North Tonawanda’s city marina — now crumbling and abandoned — is still home to the fondest memories of the Niagara River Yacht Club members who built it and then maintained it for 53 years.

“It’s heartbreaking to go down here, to be honest with you,” Stan Ziomek, club commodore, said during a recent visit to the group’s former home at 1000 River Road, at the southern tip of Gratwick Riverside Park.

He and a group of four other past commodores of the club (which is now based in the former Schooner’s property just down the road) shed light on the relationship they and others had with the “working man’s club” that for a long time leased the property.

Guys like Harbor Master Tom Haug, George Culmer, Don Prohaska and Don Olmsted (member since 1964) are well versed at professing the city’s folly in ousting their club from the property in 2004. Since that time, one of the riverfront’s most picturesque features has remained unused.

A long-standing renewable lease was canceled in 2004. Subsequent efforts by the city to sell the property and then have it run by an outside party have stalled. The trouble has had to do with everything from structural issues to state laws. Now walkways have been torn up, paint is peeling and not a soul stirs there.

“People have wrecked the place,” Ziomek said.

Or perhaps it’s the absence of people that’s led to that cold, end-of-an-era feeling at the old marina, home to 108 boat slips and a clubhouse set on one of the river’s most unobstructed views of the water.

While the waterfront hangout has lost its soul, the city of North Tonawanda, which owns the land and terminated its lease with the Niagara River Yacht Club with hopes of pocketing sale revenue, has lost quite a bit of money, as well.

The club had paid the city about $200,000 per year, Prohaska said, as well as city and school taxes on the property valued at between $300,000 and $400,000.

Several of the old members (who now own and operate their new, smaller headquarters at 346 River Road) know the ins and outs of the property better than most people. It was them who hauled concrete to build the huge break wall sheltering the slips from the elements, moved the clubhouse to where it now sits and slowly reclaimed much of the waterfront for decades.

Several members of the club were compelled recently to visit their old labor of love to comment on many of the structural issues that have delayed a new use for the property – code and utility issues politicians and engineers haven’t been able to agree on regarding what can be done with the property now.

“If they just left it alone, they had a good thing,” Prohaska said. “They’ve got nothing. They lose $200,000 from what we used to give them.”

And then there’s the sweat equity most former members talk about — the years of repairs and land reclamation they did for free. The “working man’s club” was home to plumbers, welders and other tradesmen who quietly and competently took on the rigorous maintenance a marina requires.

Posts for docks were driven, the breakwall was built, hundreds of feet of electrical conduit were laid and cat walks were built atop it.

Though most former members have fought to move on despite the years of time and money they invested in the place, they point to a laundry list of inadequate utilities and parking, the potential need to dredge the basin and other issues purportedly well beyond the $200,000 the city now has bonded for repairs.

Member and past commodore Tom Haug said such issues include the fact that it’s hooked to a septic system and not the city’s effluent lines, as well as being served by propane, not city gas lines.

“You can’t put a restaurant in there,” he said, at least not without sizable investment.

Half of the 60-car parking area, he said, may in fact be on Gratwick Park land, as some past members had pushed the fence a few feet each year. Haug also said when they left, the harbor was as shallow as two or three feet in places, and it might need to be dredged.

For years in the inner harbor, turtles almost two feet wide swam in waters members said the Department of Environmental Conservation claims are spawning grounds.

Dredging the marina, he estimated, could cost upwards of $500,000, even if it could legally be done.

“It kind of got to the point where we wondered what was the real reason they were selling the property,” Haug said.

When a court, at the city’s behest, ruled the lease could not be renewed in 2004, the property had been put up for auction. Though its former members put up the maximum amount they could, another party scored the high bid.

Despite the above concerns and others, the city had aimed to profit from the land before a then-apparently unknown law took center stage, Haug said.

A state law prohibits the sale city officials had hoped would add to their coffers. The law states such waterfront property cannot be sold without the conversion of an equal amount/value of land designated for public use elsewhere.

While former Mayor Larry Soos had tried to have the city run it in recent years, the Common Council and others disagreed on the price tag for repairs, and indeed how much of the work needed there was actually necessary.

The property can, however, be used by another under a concessionaires agreement, different from a lease.

During a period at the end of Soos’ term, the city took proposals from those interested in running the marina. Hurricane Bar owner Robert Orefice provided the lone proposal, in which he offered to pay for at least $30,000 in repairs the clubhouse would need as part of a plan to open a restaurant and marina operation there.

The plan was rejected by Mayor Rob Ortt, who campaigned in part on promises to address future uses promptly. He has since commissioned the first economic viability study to determine legitimate potential uses.

While the results are compiled, those who had invested so much there point out what is now a kind of decaying testimony to how much there presence there had been worth, after all.

“Hey Hawger, what happened to our steps?” Prohaska asked Haug as they surveyed the place. He was pointing in the direction of a wheelchair ramp and steps they and others had installed years ago.

Now crumbling and neglected, pieces of rotting wood are a hard reminder that their work was in some ways in vain.

“Yeah, we put a lot of work into that,” Haug forlornly replied.

Contact reporter Neale Gulleyat 693-1000, ext. 114.