Room found under playground

Owners of older homes know they might run into a surprise when they start a home improvement project.

Workers installing new playground equipment on the south side of Dundee Elementary School, 51st and Davenport Streets, found a kind of underground room.

Kaye Goetzinger, Dundee’s principal, said the workers were drilling a hole to set a pole when they hit brick and mortar and punched through into the space.

She said the space, which had a partially curved top, reminded her of a tunnel. Some old cans were inside, as well as some pipes. It was deep enough that it would have taken a ladder to get down into it.

“We really don’t know,” she said. “There was no buried treasure.”

Mark Warneke, the Omaha school district’s director of buildings and grounds, said his staff didn’t know the room was there. He doesn’t recall having seen it on the plans he perused when the district remodeled the more than 100-year-old structure in 1994.

The space, which was about 16 feet long, might have been an old coal room, he said. Coal may have been shoveled into carts and wheeled to the boilers that once filled a large share of the school’s basement. When new heating and cooling systems were installed, the basement space became classrooms.

“You’ve got some good-sized rooms in those old buildings because you were burning a lot of coal,” he said.

Warneke said the room was checked to make sure it was structurally sound. Part of the ceiling fell in during the drilling, so supports were installed to keep it from collapsing. A concrete cap was placed over it. Soil will be placed over the cap. On top will go a concrete slab and rubber surface for the playground.

“We feel pretty good that it’s not going to cave in,” he said.

Although the playground isn’t yet ready for play, the school held ribbon-cutting ceremonies Tuesday for students and others. The new equipment replaces structures that some Dundee parents remember from their days at the school 20 years or more ago, Goetzinger said.

The playground project was paid for by funds raised by the parent-teacher association, including money from Dundee-area businesses, as well as by a major grant from the Sherwood Foundation and contributions from Lowe’s home improvement stores.

Said Warneke, “You never know what’s going to happen when you’re digging around in an old school site.”

Contact the writer:

444-1223, julie.anderson@owh.com

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