John Mallon’s restoration work has earned him an award to be presented in one of the buildings he helped save.
Emporia Main Street planned to honor Mallon with the J. Warren Brinkman Preservation award at 4:30 p.m. today at Amanda’s Bakery & Cafe, in the Kress Building at 702 Commercial St. The public is invited, and cookies will be served, according to a Main Street news release.
Main Street chose Mallon for the award based on his work in restoring the Granada Theatre and the Kress Center, where Amanda’s is located.
“I appreciate the recognition,” Mallon said. “There are probably always people that need it more than I do. But I’ve spent a career building new buildings to make a living and occasionally got to do a restoration project, which was always exciting.”
Mallon bought and renovated the Kress Center, which had begun as a Kress five-and-dime store and then became a multiuse building that Mallon said “had been done real poorly.” He worked hard to make the building a thriving part of downtown.
He’s also known for restoring the Finney house, which became the Emporia State Federal Credit Union. His former building company, Hastco, received a High Performance Builder award from the Butler Manufacturing Co. in 2001 and also received a Million Dollar Award for buying more than $1 million in Butler materials in one year.
The Granada Theatre is his current project. The theater’s previous owner was set to tear it down in 1994 when Mallon and a group of other Emporians bought the building. He founded the Granada Theatre Alliance and is part of the ongoing restoration to return the Granada to the way it looked before a fire damaged it in 1959.
Mallon was president of the alliance from its inception in 1994 until he stepped down in 2001. Hastco — which Mallon sold in 2005 — has provided much in the way of materials, equipment and other aspects of the Granada restoration project.
Former alliance board member Roger Hartsook once said, “If it hadn’t been for John, there would be an open hole in the middle of that block.”
“It was one week from the wrecking ball when John and others stepped forward and saved it,” Hartsook told The Gazette in 2001. “He was the catalyst that brought people together to save the building and form the organization.”
Restoration, of course, is something that’s been near and dear to Mallon for a long time.
“We have to make our living building strip malls in front of Wal-Marts, but that doesn’t mean we can’t reinvest it in downtowns and doing good things for communities,” he said.
Brinkman, the award’s namesake, was an art teacher in both the Emporia school district and at what is now Emporia State University.
Main Street is part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
According to a news release, more than 300 fifth-graders from Lowther South Intermediate School will tour the Kress Center and Plumb Place on Thursday on an annual field trip sponsored by Main Street’s design committee.
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