Westover Air Force Base Control Tower | Chicopee, MA
Chicopee, MA
Some projects mark a moment in time as clearly as any monument. The 135-foot control tower that Fontaine Bros. built at Westover Air Force Base did exactly that. It rose above the tarmac at the peak of the Cold War, at a base that sat at the center of America's nuclear deterrent strategy and was widely considered one of the Soviet Union's primary targets in the event of war.
Westover Field was created by a war-readiness appropriation signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 and opened on April 6, 1940, eventually becoming the largest military air facility in the Northeast during World War II. By the time Fontaine Bros. constructed the control tower, Strategic Air Command had established Headquarters Eighth Air Force at Westover and the 99th Bombardment Wing had arrived equipped with B-52 Stratofortresses and KC-135 Stratotankers. The base was operating around the clock. Aircraft carrying nuclear weapons were on alert. Every takeoff and landing mattered at a level that had no peacetime equivalent, and the tower at the center of it all needed to be equal to that responsibility. AfWikipedia
At 135 feet, the tower gave air traffic controllers an unobstructed sightline across Westover's runways, one of which at nearly 11,600 feet was the longest in New England. It was a precision instrument in concrete and steel, built to military specification and built by a contractor that understood the weight of the commission. Fontaine Bros., headquartered in Springfield just across the Chicopee River, had the regional experience and the construction capability to meet those standards.
The original tower served Westover through the Cold War, the Berlin Airlift legacy, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, and the base's eventual transition to the Air Force Reserve. It was demolished in 2002 when a new tower was constructed to serve the modern installation. What stands in its place is a successor. What Fontaine Bros. built was the original, raised at the height of American military readiness, doing its job for nearly half a century.
