It's hard to roll the urban culture clock back to the early 1970s and imagine a time when people didn't really care about historic preservation, when urban renewal always started with demolition.

In New London, the eventual shift in perspective, from a desire to wipe the slate clean to an interest in preserving the historic urban landscape, came into focus with a battle over the city's 1971 decision to demolish Union Station at the foot of State Street.

It was Claire Dale, a 44-year-old concert pianist married to a Connecticut College professor, who was credited at the time with raising awareness about the value of architect Henry Hobson Richardson's brick monument in downtown New London.

But Dale, now deceased, had an important and critical partner, one whose role was never fully revealed - until she spoke about it publicly for the first time in an interview last week.

Richardson's magnificent station has had a guardian angel for the last 40 years, one who just finally stepped aside to make way for the station's new role in the creation of the National Coast Guard Museum.

Dale rallied a national response to the demolition plans for Union Station, even enlisting the Pulitzer-winning architectural critic for the New York Times, Ada Louise Huxtable, for help with the trust Dale had established to preserve the station.

Huxtable was quoted as saying the battle to save the New London station was not just uphill. It was perpendicular. Dale said at the time that people in the city were 99 percent in favor of tearing down the station.

The Day, reflecting public sentiment, called the station a "hideous eyesore" and a "behemoth" in editorials.

"The best use of the gloomy and ugly old pile is as a conversation piece," said one editorial, going on to suggest it be demolished and the bricks be inscribed and sold for $2 to $5 each.

More people, including many from the region's arts community, eventually joined Dale in a preservation movement that led to the creation of what is now New London Landmarks.

One of the most important players in the movement to save the station was a young woman who began to quietly finance the station preservation effort with money from family resources.

Even by 1988, in a story in The Day about a 100th birthday celebration for the station, more than a dozen years after the wrecking ball had been stopped, the person who financed the rescue of the station was not identified.

"The benefactor was a young woman … then studying at Columbia University for her master's degree in historic preservation," The Day wrote then, reporting that Dale still would not disclose who had put up $3,000 for a feasibility study of the restoration and later a half million dollars to secure bank financing.

The young woman was Barbara Timken, who grew up on Montauk Avenue and attended Harbor School. She lived outside Connecticut after the train station battle, raising a family, but returned to live in the region more recently, in part to be closer to her elderly mother.

Timken, who agreed to talk about her role in saving the station last week, after the sale was completed, said she got involved in the battle to save Union Station after writing a paper for a class at Columbia about the preservation battle in her hometown. She got emotionally involved from the start, she said, because of her love of New London, and remained so for 40 years.

She said the sale of the station last month to the chairman of the National Coast Guard Museum Association was bittersweet.

Timken said she is excited about the prospects for the station and an affiliated Coast Guard museum and how they can help transform New London. Still, she said, it was hard to let go of a 40-year commitment. She said she considered herself a caretaker of the historic building all those years.

Owning the train station was an expensive proposition, and Timken said the $3 million it sold for did not begin to cover the investments made over the years. The initial restoration, one of three under her stewardship, cost $1.5 million, according to news accounts at the time.

Timken has had partners over the years who were the more public face of the station ownership.

The first was George Notter, a renowned Boston architect, now deceased, who devised the plans for the original restoration, which created office space and a restaurant in the building, to try to make it economically viable.

Timken said the guiding principle of the original preservation and restoration was to make the building useful, a tenet of successful restoration. And indeed, for many years it was a viable commercial enterprise, with a Navy subcontractor filling two upper office floors.

Timken's most recent partner and co-owner was Todd O'Donnell. Their work together was concentrated on preserving the structural integrity of the building - a new slate roof, brick repointing, a restoration of the lobby and new boilers.

Timken and O'Donnell tried to keep the building viable, supporting improvements in rail service, for instance, and fostered attempts to put it back more squarely in the public realm, a key goal.

It was a sometimes rocky road, though. The city once took part of the property by eminent domain, for unspecific plans to erect a pedestrian bridge beside the historic station, a government taking the station owners had to go to court to fight.

Of course they've also been paying the city taxes all these years, while maintaining what amounts to a public building.

They more recently avoided long-term leases and commitments - even Amtrak now has only a month-to-month lease - to remain flexible in the event a new opportunity, like the Coast Guard Museum, were to surface.

Indeed, O'Donnell and Timken paid for a first round of architectural plans, suggesting how a waterfront Coast Guard museum could be built around the station, a visualization they believe led to a commitment to the site from the museum association and the current momentum for the project.

I had the privilege last week to personally thank Timken for her generosity in safeguarding New London's greatest architectural treasure.

Perhaps the most remarkable part of her work to save the station all these years has been her modesty about it.

I suspect she only agreed to talk about it now because she wanted to remind people of the great public battle waged to save a single building, a lesson it might be fruitful to remember as the next chapter unfolds.

In the end, Claire Dale's campaign won over a lot of New London. Even The Day recanted and wrote in an editorial that the newspaper had been wrong in calling for the demolition of Union Station.

A big celebration and ribbon cutting for the restored station, in July 1976, attracted lots of dignitaries. U.S. Sen. Lowell Weicker arrived from Washington by train. Gov. Ella T. Grasso came down State Street in a police cruiser.

Mayor Ruby Turner Morris read a proclamation declaring it "Union Station Day" in New London.

Timken was never mentioned in the news story about it all.

I also had a sense while talking to them last week that you could almost see O'Donnell's and Timken's fingers triple crossed, hoping that the Coast Guard museum will successfully preserve the station for the next 40 years or much longer, the centerpiece for a stronger, more vital downtown New London.

"The table is set," O'Donnell said.

This is the opinion of David Collins

D.collins@theday.com

Twitter: DavidCollinsct

See related material, C8