After 10 months and $3 million of construction, Windsor is ready to show off its shiny new Town Hall.

But that “new building” is 100 years old.

Gov. Bill Ritter and Windsor Mayor John Vázquez spoke to hundreds of people who gathered on the plaza in front of the building Thursday, in a grand re-opening ceremony.

Ritter said the renovations “married the old and the new.” The three-story stone building now has handicap accessible ramps at the bottom, and a set of solar panels on top. In between, though, many things are the same.

The town hall was badly damaged by the tornado that tore through Windsor in May 2008. Vázquez called it “ground zero.” But it was the tornado that helped fund the $3 million renovations, attracting state and federal grants.

Ritter and Vázquez spoke about the way the community came together to rebuild after the tornado. Ritter said that community togetherness and local leadership is what helped the town to bounce back.

“This building behind me is a testament to the fact that you did it, and you did it better than well,” Ritter said.

The goal of the construction project wasn't to re-create the building as it stood the day before the tornado, but to create something better. Before the building was damaged, the town staff was already cramped in tight quarters.

Justin Larson, who was the lead architect on the project, said every department has room to grow now, and this is a building to take Windsor through the next 100 years.

At the ceremony Thursday, Windsor-Severance firefighters symbolically took down the tattered flag that flew on the day of the tornado and replaced it with a shiny, new one.

History

During construction, workers found old chalkboards, remnants of the building's former life as the Park School.

Meredith Moore, 57, is a lifetime Windsor resident and started school there when she was 5 years old. She said she used to slide down the wooden banisters in the stairwell and play hopscotch in the yard.

“I would've protested if they had torn it down,” Moore said.

Construction on the new high school was started in 1904. The third floor and west wing were added in 1910, creating the full 29,525 square-foot building that stands today.

Originally the building was Windsor's high school, but from 1918 until the late 1970s it was a grade school. In 1967, an annex was built on the north end of the building to manage the growing population.

It became the town hall in the 1980s and until recently also housed the Windsor Police Department in the basement. During construction the town hall staff stayed in the annex, for the most part, until it was torn down on June 14.

Preserving the old

Larson said they had originally planned to keep the floors of the building carpeted. One of the layers included asbestos flooring, and they weren't sure what was the best, most cost-effective way to manage them. Larson said at the ceremony that they peeled back years of flooring and saw “all of the history, all of the foot traffic.”

“That was one of those fortunate discoveries during the process,” Larson said Friday.

The wooden banisters in the stairwells are mostly all original, too. All over the building, when something couldn't be restored, it was replicated. The interior walls were all covered with new plaster, but finished with the rough style of the original building.

Just one part of the stonework on the outside is new, and that is on the south end where the elevator and stairwell were added. Larson said the team brought stones from the building to the quarry to find stone that would perfectly match the rest.

All of the stone was affixed with new grout, but they used a unique technique. The whole building has rope-like grout, recreating the hand-formed ridges seen on the original building.

“It's a great historical detail that you don't see in masonry today,” Larson said.

The top floor Town Board meeting room and chambers features an ornate, wooden smoke vent, part of the ceiling of the original 1910 building. As a fire abatement system, the smoke vent is no longer necessary. But that round, flat carved wood weathered the tornado that destroyed parts of the roof, so it has earned its place.

Painting the town green

At the ceremony Thursday, Vázquez told stories about banging on the radiators in the old building to get them to work. Those days are over.

Energy efficiency and an upgraded heating and cooling system was one of the main goals of the construction

Larson said that fortunately the fine stone masonry of the original building made it quite energy-efficient already, more so than the 1960s-era annex.

New insulation was added, though, too. “

Energy costs will also be partly defrayed by the addition of a 10-kilowatt system of solar panels on the roof.

All of the windows were replaced, but they are all in the shape and style of the originals, just with better insulation.

In with the new

The third floor hadn't been used in years. In the school, it had been the gymnasium, and there was a small stage at the front of the room. Now the room is home to both the Windsor Municipal Court and the Town Board meeting room and chambers.

The room is decked out in the most current technology, with cameras and computers. There are four cameras set up to record town board meetings for broadcast on Channel 8, something Ritter applauded as a way of helping Windsor's citizens be involved in their government.

A fifth camera is embedded in the ceiling, and it can zoom down onto a document and project the image onto the wall for everyone to see. Every board member has a computer screen in front of them, which they can use to zoom on the document, watch the video feed or review documents.

The town has a new computer server, too, with the capacity to run for over two hours on battery power. It is protected by a dedicated cooling system; the previous server just had an air conditioning window unit pointed at it.

The building now has handicap access to the whole building, too, in compliance with the disabilities act. The building is equipped with a sprinkler system and exceeds all fire codes, Larson said.

“The way it has been restored will facilitate it to better be preserved for the next 100 years,” said Larson.