A father-daughter duo that bought an abandoned 1930s schoolhouse in a state of disrepair has turned it into 16 stunning apartment units with the support of their incredibly talented family.
Realtor Audrey Broadway Worley of Asheville, North Carolina, works for the family business, Broadway Properties, with her father, 63-year-old Dante Broadway—whose parents started the business 50 years ago. Ms. Worley joined in 2015 after her father bought apartments in Mars Hill and quickly fell in love with an abandoned school building across the street.
‘They Believed In Us’
Mars Hill High School was built under Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration to get people back to work. The building was completed in 1938, and the first school class graduated the same year.
The school had grades 1 through 12, evolving through racial segregation in the 1960s to become a unified high school, then an elementary school, but eventually being abandoned and falling into disrepair. The building was being used for storage by teachers from the newly built elementary school next door when Ms. Worley decided to take it on, wanting to help the community save this historic property and give it another 100 years.
“We placed a bid on the property,” Ms. Worley said. “Luckily, no one voted against us. Then we started the due diligence period, which lasted about nine months.”
Ms. Worley worked with all the necessary government agencies, who offered unconditional support, as they all had the common goal of wanting to restore the building.
“They believed in us,” she said, “because when we bought the apartments from out of foreclosure, they were really rundown; they didn’t have the greatest tenants [and] it was causing a negative feeling from neighbors. When we came in and kind of brought everything up, it allowed them to trust us to take on such a huge piece of their history.”
Ms. Worley and her father toured the school on Nov. 7, 2017. By January 2018 they were under contract and officially bought the building in September of the same year. They secured their first building permit in August of 2019.
They bought the school for $73,000. Ms. Worley estimates they spent “three times what we thought we would” on the renovation.
“I was not realizing the magnitude of what we were doing,” she said.
Mr. Broadway said: “It was in really bad shape. They had done some kind of roof repair on the gym, and most of the water from the gymnasium went under the roof into several classrooms ... They didn’t use skilled workers so the carpentry was marginal.
Early Works
One of the first things the father-daughter duo had to supervise was removing the school’s old heavy radiators.“It was really nerve-wracking,” Mr. Broadway said. They wondered if they would go through the door.
They then had to replace all the plumbing by jackhammering the concrete floors, install natural gas heating, and level the flooring downstairs since “each unit was entirely different.”
As they tackled one issue after another, they had to also replace the manhole.
“The manhole was completely falling in because it was just made from brick,” Mr. Worley said. “We had to add a sprinkler system and bring the water in from the other side of the street and bore underneath the road to where the sprinkler system [was] and to get a larger pipe into the building to supply more water to multiple units.”
They then dealt with fire damage that the building had sustained when the school was abandoned.
“A couple of kids who were younger and got bored broke into the school and lit it on fire and burned a portion of the corner of the school,” Ms. Worley said. “Thankfully, the fire department came very quickly, and it didn’t destroy too much.”
One stroke of good luck was that they didn’t find any toxic materials in the building.
Ms. Worley said: “I took a lead abatement class at the Greenville Institute. I told the instructor the age of our building, and she’s like, ‘You have a 13 percent chance of not finding lead paint, so good luck!’ I did the testing, and we were in the 13 percent.”
Despite having “overall great employees” to work with, one temporary worker threw a spanner in the works when he was caught stealing.
Transformation
They installed new electrics, embraced an industrial aesthetic on the ground floor with an exposed HVAC and sprinkler system—overseen by Mr. Broadway who has a plumbing, mechanical, and general contractor’s license—and preserved as much 100-year-old hardwood flooring as possible. “People really like even the [wood] that got burnt, it adds character,” Ms. Worley said.
Upstairs, with the help of her sister, designer Carly Conley, Ms. Worley paid homage to the historical character of the schoolhouse with original colors and milk-glass light fixtures.
One of Ms. Worley’s favorite places in the building is the corner of one of the ground-floor apartments, for a very specific reason. While lead testing, she heard a “commotion” and going to investigate, came face-to-face with a homeless cat.
“She'd had kittens recently,” Ms. Worley said. “I called the Humane Society, and they were going to come and catch the mom and get all the babies, so I came out there the next day, and she’s removed all the kittens but one. ... Four or five hours [later], the little kitten was still there, right next to a little vent that didn’t have a cover over it. I was nervous she was going to fall in.”
Ms. Broadway decided to take in the kitten and named her Maple.
Gratitude
During the March 2020 lockdown, the renovation had come to a halt. Ms. Worley had just made “a large purchase of appliances” on her credit card and was suddenly faced with an uncertain financial future. The thoughts that popped into her mind were: Could they afford to keep people employed? Would the renovation even be completed?As she began to navigate through the answers to these questions, she decided to take a walk on the greenway trail behind the school to clear her head.
“I was walking, I was just praying, and I was like, ‘Lord, this is not my building, this is yours, and I’m just a steward ... if you want this building to succeed, and I know you will, I just need a little bit of help right now,” she said.
“I wasn’t just putting myself at risk, I was putting my dad at risk, I was putting what our family had built for three generations at risk financially,” she said. “That was just a really scary time, but really, it was a growing point. I could feel my capacity growing.”
Bolstered by faith, which she stressed, “is important to our business,” the family resumed the restoration. Their first tenants were able to move into six finished units in April of 2021. The next four classrooms were renovated in December 2021, financed, and the funds used to renovate the gymnasium.
Ms. Worley received the county’s original blueprints, framed, from her parents as a Christmas gift and hung them in the hallway of the building. She and her father hope to complete all 16 units by December 2023.
As years of restoration work draw to a close, Ms. Worley can look at the beautifully transformed school building as the cumulative product of her family’s skill, dedication, and attention to detail; from her grandfather who started the business to the employees and family members who brought the vision to life.
“Thankfulness, gratitude ... This is a family-owned and operated business,” she said.
