School rehab efforts recognized

The Kansas City architect who saved the old middle school has won two state preservation awards, including one for the Ottawa building.

Steve Foutch won the Kansas Preservation Alliance’s 2008 Medallion Award for Rehabilitation for converting the school to apartments called Washburn Towers.

He also won the Notable Achievement in Rehabilitation award for his project rehabilitating the old Mahaska High School in Washington County in extreme north central Kansas.

“I think it’s exciting,” Mattie Perry, a member of the Friends of Historic Buildings group that worked with Foutch in saving the old middle school.

“I think it’s wonderful,” Perry said of the school’s rehabilitation and conversion into a senior apartment complex and community center. “Everyone is so happy.”

Preservationists, spearheaded by the Friends group, spent nearly 10 years trying to keep the building from being demolished, she said.

“We just knew it was a good building,” Perry said. “... We felt it was going to be a useful building.”

The Friends made multiple attempts to interest rehabilitators in the building.

At almost the last minute, the group sent out a request for proposals for the building.

That afternoon, they got a response, she said.

“Steve was the first one to contact us,” Perry said. “He called me and asked me for a tour.

“I asked him when he wanted to. He replied, ‘How about this afternoon?’”

Perry got the key from the school district and went through the building with Foutch.

“He said ‘I like this building,’” Perry recalled. “I thought, ‘This is our guy.’”

Foutch’s project, which is being done in two phases, has exceeded the Friends’ expectations, she said.

Washburn Towers is an asset to the downtown, as Perry said she knew it would be.

“I wonder if all the nay-sayers will say they were wrong,” she said.

Foutch also rehabilitated the abandoned Mahaska High School into housing.

Like the Ottawa Middle School, the Mahaska school was designed in the Collegiate Gothic Revival style, according to the Kansas Preservation Alliance. The school opened in 1926 and closed in 1955.