Springfield Union Station honored for brownfields redevelopment project

Springfield, MA Springfield Union Station has won the Phoenix Award grand prize for the best brownfields redevelopment project in the nation. Announced during the National Brownfields Training Conference in Pittsburg, the Union Station project also won the Region 1 Phoenix Award. Both awards recognize exemplary brownfield redevelopment and revitalization.

Tighe & Bond provided extensive hazardous building material evaluations, abatement monitoring, building demolition design, and the assessment and remediation of widespread areas of subsurface contamination.

These awards highlight the critical environmental cleanup phase at Springfield Union Station, as well as the demolition and removal of a massive baggage warehouse and the remediation of the former site of the Hotel Charles. It also celebrates the redevelopment of a long vacant historic train station into a state of the art intermodal transit center.

Built in 1926, the original Union Station was boarded-up for 44 years before taken over by the Springfield Redevelopment Authority (SRA) in 1989. After many fits and starts, the $94.1 million redevelopment project was funded by numerous federal, state, and local sources.
This included grants from the EPA Brownfield Assessment and Cleanup program, MassDevelopment, Federal Transit Administration, State Transportation Bond Funds, a state parking grant, and more. 

After almost 10 years, Union Station has been transformed and repurposed into a LEED certified building that opened last June, and is the new headquarters for Peter Pan Bus Lines. It also has spurred a new adjacent $15 million 265-unit housing redevelopment. Besides the Phoenix Award, the project has already won other statewide awards for historic preservation including the Preservation Massachusetts “Paul & Nikki Tsongas Best Then & Now” award for 2017.