Harvesting Historical Riches

Classy Preservation Project Saves Durango School

Originally published in Colorado History NOW, April 2005

When John and Charles Shaw and Lisa Bodwalk announced their plan to purchase a vacant, rundown junior high school in Durango and turn it into a community arts center, city leaders responded with near-universal incredulity.  “There were a lot of doubters in the beginning,” John Shaw told one journalist.  Despite widespread concerns that the project, while praiseworthy, would not be economically viable, the three entrepreneurs went ahead with their ambitious plan with the enthusiasm of idealistic first-year teachers.

The town newspaper counted itself among the naysayers.  The Smiley Building, named in honor of revered district superintendent Emory Smiley, needed a lot of work.  The Durango Herald feared that “an undercapitalized business could make too little money to affect repairs, yet hang on long enough for the facility to suffer irreparable damage.”

Those fears proved to be unfounded for two reasons.  First, the owners demonstrated a genuine eagerness to invest time, personal labor, and money to make the project work.  Second, the State Historical Fund bridged the gap between goodwill and a good business plan by contributing $525,807 in three separate grants to rehabilitate or repair the building’s historic features.

Those grants helped mend a broken transition zone between commercial and residential areas.  Completed in 1937, the Mission Revival–style behemoth served as both a junior high and middle school.  Kids walked there from what is now designated as the East Third Avenue historic district and from other nearby neighborhoods until the construction of the Escalante School forced the Smiley Building’s closure in 1994.  During the next several years, the facility saw sporadic use as a charter school, but stood mostly vacant until Bodwalk and the Shaw brothers purchased it.  Deferred and improper maintenance led to leaky roofs that damaged floors and ceilings, rotting window frames, and an unkempt appearance that encouraged vandalism.

The new owners assessed the Smiley Building’s decrepit condition and envisioned a holistic revival that would not only address the landmark’s physical appearance, but restore its past role as an educational facility as well.  Working up to twenty hours a day, they overhauled the electrical and plumbing systems, fixed holes in the walls, refinished maple floors, repainted classrooms and hallways, installed a solar power array, and rehabilitated a dingy 665-seat theater into what John Shaw calls “the classiest joint in town.”

This work brought the building up to code and made the facility energy efficient and presentable again, but it did not fix some of the most pressing problems.  That’s when the trio turned to the State Historical Fund.  In 2000 and 2001, they restored 176 original wooden double-hung windows and 99 steel casement windows with help from a $130,000 SHF grant.  Then, after completing a Fund-supported Historic Structure Assessment, they received another $385,918 grant to repair and restore the damaged, but character-defining curvilinear parapets that crown all of the entrances; replace the theater’s roof; and replace non-historic doors.  Thousands of hours of volunteer labor, graciously donated by neighbors and the owners themselves, kept all of the work within budget.

But all of this work, grant-funded and non-grant-funded alike, would have been for naught if community members did not embrace the owners’ vision.  Fortunately, they have.  Taking advantage of below-market rental rates, artists, nonprofit groups, small schools, and creative businesses have crowded into the available space.  Performances by a resident dance company and repertory theater group fill the Smiley Theater on a regular basis.  Today the building buzzes with activity day and night, much like it did during its past life as a public school.  And local patrons can be excused for remembering its brief period of abandonment not as a four-year problem, but as something more like a four-year recess.

BY BEN FOGELBERG, Editor

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