Fire guts I-235/13th Street church

[J N Winkler]

These articles pertain to a church that burned in the small hours yesterday morning.

http://www.kansas.com/news/weather/article32043786.html

http://www.kansas.com/news/local/article31970220.html

http://www.kansas.com/news/local/article32837934.html

The pictures of the burned building accompanying the articles look nothing like what is currently visible in StreetView imagery of the site:

July 2012 imagery for unpaved northern segment of Hoover adjacent to I-235 right-of-way

When the City of Wichita began building the flyover that now connects I-235 just north of Central with the portion of 13th Street west of the Big Ditch, a substantial amount of the church's property had to be taken for a relocation of Hoover Road just to the east in order to create room for the embankment and abutment for the westbound connector.  None of the taking overlapped the footprint of any building on the site, however.  The congregation presumably spent part of the settlement on a remodel that included ground-to-eaves brick facing with window and corner edging with cut limestone blocks.  It is this renovated building that has now burned down.

Hoover, which is a section line road and is often bladed as "55th West" in rural portions of Sedgwick County, was unpaved before flyover construction started.  Much of this neighborhood was developed in the 1950's, when the City of Wichita still allowed developers to provide unpaved subdivision roads with open drainage.  Normally it takes a paving petition (with a certain proportion of abutters agreeing to pay proportionate shares of the actual cost not just of curbing and paving but also closed drainage) to upgrade a subdivision road from gravel to current standards, but in this case, the paving was included in the flyover construction contract.  This abated dust nuisance on I-235 on windy days but has also resulted in Hoover and 13th becoming a popular cut-through between I-235/Central and 13th/Zoo.

Construction of the flyover began in 2012 and was finished in November 2014.  Attendees at the Wichita road meet in July 2013 visited the construction site as part of the driving tour, but on the west side, so the church and its renovations (which were then in progress) would have been visible only across four lanes of I-235 traffic.  (As originally drafted, the meet tour included a stop to see the Hoover Road relocation, but this was dropped for time.)

[okroads]

I was just in this area Saturday afternoon, August 29. I believe the church is visible just to the right of the ramp in this picture (which is the new ramp from I-235 northbound to 13th Street).

DSC05658 by Eric Stuve, on Flickr