Granada Given Gear from Kenyon Hall
Stage rigging, seats moved across town
By Scott Rochat
Friday, June 8, 2007
Workers at the Granada Theatre aren’t just making history. They’re transplanting it.
Construction manager Bones Ownbey said this week that the restored theater would use seats and stage rigging from the old Kenyon Hall auditorium. The rigging has already been dismantled so it can be installed. The seats will be placed in the Granada’s balcony.
“The curve of the balcony and the curve of these seats are exactly the same,” Ownbey said. “We couldn’t have asked for it to fit better.”
He said the items were donated by Mitchell-Markowitz, the owners of Kenyon Hall. The company could not be reached by press time.
Kenyon Hall, the former College of Emporia administrative building, was the focus of a lawsuit last year when Mitchell-Markowitz filed for a permit to demolish the building. The Lyon County Historical Society withdrew the suit in February, saying the company was making a good-faith effort to use tax credits that would make it possible to rehabilitate Kenyon for another use.
Despite its distinctive Gothic architecture, Kenyon is not on the National Register of Historic Places, though nearby Anderson Library is. The hall was completed in 1928 as a replacement for Stuart Hall, which burned to the ground in 1915.
The Granada was finished not long after Kenyon, opening for business in 1929. Preservationists saved the building from the wrecking ball and helped raise $2.8 million for the theater’s restoration. The Emporia Granada Theatre Alliance has said that it expects to be done with the renovation by the end of the year.
Ownbey himself was pleased to see Kenyon still standing and able to lend a hand to its younger sibling.
“It’s neat to pull stuff out of one part of history and put it in another,” he said.