Beer garden generates $5K for freight station
Donation to help fund cleanup and restoration of the early 1900s station
An annual event that has drawn big crowds to Lansdale for two years has now made a big contribution to preserving part of the town’s history.
Organizers of the Lansdale Beer Garden presented a check for just over $5,000 to local nonprofit Discover Lansdale, putting the proceeds from two summers of drawing visitors to town toward preserving the borough’s freight station.
“One of my biggest pet peeves, things that got to me the most, was in the summertime, I’d hear about people — and with all due respect to any of these towns — they’d go to Skippack, to Doylestown, they’d go to all these other places. Why not Lansdale?” said Rob Hyde, general manager of the Blue Dog Tavern.
“What I think we’ve started to show by the beer garden is yeah, Lansdale is right up there. There’s no reason Lansdale can’t be, and will be, and has shown that it’s going to be, bigger and better than those towns,” he said.
Starting in the summer of 2016, local nonprofit the Lansdale Area Fundraising Society and the owners of the Blue Dog in Towamencin have partnered to host the beer garden event, bringing local brewers together on the site of Lansdale’s freight station at Broad and Vine Streets during summer evenings.
Hyde and Chris Staub, owner of Blue Dog, gave a year-end rundown of their activities during borough council’s Dec. 20 meeting, thanking borough staff and elected officials for their support.
“People mocked us when we started the Lansdale Beer Festival. They said it wouldn’t happen, they said a Lansdale beer festival would never work, the town of Lansdale can’t pull these kind of people in,” Hyde said.
“Now the Lansdale Beer Festival has become a premiere event, where we have people banging down our doors to be in that festival. I think that’s just an awesome showing for this entire town,” he said.
Staub said state law required each attendee of the beer garden to sign up for a membership, so membership cards were given for a $1 donation, with proceeds going to repair efforts for the freight station building just behind the beer garden site.
“We raised, it turned out to be $5,022, and you did it the hard way, $1 at a time. 5,022 unique members came out there, and they came from Austria, they came from California, they came from Hawaii,” Staub said.
“I’m not saying they came just for Lansdale, but I would get emails: ‘Hey, we’re coming from New Jersey just for the beer garden, are you going to be open? What’s the weather?’ So people came from all over,” he said.
Council President Denton Burnell joked that after hearing of those visitors, Discover would need to update their T-shirts listing Lansdale among several of the world’s top tourist spots, and Discover President Mary Fuller said the wide interest was a good sign.
“It sounds like Discover Lansdale is completing their mission to put Lansdale on the map, if people are coming from other countries just to visit Lansdale,” she said.
The freight station building was built in the early 1900s and had largely sat unused for several decades until the borough parking authority bought the land and Discover Lansdale purchased the building itself in the summer of 2016. Since then, Discover has organized several clean-up days and open houses to show off the freight station building, announcing plans to renovate the station for use as a borough welcome center and/or meeting or office space, and have applied for grant funding to pave the surrounding area.
Discover board member Bill Henning said the donation from the beer garden organizers “will go a long way, but we’ve got a lot of funds to raise.”
“That project over there is going to take a lot of money, but we’re really looking forward to 2018. We’re making great strides, and maybe if all goes right, by this time (in 2018) we’ll be having a party in there,” Henning said.
More freight station events will likely pick up once winter weather clears, and the next event on the docket for Discover Lansdale is a project presentation for those interested in volunteering, scheduled for 6:30 p.m. on March 12 at the borough municipal building, 1 Vine St., according to Henning.