The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Firehouse owner: ‘It’s historic’
TORRINGTON — The old Torrington firehouse, adjacent to the Torrington Fire Department’s main building on Water Street, is almost ready to open as Bad Dog Brewery.
Matt Tkac of Bristol, his wife, Michele, and their son and daughter Chris and Emily all are part of the business. Matt Tkac signed a lease with the property owner, JR Laliberte, in May 2019. Since then, Laliberte has invested in upgrading the building and is looking forward to the brewery’s opening.
Tkac said the brewery is opening in about four weeks.
“Our liquor permit has to be approved, and we’ve got other permits that are almost ready,” he said. “We’ve got to make sure all that gets done. Every date I’ve set so far has been wrong. ... But the electricians are there, working six days a week, the plumbers are there. It’s all coming together. We’ll open in four weeks, hopefully sooner.”
Laliberte Monday asked the City Council to release $40,000 in blight liens on the property, and the council approved his request at their meeting. He said he has invested more than $800,000 in the firehouse.
“The deal is, I did all the infrastructure work in the building,” Laliberte said. “We put in four new bathrooms. We did a tremendous amount of steel reinforcements, new flooring, all new windows. We did all the drainage round the building, put in a new driveway, and the building has a brand-new sprinkler system.”
Meanwhile, the Tkacs have been working on the interior.
“We were able to keep a lot of stuff that was left in the building,” Matt Tkac said. “We were working with the Fire Department and the historical society, and we went over everything with them,” he said. “We have a lot of cool pieces, from the 1800s to the 1950s and 1960s, including the fire truck,” he said. “It’s a 1939 model, and we just spent a day or so washing it and waxing it. It’s beautiful.”
Tkac and his family have repurposed as much of the old building’s interior as possible, he said, using wood flooring for furniture, for example.
“We saved everything we could — old flooboards were made into tables, beams became bar tops, things like that,” he said. “It’s been completely redone. It’s a tough old building, and it fought us on a bunch of things. But as good as the outside looks, the inside has been completely transformed.”
For Laliberte, completing the renovation and repairs to the old firehouse is a great relief, he said.
“I bought it 20 years ago, and at the time, I thought it would be a lot simpler than it turned out to be,” Laliberte said. “We’ve spent a lot of money, but the building is history. It’s a beautiful spot.”
He said he also couldn’t find the right tenant for such a large space. “It’s big,” he said. “It’s got 6,700 square feet on the first floor and about 5,000 square feet on the second floor, plus a big basement. So there was a lot to do, and we had to find somebody who would want to use all that space.”
The developer, who owns properties around Connecticut, which he has renovated then either sold or leased, said the brewery was “exactly what we were looking for.”
“Rista Malanca, the Torrington Economic Development director, is just wonderful,” he said. “She’s the one who found the tenant. They were going from town to town, looking for a building. So Rista found these guys, who said they wanted something very unique.
“So she called me and told me about the Tkacs, and I said, ‘I’ll spend the money if I find the right tenant,’ and that’s how it happened,” Laliberte said.
Tkac said his search for the right building led him to many towns around Litchfield County. “Not every town was accommodating, but Torrington was great,” he said.
Laliberte also has worked with the city to make the building part of the ongoing river trail, or riverwalk area, which runs along the Naugatuck River downtown. The back of the old firehouse is along the river corridor. “We worked out an easement for the city with the riverwalk right-of-way, and it will direct people walking through there through the firehouse driveway,” he said. “So that’s exciting.
“It’s probably the most expensive project, per square foot, that I’ve ever done, but it’s a historic space,” Laliberte said. “I think it was worth it.”
Laliberte also is working on the old Wolcott House building on lower East Main Street. The front of the structure, which was a used furniture and antique store in its most recent use, has lost its windows and is being refaced with new ones within the next two weeks, the developer said
“We’re converting it to three tenant spaces,” he said. “It’s a very large building, so we’re dividing it to bring in more tenants. It’s difficult sometimes to find a tenant that wants to use so much space. This way we can have more than one. The new storefronts should be ready in a few weeks.”
To learn more about Bad Dog Brewery, visit www.bdbrewco.com/home.