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September 30, 2001Gaylord's Alpine Center a sight to beholdBy MIKE NORTONRecord-Eagle staff writer GAYLORD - Forget the faux Suisse frills on the Alpenstrasse, and even St. Mary's Cathedral, which looks more like a half-sunken alien Mother Ship than anything else. If you want to see the best architecture Gaylord has to offer, you've got to head north of town to the J. Richard Yuill Alpine Center. Built in 1937 as a 128-bed tuberculosis sanitarium, the Alpine Center was the work of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration. In the 1960s it became the Gaylord State Home, a residential and training institution for people with developmental disabilities. Today it houses a variety of state, county and other public offices. Even though the big four-story main building is in a somewhat severe style, it's full of decorative touches that have long vanished from today's public buildings. But the stars of the complex are the cottages and other outbuildings: built of red brick with white stone sills, copper guttering and steep dark roofs. In a way, they're Gaylord's version of the Traverse City State Hospital complex - except that they're in much better shape. Not that the place hasn't suffered a certain amount of neglect and vandalism in its time. In fact, the old buildings were allowed to decay during most of the 1980s until Otsego County finally got around to rehabilitating them. "I remember when I got here, this whole place was full of trash, garbage, all kinds of stuff," said Dale Fulcher, head of the county's building and grounds department, who arrived in 1991 to oversee the work. "We just got an old beater of a truck and backed it up to the door and started shoveling." Today there are still a few places (like the old boiler room) that need work, but most of the Center has been brought up to standard. Even Fulcher's domain, the maintenance building at the rear of the complex, is far more neat and cozy than the average custodian's lair. It's full of comfortable nooks and crannies, secret passages and spacious tiled rooms where the sanitarium's laundry was once washed, dried and ironed. "There's a big old steam tunnel down below," he says. "Now it's how we get over to the main building when the weather gets nasty." Fulcher, 38, was the maintenance superintendent of a large apartment complex in Rochester when he first learned that officials here in Gaylord were looking for someone to supervise the renovation work at the Alpine Center. He and his wife had already bought a place on 10 acres near Elmira, because they were certain they didn't want to raise their two kids in the city. "We wanted out of downstate something bad," he says, laughing. "We figure the two of us were pulling down $60,000 a year when we left, and I came up here to take this job for $6.50 an hour. But we suffered and we saved and gradually we built our way up, and it's good now. The kids are happy. They've never known anything different, and that's how we like it." It was more than a little spooky during those first few years, when there were still a lot of empty, unlighted buildings in the complex, and the building supervisor had to come in early each morning to search for intruders in the dark. These days, though, Fulcher and his crew have more than enough human interaction to keep them busy. They're forever replacing burned-out light bulbs, unclogging toilets, trying to figure out why someone's space heater just blew a circuit breaker, or moving a set of office furniture from one floor to another. But there are also unexpected treats to this job. Having the keys to all of the places most people never get to go, for instance. And being able to go up on the roof of the main building, where the view of the surrounding countryside is breathtaking - especially on a sunny autumn day. "It sure beats working in a regular office," Fulcher says. "I've never regretted coming up here and taking this job. I love the fact that when I'm home I can walk right out my back door and go hunting. It's right there." |
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