."

To contact writer Stanley Dunlap, call 744-4623 or find him on Twitter@stan_telegraph.

This story was originally published February 5, 2016 at 6:52 PM with the headline "Ceremony marks start of 100-year anniversary of Macon's Terminal Station ."