CLATSKANIE – The outside of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows Hall in Clatskanie is deceptive: Newly painted and rebuilt, it gives no indication of the gutted out wasteland of boxes and furniture lurking inside.

What the hall really has is potential. First opened in 1927, it has the potential to be a cultural center, a performance space, an office space and a monument to the history of a small town.

“At our one traffic light, that is the building face that you see,” said John Moore, head of the Clatskanie Chamber of Commerce. “It has really been an eyesore.”

The hall has not kept pace with the town, which has grown over the last five years with the opening of a new inn and a new mall, Moore said.

“It’s great that we are giving these old buildings a facelift,” he said. “You’d love to have tourists stop and check out your little town. This beautiful historical building will give a sparkle to Clatskanie. Maybe it will get people to turn left … to stay and visit the local stores and restaurants.”

The Clatskanie Foundation, the Clatskanie Arts Commission and City Hall joined in this vision when the Foundation bought the dilapidated building on South Nehalem Street two years ago.

Located at the heart of town, the hall is one of only several really old buildings in the area. The recently rebuilt facade is only a few weeks old, but already the community is talking.

“People come into the bank and they’re abuzz with how great (the hall) looks,” said Moore, who manages Sterling Savings Bank in Clatskanie. “They’re sharing stories about how they used to go there when they were kids to watch movies.”

“I’ve been bringing people out here to see the hall all day, ‘Look, isn’t it just great?’,” laughed Deborah Hazen, publisher and editor of The Clatskanie Chief and a member of the Foundation.

Hazen has been instrumental in researching the history of the hall. It was actually her daughter who stumbled on the building’s original blueprints while conducting research for a her master’s degree thesis at the Oregon Historical Society in Portland. This led Hazen to further research the building. She discovered that it had been designed by famed Oregon architect Ernst Kroner, the brain behind many schools, churches and other buildings in Astoria, Portland, Seaside, and Gresham.

“We have so few historical buildings,” said Mayor Diane Pohl. “We have to cling to what we have.”

In the last 83 years, the IOOF Hall has housed a movie theater, a florist shop, a post office, a dentist’s office, and a lodge for the fraternal organization that gave it its name, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. It was a center for meetings and community dances.

“They were good dances. The floor would kind of bounce a little,” chuckled Bill Mellinger, 74, a retired Clatskanie fire chief and former IOOF member. “It was a very pretty building.”

A mixed historyBut over the years, it has slipped into disrepair. The theater closed its doors in the 1990s, unable to compete with movie theaters in Longview, Wash. The Clatskanie IOOF lodge also disbanded around this time. Membership had shrunk to two or three people.

Always a background in old pictures of summer parades, the hall became shabbier and shabbier as the years and paraders marched by. It passed from owner to owner. The hall’s most recent use has been as a warehouse.

The Foundation is more familiar with organizing scholarships for the high school than rebuilding derelict halls. But when Keith Birkenfeld, whose family came from Clatskanie, left a $500,000 bequest to be used for a physical community project in the town, the Foundation decided the hall would meet the criteria perfectly. They bought it.

It took all of the half million to buy the hall, hire architects to come up with a master plan and rebuild the facade. It’s going to cost $2 million more dollars to complete the project.

The battle of the facade is over – the scaffolding came down Jan.21.

Let the battle of the grants begin.

David Hicks, a former engineer and current ?Foundation member, and Elsa Wooley, the grants coordinator for the Arts Commission, are optimistic about gaining the necessary grants. The tight partnership between the foundation, the commission and the city presents a convincing front, they say. Wooley says the Oregon Arts Commissions offers community grants specifically for such partnerships.

Hicks has been working closely with the National Registry of Historic Places to approve the hall and register it as a historic landmark. This title would further increase the project’s credibility.

“It just takes your breath away driving past (the hall) now,” Wooley said. “Our community is very arts oriented. It’s wonderful that there’s going to be another venue … Other than the high school and the park, if the weather’s nice, we really don’t have any other venue right now.”

When the hall is finished, it will be used in much the same way as it had been before. The top floor will have offices and the dance floor. The bottom floor will house a small theater for community productions instead of movies and some space will be reserved for retail. There will be elevators, central heating, and up-to-date plumbing.

But that’s still far in the future. The work has only just begun.

“It’s kind of like a Hardy Boys mystery building in here,” said Hicks, picking his way along a makeshift path of boards on the first floor.

Dirt floors slope away into a tangle of furniture piled over 10 feet high in the theater on the ground floor. Stage curtains hang in the gloom below, stained and fungus-colored, pale against the dark walls. An abandoned toilet rises out of the dirt like a sea shell in the sand.

One of the original owners, hoping to refurbish the building, stripped the interior, then inconveniently went bankrupt before he could make repairs. Another owner destroyed the plumbing when he set up a special irrigation system for his crop of marijuana plants.

Sunshine filters through the dust on the hall’s second floor, glancing off the yellow glass body of a broken lamp and piles of banana boxes stacked like city walls and full of odds and ends.

But the huge wooden beams overhead keeping the ceiling afloat are solid and massive. They’ve been there since 1927 and are still stable, Hicks said. Outside, beyond the tarp and wire fence the builders set up to block the entrance, the new facade gleams white and clean in the sun.

“It’s given a lot of people a new hope,” Hicks said. “To see something so central to the community go to wreck and ruin and then to see it restored.”