July 31^st End of an Era, Ten Dwellings added to local housing stock

Radar Base Development Homes For Sale

By CONOR BERRY

Messenger Staff Reporter

ST ALBANS TOWN ‑ Barracks­ style dwellings that once housed U.S. Air Force personnel at the old radar base here have been renovat­ed and are now being sold as afford­able to moderate‑priced housing.

Essex Junction‑based Results Real Estate is handling the sale of nine one‑story units on roughly 10 acres atop Bellevue Hill. Just off Route 36 in St. Albans Town. The asking price for a two‑bedroom house is $89,000 and $98,000 for three bedrooms.

Developers Carl Laroe and Kip Matthews purchased 104 acres. Including the nine units and other surrounding structures, from Pinewood Manor Inc., an Essex Junction development firm, for $350,000, according to St. Albans Town zoning records.

Town Zoning Administrator Rhonda Bushey said Laroe and Matthews closed on the property in February and last month received conditional use approval from the Development Review Board to trans­form the site into a planned residen­tial development.

Bushey said the board allowed the developers to subdivide the 104 acres into two lots, the smaller of which ‑ about 10.7 acres ‑ is home to the newly refurbished units.  Presently, she said, there are no other development plans on file for the site. Laroe, who lives in Georgia, and Matthews, of South Hero, did not return phone calls from the Messenger.

In its heyday, the base was home to nearly 300 Air Force personnel. It opened in 1951, just as the Cold War between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union was beginning to heat up.  The facility was part of an extensive radar detection network stretching along the northern U.S. border known as the "pine tree line."  But as radar technology continued to improve, the outmoded base eventually closed its doors for good in 1979.

"It was kind of a miniature little city" town resident Gerald Morong recalled in a past Messenger interview.  Morong, a for­mer base employee and presently a town selectman, said at one point the facility grew to include a bowling alley, a dance club, a dining hall, and even a few shops.

The majority of the radar base proper­ty was sold at auction for about $200,000 to Bob Marcotte of Pinewood Manor Inc. in the early 1980s. At that time, and for the years to follow, a lack of adequate water and sewer service stymied development efforts. Bellevue Hill's single remaining radar dome is today owned and occupied by the Federal Aviation Administration, which uses the site to conduct air traffic control  Last summer, an environmental cleanup firm removed potentially hazardous soil from the former base. Soil studies had dis­covered higher‑than‑permissible levels of polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, poten­tially carcinogenic substances, that exceeded safety levels established by the Vermont Department of Health.  The cleanup was part of a federally mandated program to rid current and for­mer military facilities of hazardous waste.