The former Garyton School, considered the oldest commercial building in Portage, is likely to be demolished soon.

The Portage Redevelopment Commission had hoped to turn it into a community center, even hiring a team of consultants to draw plans for what it might look like, while Sue Lynch was mayor.

The cost of that project was too big a hurdle, though, and Mayor Austin Bonta said it’s even more difficult today. Just getting the building in working order again would cost $5 million, he said.

It’s considered the oldest commercial building still standing in the city, former Planning Director AJ Monroe said when the community center project was proposed.

“We all have a love for the building,” Bonta said. “We always want to honor the history of the Garyton building.”

His mother was a former student there. So was Councilwoman Gina Giese-Hurst, who attended kindergarten through second grade there.

The building has been shopped around for a variety of prospective tenants. It was rejected as a law enforcement and fire academy for the city’s public safety agencies. United Way of Northwest Indiana, Salvation Army and Portage Recovery Association all considered the building but ultimately rejected it.

“It’s a disaster. It’s an old, abandoned school building,” said Portage Economic Development Corp. Executive Director Andy Maletta, who worked with the Portage Recovery Association to find its new home on Lute Road. The PRA group liked Garyton’s vast space and saw opportunities there, but Maletta saw the drawbacks. “It would break those guys forever to renovate that building,” he said.

The PRA moved into a free building, worth $750,000, on Lute Road, donated by Northwest Health.

And now the Redevelopment Commission has budgeted $750,000 for demolition of the building, listing it as a high-priority project.

Bonta said the RDC plans to discuss demolition of the building sometime this quarter.

Ultimately, a park would be developed on that lot to serve the Garyton area. Bonta doesn’t know how that school would be memorialized there but hopes that could be incorporated into the design of the park.

At $4 million for the new park, though, that project could be years from now.

Garyton School is in Giese-Hurst’s district.

“That’s a passion of mine,” she said, trying to preserve a historical building.

She walked through the building a few years ago and noticed a lot of graffiti as well as broken windows. What escaped graffiti, however, were murals painted in the main hallway by students when Garyton housed the Portage Township Schools adult education program.

Giese-Hurst participated in a couple of cleanup projects at the school during the COVID-19 era, cleaning up the grounds and then the interior.

As they worked, many of the older volunteers shared stories about the school and the place it held in their hearts. Younger people who had no sense of the building’s history added to the sense of community.

It was for those young people that Giese-Hurst was hoping the building could be turned into a community center. Older adults have the Banta Senior Center and school-age children have the Boys & Girls Club, but young adults ages 18 to 22 don’t have a similar place to hang out.

It would have been ideal for dance and art classes, yoga instruction, stage productions, adult enrichment classes and more, she said.

“The people who lived around there were kind of excited about that,” Lynch said.

The study done during Lynch’s administration to renovate the building pegged improvements at $79.60 per square foot for the 40,000-square-foot building. That was $3.2 million to be done in three phases. Prices have gone up since then, of course.

A community café was included in the first phase, along with studio spaces, meeting rooms and the gym/theater. The second phase added a kitchen and shop. Phase 3 would have fixed up the second and third floors.

But fixing up the building, though expensive, was only the first challenge. The second would be to make it sustainable. That was the big stumbling block.

The consultants recommended creating a nonprofit to handle space rental and maintenance of the building. Without getting that organized, fixing up the building wouldn’t make sense.

Lynch said she hoped for READI 2.0 grant money to renovate the building and allow its use for workforce development.

“I was really excited about it, and I know Gina was too, because it was kind of her pet project,” Lynch said. “She wanted to see a historical building in our city, because God knows we don’t have very many, not get demolished.”

“We had kids breaking in, so we actually installed an alarm system in there because the police were doing checks almost every night, and it just became burdensome for the Police Department,” she said. People would call in reports of kids on the roof. They did a lot of damage inside, but it was all fixable.

“It’s just really sad that they’re entertaining demolishing it,” Lynch said.

While an additional park would be nice to have, the park staff is stretched thin as it is maintaining all the parks it already has, she added.

When Lynch was mayor, a consultant proposed a recreation building downtown, but that would have required a full staff to run it. Like the Garyton project, the RDC might have been able to swing the construction cost, but making it sustainable would have been a challenge.

Giese-Hurst cherishes a book on Garyton School by David W. Lasayko. The book is mostly photos from the Community Historical Society but mentions the building was built in 1921 on a 4.5-acre lot. Additions were added in 1931, 1955 and 1964. Portage Adult Education was there at the end, leaving in 2016 for the refurbished Camelot Bowling Lanes building on U.S. 6 in the far southwest part of Portage.

Now, though, the future of the building is dismal at best.

Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.