The Englewood Train Depot Is Becoming the Letterpress Depot
Although it's a small building, the Englewood Train Depot packs a lot a of history.
There are plans currently underway to renovate and bring up to code a historic train depot to allow it to serve as a Letterpress museum and workshop area for typography buffs, school groups, and those interested in unique slices of history. We are working with Mark Rudnicki to create a safe and inviting space for future visitors, including additions of electrical systems, and historically-inspired lighting design.
The current owner property owner, Tom Parsons, is a poet and has been a one-man small-format printer since the early 1980s. The letterpress process involves hand-setting metal type, rolling out the ink, and using letterpresses to create copies of “printed” material. To support his small-format printing passion he collected letterpress machinery and materials for close to four decades, and he and his wife seized the opportunity to purchase and renovate the currently un-used Englewood Train Depot while starting their non-profit - the Letterpress Depot.
Read more about this unique melding and re-purposing of the historic building, the re-purposing of the letterpresses, and how we're contributing below.
"The invention and global spread of the printing press was one of the most influential events in the second millennium."
"If I want to save this stuff, I've got to build a community that knows what it is, and actually owns it. When people come to the Letterpress Depot, if they feel like it's theirs, then they will take care of it. But if they feel like that's just a place to go see the way things used to be done – it’s in the past, it's safe in a case – it’ll be lost. What it needs is the community of people that own it and feel like they’re part of that community, that are inventing a new way to use it so that it has a life of its own."
Tom Parsons
Historic Englewood Depot
Originally built in 1915, the depot served as a major transfer point for soldiers using the train on the local line which ran to and from Fort Logan. The depot was closed in the 1950s and has since sat empty and unused.
Photo courtesy of Mark Rudnicki
The City of Englewood decided to purchase and physically relocate the building in 1994. Although there were initial plans to restore the building and use it as a community museum, those plans did not come to life.
Art by Letterpress Depot board member Kim Morski
The City of Englewood held on to the property from 1994, and eventually sold it to Tom Parsons in 2013 who has pledged to historically restore the outside of the building while creating a living letterpress museum inside the facility - the Letterpress Depot.
The exterior lighting will be left as it is. The exception will be fixing what is broken, or in the case of this fixture, likely melted.
The building is split into two levels: a modern basement, and the historical train depot building structure on top. This top floor will feature historically referenced fixtures and will be used as a gathering space, and showcase of old print materials.
The museum portion will be located in the basement due to the weight of the printing presses, plates, and letters themselves, often reaching thousands of pounds. Electrical access had to be carefully coordinated to specifically fit the needs of some of the unique machinery.