Photo Credit: Courtesy of Frank Scafella
For those who plan to renovate an old building for seniors, the first necessity is not money. There’s no denying that you will need money--plenty of it--in the long run. But first you will very likely need to “mend-and-make-do” in order to pave the way for major grants.
An elementary school built in 1908 and abandoned in 1999 in the Wiles Hill neighborhood of Morgantown, W. Va., is not a pretty site to contemplate renovating, especially for an executive director of a small-town parks system, or its maintenance supervisor. It’s not that administrators do not like old buildings; it’s that old buildings eat up capital budgets in the blink of an eye. They can become money pits. That’s why school boards abandon them and leave neighborhoods (mostly low- to moderate-income neighborhoods) to deal with them. And that’s why so many of these wonderful old buildings meet the fate of the wrecking ball.
The Board of Parks and Recreation Commissioners (BOPARC) bought the abandoned elementary school in 2000, not for the building itself, but for the land, which was designated as the first park on the north side of town. But the old building was squarely on the property, so what was to be done with it?
