Victorian ‘mobile’ home takes a ride across the street

A crowd of onlookers came to watch a 113-year-old house get moved Thursday across the street in downtown Wichita.

The historic Betzen family home was jacked up onto wheels and moved from 715 N. Topeka a couple hundred feet across the street to 808 N. Topeka. QuikTrip paid to move the home in order to make way for a new a store.

At 288,000 pounds, “This is the biggest project we’ve ever done,” said Dwayne Mastre, a co-owner of Unruh House Moving, who was moving the house with his 15-year-old son and three co-owners.

Unruh’s massive, two-transmission 48-wheel truck-trailer pulled the old house in fits and stops, on top of steel grates laid on the grass and over a small pile of 4x4s and 4x6s next to the curb, until it landed into position on a grass lot owned by Via Christi Health.

“There it goes,” said Julie Irvin, one of about 30 onlookers, who works on land deals for the city.

The move took more than an hour and the coordination of several government agencies, private contractors and QuikTrip employees.

Unruh came to Wichita on Tuesday to add dollies with wheels to the beams and mowed the grass Thursday morning to prevent the wheels from slipping. Their truck had gotten stuck in the wet grass earlier in the week.

The house was first jacked up onto beams at the end of April and was originally set to be moved in June. But Greg Kite, president of the Historic Preservation Alliance of Wichita and Sedgwick County, learned that he had to obtain a number of other permits he hadn’t anticipated.

“There has been a lot of red tape: permits, approvals memorandums of understanding, performance bonds,” Kite said.

QuikTrip agreed to purchase the home for $203,000 from the Betzens and donated it to the alliance, according to Kite, and then it put another $125,000 into escrow to pay to move to the house to its final location at the 1200 block of N. Emporia in about 75 days.

“QuikTrip has placed this community and its heritage ahead of its expensive project,” Kite said. “And that speaks volumes to the character of QuikTrip.”

Several other buildings in the lot next to the Betzen home had been demolished a few years ago by Gene Razook, of Andeel & Co. Realtors Inc. who was preparing the land for a new QuikTrip building at Broadway and Murdock.

Lynette Dooling, a commercial escrow officer at Security First who coordinated the finances for the move, called Razook the “godfather of QuikTrip,” because of the more than 20 years he said he’d spent demolishing buildings for QuikTrip.

“We’ve been on this thing for four years,” Razook said about the final move. “And I wanted to see it.”

“They all take a while,” Dooling said. “I’ve done projects that have been in the works for 10 years.”

It was Wichita’s first historic home move in more than a decade, according to Kite.

The last move of a historic house was the McAdams/Fultz house, now in the 1400 block of North Fairview, he said.

The “transitional Victorian” Betzen home is mostly valued for its architecture according to Kite. He expects it to be refurbished in about two years for the public to visit and rent out for events. One of the people watching the move, Helen Cole, said she considered buying the home with her fiance in the 1960s before the Betzens did because “the hand-carved oak work from Italy was exquisite” but decided that its 2,800 or so square feet was too much for newlyweds.

Although some exterior repairs are needed, they are not as substantial as at the McAdams home, which still isn’t finished eight years later, Kite said. He doesn’t think this new house will stretch the alliance’s resources too thin. He’s planning on applying for Kansas Heritage Trust Fund grants, which only require the alliance to come up with 20 percent of the cost of restoration.

Tim Smith, 58, Cole’s brother, who lived across the street from the Betzen home in the late 1960s, remembers playing hide-and-seek, singing, dancing and jumping off the front porch.

“It will be strange (seeing it in a new location),” Smith said. “I’m just really glad it can be preserved.”

This story was originally published September 10, 2015 at 2:23 PM with the headline "Victorian ‘mobile’ home takes a ride across the street."