Trumbull School, ca. 1920. Courtesy of Edgewater Historical Society.

Lyman Trumbull Elementary School
5200 North Ashland Avenue
Historical profile by Julia S. Bachrach

At the end of the 2012-2013 academic year, Lyman Trumbull School closed down after operating as an elementary school for more than a century. In May of 2013, the Board of Education announced its final decision to shutter 50 Chicago public schools. This effort has resulted in “the largest single wave of planned public school closures in U.S. history.” (1) Thousands of students and their families feel deeply embittered by the decision. A group of Trumbull School parents who had children in special education programs there have filed a federal discrimination lawsuit against the Chicago Public Schools. On June 24, 2013, the school’s final day, hundreds of parents, teachers, and children gathered for a bittersweet goodbye celebration at the building on the corner of West Foster and North Ashland avenues in the Andersonville community.

© 2013 James Iska

Interestingly, similar activities occurred at the same location more than a hundred years ago, when citizens celebrated the construction of the large, two-tone brick building named for Lyman Trumbull (1813 – 1896) a lawyer and U.S. Senator from Illinois who helped write the 13th Amendment. Throngs gathered on October 3, 1908, for a ceremony to lay Trumbull School’s cornerstone. Children sang and marched. Superintendent Edwin Cooley, Chief Justice Harry Olson, and the Chicago Public Schools’ head architect Dwight H. Perkins made speeches. (2) The school opened in the fall of 1909 and was formally dedicated the following spring. (3)

© 2013 James Iska

Perkins used the same set of plans for Trumbull and for the George Tilton Elementary School, located on the city’s West Side. In its 1907 Annual Report, the Board of Education published floor plans labeled as “Tilton and Trumbull Schools,” with text describing the prototype as “a new type of school building.”(4)

Tilton Elementary School, ca. 1910. Courtesy of Bill Latoza.

The Architectural Record described Trumbull and Tilton schools as representing “the most successful of all of Mr. Perkins’ designs.” (5) Among several innovative aspects of the plan was that it could adapt to the unpredictable needs related to future growth. Perkins designed the 20-room buildings to allow for one or two 10-room additions that could be constructed “without interfering with school sessions.” (6) As anticipated, the need for more space quickly arose and an addition was constructed in 1913 at the north end of the building.

Trumbull School, ca. 1940. The 1913 addition can be seen beyond the tower on the far right. Courtesy of Bill Latoza.

In addition to the adaptability of the floor plan, the design had features that were considered revolutionary at the time. For instance, bathrooms had long been included only in the basements of schools, and students had to line up in crowded dreary spaces for their chance to use the toilet. Perkins decided to provide bathrooms on every story. As the Chicago Daily Tribune explained: “the most radical feature of the new building will be the complete elimination of the basement. Toilet conveniences will be placed in ‘tower rooms’ on each floor.” (7)

© 2013 James Iska

The exterior appearance of the two identical buildings also represented “a bold departure from traditional school architecture.” (8) Each is composed of a large box-like mass with strong horizontal lines formed by two shades of tan brick. This horizontality is juxtaposed with vertical elements expressed through hipped roof towers, as well as lines expressed in the fenestration. (The hipped roofs of Trumbull’s towers were later removed, although Tilton still retains these elements.)

The Brickbuilder, an early 20th-century architectural publication, highlighted the importance of the alternating colors of the brick, terra cotta, and stone in enlivening what might otherwise have been large, mundane facades:

© 2013 James Iska

A rather unusual appearance results from the horizontal bands upon the exterior. These courses are made of buff brick, alternating in the light and dark tones. The base and lower trimmings are of Bedford stone, while above the first story is substituted with terra cotta, which maintains the same color and texture as the adjacent brick. The towers lend considerable interest to what might otherwise prove a monotonous and tiresome treatment of the façade and at the same time provide for toilet rooms on each floor. (9)

© 2013 James Iska

Among Perkins’s other design innovations were modern ventilation, “unilateral light” in all classrooms, and a large, spacious auditorium with “easy access to the main entrances” that would make the space practical for community meetings and events. (10) In 1913, an unknown artist painted two arched murals depicting Christopher Columbus’s ships sailing to the New World above the doorways leading into Trumbull School’s auditorium. The Chicago Conservation Center conserved the murals in 2011.

© 2013 James Iska

After Chicago Public Schools decided to close Trumbull Elementary, officials considered removing the two murals in early June 2013, to have them placed in protective storage. Parents especially objected to the idea of removing the murals while classes were still in session, and administrators agreed to delay the removal until sometime after the school’s closing. (11) As of September 2013, the murals remain in place. This is also true for dozens of other murals in six other newly-closed schools.

In addition to Lyman Trumbull School, there are other Perkins-designed buildings that are on the list of recently closed schools. These are Graeme Stewart School in the Uptown community and Francis Scott Key School in Austin.

© 2013 James Iska

Notes

1. “Chicago School Closings Vote: Board of Education Votes to Shutter 50 Public Schools,” The Huffington Post, May 22, 2013 available on-line at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/22/chicago-school-closings_n_3319755.html
2. “Stone to be Laid in Style,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 3, 1908, p. 3.
3. “Want City Folks on Farm,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 19. 1910, p. 3.
4. Fifty-forth Annual Report of the Board of Education for the Year Ending June 30, 1908, March 1909, plate between pp. 154-55, and p. 174.
5. Peter B. Wight, “Public School Architecture at Chicago: The Work of Dwight H. Perkins,” The Architectural Record, Volume 27, June 1910, p. 7.
6. Fifty-forth Annual Report, p. 174.
7. “New Type of School; No Basement: Expected by Board of Education’s Architect That It Will Stop Crowding,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 14, 1907, p. 3.
8. Julia S. Bachrach and Jo Ann Nathan, Inspired by Nature: The Garfield Park Conservatory and Chicago’s West Side, Chicago: Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance, 2008, p. 114.
9. “Three New Schoolhouses, Chicago: Dwight H. Perkins, Architect,” The Brickbuilder, VXVIII, No. 11, November, 1909, p. 229.
10. Ibid.
11. Jennifer Delgado, “Historic Murals to Stay at Trumbull Elementary, for now,” Chicago Tribune, June 7, 2013, available on-line at http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-06-07/news/ct-met-historic-trumbull-mural-20130607_1_heather-becker-murals-cps-schools

Wendell Phillips High School, ca. 1940. Courtesy of Bill Latoza.

Wendell Phillips Academy High School
244 East Pershing Boulevard
Historical profile by Elizabeth A. Patterson

An imposing building by William Bryce Mundie, Wendell Phillips Academy High School sits at the corner of East Pershing Boulevard and South Prairie Avenue, near the southern edge of Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. Established in 1904 and named for an abolitionist, within a few short decades of its founding, Wendell Phillips had become Chicago’s first predominantly African-American high school, a point of pride and an important anchor for the surrounding community.

© 2013 James Iska

The Chicago Board of Education built Wendell Phillips High School to replace the aging South Division High School which stood about two miles north, at 26th Street and Wabash Avenue. A four-story brick structure designed by Board Architect James R. Willett, South Division High opened in January 1884. With its 17 classrooms and fourth floor assembly hall, South Division was the third of four “divisional” high schools built to educate the city’s older children after the Chicago Fire. The divisional high schools, though built with future growth in mind, soon overflowed with students, as Chicago nearly doubled in size through annexation in the years around 1889. (1)

By the end of the 19th century, the educational needs of the South Side had far outpaced the capacity of the old South Division High School. Even as South Division celebrated its 25th anniversary in 1900, representatives of “South Town,” led by former City Councilman and soon-to-be U.S. Representative Martin B. Madden, President of the Western Stone Company, were pleading for a new school building, decrying the existing structure as “altogether unfit to the purpose for which it is used, and a constant menace to the health of the children and teachers who are obliged to use it.”(2) The Board of Education soon began to plan for a modern high school about two miles further south, on 39th Street (now Pershing), between Prairie and Forest (now Giles), in what was then a primarily middle- and working-class neighborhood, many of whose residents were European immigrants.

© 2013 James Iska

Board Architect William B. Mundie designed a symmetrical, three-and-one-half-story Neo-Classical style structure of brick and limestone, its primary façade facing south onto 39thStreet. At the center of this façade, three elaborate stone portals frame the main doorways. Three-story Ionic stone pilasters divide the nine central bays. Decorative stone lintels with prominent keystones top the second and third story windows.

© 2013 James Iska

Above the central portals, just below the roofline, the school’s name is incised in large letters within a stone panel. At either corner of the building, pavilions with quoined corners project slightly beyond the central mass of the building. On the somewhat simpler east and west façades, along Giles and Prairie, Mundie placed secondary entrances topped by limestone pediments and set in projecting bays. A smooth limestone water table anchors the base of the building, and a simple cornice caps it. Classrooms run along the three street facades in a U-shaped fashion; Mundie filled the central core with a first floor assembly hall and gymnasium.

© 2013 James Iska

On November 4, 1902, South Division students and alumni gathered to lay the cornerstone for the new structure, which was to be the largest high school in the city. (3) The Board hoped to open the much-needed facility in September, 1903, but labor troubles intervened: from August to December of 1903, construction workers refused to continue working because one contractor had tried to use non-union laborers. The strike was eventually resolved, and the new building finally opened at the start of the 1904 school year. (4)

© 2013 James Iska

The Board of Education named the new high school in memory of noted abolitionist Wendell Phillips (1811–1884). A Harvard-educated lawyer and son of Boston’s first mayor, Phillips took up the anti-slavery cause in 1836, shortly after seeing the near-lynching of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. A member of the American Anti-Slavery Society and a gifted public speaker, Phillips was known as “abolition’s Golden Trumpet.” After the Civil War, he dedicated himself to other causes, including Native Americans’ rights and women’s suffrage. (5)

In the first years after its opening, Wendell Phillips High School’s student body was primarily of European descent. From the start, however, African American students also attended the school. The Near South Side had long been home to a small African-American community, and by the turn of the 20th century, the narrow “Black Belt” was growing southward. (6) While there were only four black Phillips graduates in 1912, twenty-five African Americans graduated with the class of 1914, and the number continued to grow. (7)

Racial conflicts sometimes arose in the early years, as when, in 1915, the school’s dean of girls began to hold weekly dance functions, and then established racially-separated ones after some white parents protested the inclusion of African American students. (8) In 1917, The Chicago Defender, a locally-published and nationally-distributed African American newspaper, optimistically noted the potential for more harmony when it published a photograph of a platoon of Phillips High School cadets at a citywide event. Noting the presence of “members of the Race, the Jew, the Greek, the Irish, and the Swede, all led by Sergeant Hughes [an African-American student],” the photograph, it said, “brings out true manhood, no color, no creed, all one.” (9)

By the early 1920s, Wendell Phillips’ student body was predominantly African-American, the first such high school in Chicago. The school’s changing racial make-up followed that of the surrounding neighborhoods, which had seen an increasing influx of black southerners since 1910. Encouraged by The Chicago Defender, many of these African Americans had come in search of dependable jobs in Chicago’s expanding industrial sector. They found such jobs, but also discovered restrictive covenants forcing them to live in only a narrow corridor on the city’s South Side. Often known as Bronzeville, this area became a thriving hub of African American commerce and culture. (10)

© 2013 James Iska

Wendell Phillips High School quickly became one of Bronzeville’s most important institutions. The building held not only high school students (considered the pride of their community), but also “prevocational students” – sixth, seventh, and eighth graders who were thought likely to drop out before high school without extra attention. (11) The presence of the prevocational program made Wendell Phillips a logical location for a junior high school when, in 1924, the Board of Education created such schools citywide for seventh, eighth, and ninth graders. (12)

By the late 1920s, the student population far outpaced the capacity of the school building, necessitating the use of portable classrooms and the implementation of two half-day shifts. In 1931, the Board of Education began building a larger high school (also to be known as Wendell Phillips) at 49th and Wabash, but the project was delayed due to a shortage of funds. By the time the new high school reached completion in the mid-1930s, however, it had become apparent that it could not hold all the neighborhood’s high school-age students. The Board of Education therefore decided to send only sophomores, juniors, and seniors to the new Wendell Phillips High School, while freshman attended the old Wendell Phillips school. (13) The Board also decided to add a new elementary school wing onto the old Phillips building. (The junior high program within the old Phillips building had been discontinued in 1933 as a part of a district-wide cost-saving measure. The Board had repurposed the space as elementary school classrooms.) (14)

1936 Phillips Elementary and High School addition, John C. Christensen, architect. Courtesy of Bill Latoza.

Unfortunately, on January 29, 1935, even before the new school opened, the old Wendell Phillips building caught fire. The central section of the building, which held the assembly hall and gymnasium, as well as the heating plant, was gutted. Despite the destruction, the surrounding classrooms were open for business a few days later, the same day the new Phillips was dedicated. (15) (The following year, the new Wendell Phillips High School, designed by Paul Gerhardt, Sr., was rechristened in honor of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the Haitian-born first settler of Chicago.) (16)

DuSable High School, viewed from 50th and State streets, was briefly called New Phillips High School. 1935. Courtesy of Bill Latoza.

By the spring of 1936, Board of Education Architect John C. Christensen had developed plans for repairing and improving the central portion of the old Phillips High School, including a new assembly hall, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a lunchroom, and chorus and band rooms. The new elementary school wing would run north of the original building along Prairie Avenue. (17)

John C. Christensen designed this wing north of the old Phillips High School to house Phillips Elementary School. Ca. 1935. Courtesy of Bill Latoza.

Christensen’s brick and limestone addition echoes many elements of Mundie’s 1904 design (the brick quoins and raised stone basement, for example), but has somewhat more streamlined ornamentation (e.g., it lacks a cornice). The words “Wendell Phillips Elementary” are incised over the addition’s two entrances. The building projects were not yet fully complete when a second fire swept through several classrooms in November, 1937. (18) Repairs were soon made.

By the mid-1940s, the Wendell Phillips building was in constant use. At night, adults came for “Evening School” courses in academic subjects, English for non-English-speakers, citizenship, trades such as millinery and architectural drawing, and wartime training including preflight aeronautics. High school students were again attending school on split shifts. To address overcrowding at the grade school level, the Board of Education added a 20-room extension to the elementary school wing in 1944. (19)

Crowding was still a significant problem in the 1960s. Students attended school in three shifts, and some classes were held in portables. The school underwent a major rehabilitation in the early 1970s, but by that time the population of Wendell Phillips High School had finally begun to fall, as African Americans relocated to other areas of the city. In the 1990s, the Public Building Commission completed exterior improvements and created new greenspace and athletic facilities between Wendell Phillips and Mayo Elementary, just to the north. (20) In 1999, the Chicago Conservation Center restored four seriously deteriorated murals that date to 1906, just after Wendell Phillips’ construction. These are among the oldest murals in the Chicago Public Schools. (21)

© 2013 James Iska

Wendell Phillips High School has a long history of accomplished alumni. A group of Phillips basketball players of the 1920s joined the semi-professional “Savoy Big Five,” which quickly became the renowned Harlem Globetrotters. Entertainers such as Nat “King” Cole, Dinah Washington, and Sam Cooke were Phillips graduates. So, too, were publisher John H. Johnson and historian and author Timuel D. Black. In fact, there have been so many successful graduates of Wendell Phillips High School that its alumni association created its own Hall of Fame in 1979. This list of notable alumni continues to grow. (22)

Noteworthy for both its architecture and its strong associations with the history of African-Americans in Chicago, Wendell Phillips High School was named a Chicago Landmark in 2003. (23) In recent years, the Wendell Phillips building has been home to the Ida B. Wells Elementary School. In September 2013, the Wells School moved a block north, into the existing Mayo Elementary School building. Wendell Phillips Academy High School, since 2010 a turnaround school affiliated with the Academy for Urban School Leadership, remains in the landmark 1904 building. (24)

Notes

1. Department of Public Instruction, City of Chicago, Twenty-ninth Annual Report of the Board of Education for the Year Ending June 30, 1883, pp. 34, 76-78; Department of Public Instruction, City of Chicago, Thirtieth Annual Report of the Board of Education for the Year Ending June 30, 1884, pp. 15, 72. The other three divisional high schools were: West (1880, Augustus Bauer; 1884 addition, J. J.  Flanders), North (now, Salazar Elementary Bilingual Education Center; 1883, Julius Ender), and Northwest (1889). In 1911, South Division High School became the first home of Lucy Flower Technical School. For more information on the divisional high schools, see Dale Allen Gyure, “Monuments to Education,” Chicago History, Vol. XXXII, No. 2, Fall 2003, pp. 54-57.
2. “Plead for New High School: Citizens from the South Side Want the South Division Building Replaced by a Better Structure,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 15, 1900; “Silver Anniversary of a High School: South Division Will Celebrate its 25th-Birthday Next Month—Remarkable Growth of the Institution,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 27, 1900. South Division actually remained open as a manual training school, and in 1911, became the first home of Lucy Flower Technical High School for Girls.
3. “Board to Build Business School; Announcement Made at Cornerstone Laying of the New South Division High,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 4, 1902.
4. “Building Delay Bars Out Pupils,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 26, 1903; “Ultimatum Sent Unions by Board of Education,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 9, 1903; “Six New Schools Ready,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 2, 1904.
5. http://www.pbs.org/civilwar/war/biographies/phillips.html.
6. Adrian Capehart, “Douglas,” and Wallace Best, “Grand Boulevard,” The Encyclopedia of Chicago, ed. James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, and Janice L. Reiff. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 244, 357.
7. Wendell Phillips High School: Preliminary Summary of Information Submitted to the Commission on Chicago Landmarks in September 2002, p. 6; “Twenty-Five Pupils Graduate from Wendell Phillips High School,” The Chicago Defender, June 27, 1914.
8. “’Jim Crow’ Rule, Or No Dances, Say Schoolgirls,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 6, 1915; “Discrimination at Wendell Phillips High School Can’t Be Smoothed Over,” The Chicago Defender, January 23, 1915.
9. “A Wonderful Picture,” Chicago Defender, June 23, 1917.
10. “Douglas,” The Encyclopedia of Chicago, p. 244.
11. “Better English,” The Chicago Defender, May 27, 1922.
12. “Assigns School Divisions for Junior High,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 3, 1924.
13. “New Phillips High School to Open Tomorrow; Classes Also to Continue in Old Building,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 3, 1935.
14. “Schools Listed in $5,716,000 Building Plan,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 2, 1935; “School Economy to Save Millions on New Buildings,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 17, 1933.
15. “New Phillips High School to Open Tomorrow; Classes Also to Continue in Old Building,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 3, 1935.
16. “Change Name of Phillips High School,” Chicago Defender, April 25, 1936.
17. “New Phillips Grade School,” Chicago Defender, April 24, 1936.
18. “Launch Inquiry in $15,000 Fire at High School,” Chicago Tribune, November 19, 1937.
19. ”Evening School at Phillips High to Open Sept. 13,” Chicago Tribune, August 29, 1943; 2 Shift Schools Pose Problems, Asserts Report,” Chicago Tribune, October 7, 1943; “Building Ready to House 1,500 Pupils by Dec. 1,” Chicago Tribune, November 12, 1944.
20. http://www.phillips.cps.k12.il.us/history.
21. Heather Becker, Art for the People: The Rediscovery and Preservation of Progressive- and WPA-Era Murals in the Chicago Public Schools, 1904-1906 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002), pp. 174-175.
22. http://www.phillips.cps.k12.il.us/alumni; http://www.wendellphillipshalloffame.8m.com.
23. http://webapps.cityofchicago.org/landmarksweb/web/landmarkdetails.htm?lanId=1399.
24. http://cps.edu.

The 1896 Humboldt School designed by W. August Fiedler. Courtesy of Bill Latoza.

Alexander von Humboldt Elementary School
2622 West Hirsch Avenue
Historical profile by Julia S. Bachrach and Bill Latoza

In May of 2013, when the Chicago Board of Education made a final decision to shutter fifty schools throughout the city, Alexander Von Humboldt School was the only one to receive a split vote. Several months earlier, two board members visited the school after parents and teachers asked them to come see the “programs and conditions that they felt made the school deserving of another chance.” (1) Although the visit went well, four of the board’s six members voted to close down Von Humboldt School. Altogether, four public schools are no longer open in the Humboldt Park neighborhood, because the board also unanimously decided to shutter three nearby buildings— Duprey, Ryerson, and Lafayette schools.

© 2013 James Iska

Alexander Von Humboldt School was one of the first schools designed by John J. Flanders after his appointment as official Chicago school architect in 1884. The original 15-classroom building was located on the corner of Hirsch and Rockwell Streets. Rendered in a simple expression of the Italianate style, the red brick building was T-shaped in plan.

© 2013 James Iska

Flanders enlivened the facades with decorative brickwork and unglazed red terra cotta details. At the original front façade, the terra cotta elements include panels that read “Erected 1884” and “Von Humboldt School.”

© 2013 James Iska

Flanders also sought to improve Chicago school designs by providing better light and ventilation. Some of his advances can be seen in the facades of the oldest section of Von Humboldt School, such as its numerous large windows, some of which are rectangular and others have arched hoods. He provided upgraded heating systems ventilated with tall vertical chimneys that had exterior brickwork. (One can still be seen at the North Rockwell Street façade today.) The school board commended Flanders for making these improvements, describing his early buildings as “model school buildings, fully equal, if not superior, to any in the country.” (2)

© 2013 James Iska

As the Humboldt Park neighborhood grew rapidly in the early 1890s, Von Humboldt School became quite overcrowded. In 1895, the Board of Education allocated more than $72,000 to build a second structure adjacent to the original the building. Designed by W. August Fiedler, who replaced Flanders as head architect in 1893, the new structure had nineteen rooms and an assembly hall. (The assembly hall was located on the third floor.) Although the new school was an entirely freestanding building, it related to the earlier Flanders-designed structure through the use of red brick and cut limestone. The Chicago Tribune published a rendering of Fiedler’s design without even showing the original adjacent building, which was still in operation. (3)

Seen from Hirsch and Rockwell streets, the first Von Humboldt school, built in 1884, is on the right and the 1896 structure is left.

Fiedler’s Von Humboldt School bears strong resemblance to several of his other building such as Augustus Burley and Richard Yates schools. All three have heavy bases articulated in limestone which boldly contrast with the lively red brick facades above. They each have three sided projecting bays with portal windows beneath copper cornices that extend across the upper level of all facades.

© 2013 James Iska

Completed in 1896, the new Von Humboldt School fronted onto West Hirsch Street. Unlike the entrance façade, the secondary West Talman Avenue façade conveys the Italian Renaissance style through symmetrical repeating arched windows, a pronounced projecting cornice, and unglazed terra cotta medallions with sculptural busts of female figures.

© 2013 James Iska

Despite the large number of new classrooms, community members immediately complained about continuing problems with overcrowding. Only weeks after the building opened, the Humboldt Park Improvement Club wrote a letter to the Chicago Tribune noting that it still didn’t meet the needs of the community. In fact, approximately a hundred students were reduced to half-day shifts and more than two hundred were housed in rented rooms. (4) This problem persisted until the end of WWI, when the board directed Arthur Hussander, who had served as head architect since 1910, to design an addition for Von Humboldt School.

West Talman Avenue facade of the 1896 Von Humboldt School. Courtesy of Bill Latoza.

Completed in 1921, Hussander’s addition includes two masses. One of them, which fronted onto West Hirsch Street, connected the original 1884 building with Fielder’s 1896 structure. The other Hussander-designed addition extends north along North Talman Avenue. Both additions were executed in red brick and limestone which helps unify the complex into one large building. The North Talman Avenue addition has a larger auditorium on the first floor. An ornate secondary entranceway marking the location of the auditorium has three arched openings embellished with lavish carved limestone details.

© 2013 James Iska

Limestone detail on Hussander addition to Von Humboldt School. © 2013 James Iska

The Public Building Commission made some improvements to Von Humboldt School in the early 1990s; however, the building was still in need of additional work. As part of the CPS Historic Schools Initiative, the structure received a major renovation in 2008. Undertaken by BauerLatoza Studio, the ambitious project resulted in a sensitive renovation that repaired and re-pointed the masonry, re-created the missing terra cotta and stone detailing, and replaced the windows with ones that matched the original designs.

At the beginning of the 2008-2009 school year, Ana Roque de Duprey School moved its operations from 1405 N. Washtenaw into the Von Humboldt building. Duprey continued operating as a separate school until the closing of Von Humboldt in June 2013.

Notes

1. Victoria Johnson “Von Humboldt to Close Along with Three Other Humboldt Park Schools” DNA Chicago, May 22, 2013, available at http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20130522/humboldt-park/von-humboldt-close-along-with-three-other-humboldt-park-schools
2. Thirtieth Annual Report of the Chicago Board of Education for the Year Ending June 24, 1884, p. 84.
3. “Bids for New Schools,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 11, 1896, p. 13
4. “Even Now There is No Room: Humboldt Park Children Badly Overcrowded in Their School,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 22, 1896, p. 10.

Ariel Community Academy
North Kenwood Oakland Charter Elementary School
1110 East 46th Street
Historical profile by Julia S. Bachrach

Ariel Community Academy, Chicago, IL, c.1880s. Flanders & Zimmerman, architects. Inland Architect, Ryerson and Burhnam Libraries, The Art Institute of Chicago. Digital File #IA2402_1633.

In 2001, the Chicago Public Schools completed a $12.5 million renovation of the old Shakespeare School building.  This project not only provided the thorough rehabilitation of a significant historic building, but also allowed the structure, which had stood vacant several years earlier, to fully accommodate two separate schools, Ariel Community Academy and North Kenwood Oakland Charter Elementary School (NKO).  As parents and students of both schools gathered in the building’s auditorium for dedication ceremonies, “Two ribbons were tied together to symbolize the coming together of the two schools.” (1)  This initiative to reuse a large building to house two smaller schools was highlighted in a publication entitled Schools Sharing Buildings, A Toolkit: Principles and Practice from the Chicago Public Schools. A website known as Architects of Achievement, which is devoted to creating “bridges between education and architecture,” offers this pamphlet as a resource for school districts throughout the nation as they grapple with efforts to save underutilized historic schools. (2)

© 2014 James Iska

The Schools Sharing Buildings pamphlet explains that Shakespeare School’s layout was well-suited to the conversion. The building’s floor plan allows each of the schools to have “…its own wing with separate entrances and signage, and shared space in the center of the building.” (3)  The building adapted well to its two functions because Shakespeare School began as small structure that opened in 1892 with a series of additions built between the 1890s and the mid-1950s.

© 2014 James Iska

The school building is located in the Kenwood community, which became part of Chicago in 1889, when the Village of Hyde Park was annexed to the city.  The following year, a local committee secured Chicago as the location for a major world’s fair, and Jackson Park and adjacent Midway Plaisance were selected as the site for the World’s Columbian Exposition (4).  Preparations for the fair spurred rapid growth throughout the South Side, particularly in the neighborhoods located in close proximity to the fairgrounds, such as the area encompassing what had been the Village of Hyde Park, including Kenwood and Oakland, the community area just north of Kenwood.

In the early 1890s, the Board of Education took control of many existing schools in the newly annexed areas of the city. (5)  One example, the Greenwood Avenue School had been built at southeast corner of Greenwood Avenue and 46^th Street in 1881 (6).  Although it was less than a decade old, the two-story brick building could not satisfy the surging numbers of elementary school children in the surrounding area.  The Board’s Buildings and Grounds Committee instructed its head architect John J. Flanders to design a large new sixteen-classroom building in two well-orchestrated stages.

First phase, Shakespeare School. © 2014 James Iska

In the first phase, Flanders produced plans for a six-classroom structure to be built at the southeast side of the lot.  Designed to seat approximately 400 pupils, this first portion of the building could be built “without interfering with pupils attending this school.” (7) Contracts were awarded for the initial six-classroom building in August of 1891.

Second phase, Shakespeare School. © 2014 James Iska

The second phase called for a much larger structure with ten more classrooms, two recitation rooms, and a large assembly hall on the upper floor. “Contracts were awarded for the erection of this part of the building February 17, 1892.” (8) Through this two-phase process, students were able to occupy the first part of the new building in the fall of 1892 while the larger second phase was under construction.  The older Greenwood Avenue School was then demolished. When completed in 1893, the building provided space for 884 students. (9)

© 2013 James Iska

The larger, second-phase portion of the complex, an L-shaped structure that faced both  Greenwood and 46^th Street, connected with the older six-classroom structure in the rear to form a “U”, thereby creating a courtyard space between the two masses.  The overall effect was quite harmonious.

Courtyard. © 2014 James Iska

Flanders rendered the two-and-a half story building in the Queen Anne style.  The part of the existing building is composed of red brick and brightly contrasting limestone. The masonry includes rusticated cut stone along the entire base of the building, as well as smooth limestone arches, panels, stringcourses. Doorways at both Greenwood Avenue and 46th Street have smooth limestone surrounds with simple Gothic style detailing. A steeply pitched hipped roof tops the building. Broad dormers on both facades feature open porches or porticos; Doric columns support their engaged, hipped roofs.

© 2013 James Iska

The Board of Education formally named Greenwood Avenue School in honor of William Shakespeare (1564— 1616), the famous English playwright in 1904.  The board’s Special Committee on Naming Schools had just adopted a new policy to select school names that fell into one of three categories—United States Presidents; American figures who have made great accomplishments or have performed distinguished service to the city of Chicago; and “foreigner personages who have distinguished themselves in the field of science, art, literature, education, patriotism, or philanthropy.” (10)  At this time, the committee renamed many schools that had previously known by their locations in order to fulfill the new naming policy.

© 2014 James Iska

By the early 1920s, Shakespeare School suffered from severe overcrowding.  In fact, the board installed portable classrooms adjacent to the school to handle the overflow.  John C. Christensen designed a large building addition that replaced the mobile classrooms in 1924.  The $450,000 addition included ten classrooms, a cafeteria, gymnasium, library, sewing room and office. (11)

© 2014 James Iska

Christensen, who was first appointed as the board’s head architect three years earlier, often rendered additions to closely match the appearance of original buildings.  Here, however; he took the opposite approach, designing Shakespeare’s addition as though it were a completely separate building located next door to the old school.  Unlike red brick and rusticated limestone of the original building, Christensen’s addition is composed of tan brick, smooth cut limestone details.  He rendered the building in the Classical Revival style with symmetrical rows of rectangular windows, with the multiple bays divided by tall, fluted limestone pilasters.  Several doors and windows are topped by fanciful broken pediments pierced with Classical urns in sculptural relief.

© 2014 James Iska

© 2014 James Iska

In the post-WWII era, Chicago’s population grew rapidly, and Shakespeare School’s problems with overcrowding became even more extreme.  In 1951, the situation was so dire, that the school began to hold classes in double shifts (12).  Two years later, the Board of Education completed an $855,000 addition on the west side of the complex. (13) Christensen also designed this nineteen-classroom addition, which was more modern and utilitarian in appearance than the previous one.  But this final addition did not fully resolve Shakespeare School’s overcrowding issue.  Enrollment numbers continued to surge, and in the late 1950s, the school went back to double shifts.  The Board of Education soon changed attendance boundaries, which sent many students to other nearby schools with recent additions and mobile classrooms.

© 2014 James Iska

During this period Kenwood’s population underwent a dramatic shift. According to the Local community Fact Book,  “In 1950, the community was almost 85 percent white, and in 1960, it had changed to 84 percent black.” (14) Kenwood and adjacent South Side neighborhoods fell into decline.  The area suffered from overcrowding, dilapidated housing, high unemployment rates, and inadequate city services.  South Side schools received few improvements and suffered disproportionate overcrowding and inadequate staffing.

© 2014 James Iska

Strong community organizations such as the Hyde Park- Kenwood Community Conference and the Southeast Chicago Commission fostered neighborhood revitalization efforts and the area received substantial urban renewal funding.  By the late 1980s and early 1990s, many of the older homes that had been converted to multiple units decades earlier, were rehabilitated and reconverted to single family dwellings.  Improvements to the area also attracted new development, and Kenwood became a racially mixed middle class neighborhood.  In 1992, the Chicago Public Schools closed Shakespeare School, in response to poor academic performance and low attendance.  The area around the school continued to improve in the late 1990s, and high ranking officials including Alderman Toni Preckwinkle (now president of the Cook County Board) and Arne Duncan (who was appointed as Chief Executive Officer of the Chicago Public Schools and now serves as U.S. Secretary of Education) led the movement to convert Shakespeare School into the dual Ariel Community Academy and NKO campus (15).

© 2013 James Iska

Notes

1. Rick Hepp, “Comeback Continues as Schools Dedicated,” Chicago Tribune, May 30, 2001, available at http://www.archachieve.net/smallschools/SharingSpace.html.
2. Architects of Achievement: Designing Schools that Work for All Students, available at http://www.archachieve.net/smallschools/SharingSpace.html, link to document: http://www.archachieve.net/smallschools/Resources/tookits/SchoolsSharingBuildings.pdf
3. Ibid, p. 11.
4. Julia S. Bachrach, The City in a Garden: A History of Chicago’s Parks, Second Edition, 2012, p. 13.
5. Proceedings of the Board of Education of the City of Chicago, July 23, 1890 to June 30, 1891, p. 21.
6. The Public Schools of Chicago: Thirty-seventh Annual Report of the Board of Education for the Year Ending June 30, 1891, p. vi.
7. The Public Schools of Chicago: Thirty-eighth Annual Report of the Board of Education for the Year Ending June 30, 1892, p. 100.
8. The Public Schools of Chicago: Thirty-ninth Annual Report of the Board of Education for the Year Ending June 30, 1893, p. 203.
9. Ibid.
10. Proceedings of the Board of Education of the City of Chicago, July 8, 1903 to June 22, 1904, p. 766.
11. “$1 Million Addition to Morgan Park High School,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 9, 1924, p. A. 15.
12. “Parents Fight Grade School 2-Shift Plan,” Chicago Tribune, August 26, 1951, p. S1.
13. “4 New Schools, 7 Additions to Open on Sept. 9,” Chicago Tribune, August 17, 1953, p. 10.
14. The Chicago Fact Book Consortium, Local Community Fact Book Chicago Metropolitan Area: Based on the 1970 and 1980 Censuses.
15. Mary Patillo, Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City, The University of Chicago Press, 2007, p. 160.

O’Keeffe School, ca. 1935. Courtesy of Bill Latoza.

Isabelle C. O’Keeffe Elementary School
6940 Merrill Avenue 
Historical profile by Elizabeth A. Patterson

O’Keeffe Elementary School honors Isabelle C. O’Keeffe (?-1922), a woman who played an important role in the history of the Chicago Public Schools. Born Isabelle Kelly, O’Keeffe attended Chicago public schools and taught at the Graham Elementary School for six years before she married. In 1893, she became vice president of the International Press League, a mixed gender group of those involved in newspaper work. That same year, she founded the Catholic Women’s League, and served as its president for three years. O’Keeffe became a member of the Chicago Board of Education in 1898, serving until 1904, and then again from 1907 to 1910. She led the movement to establish kindergartens in the Chicago school system, supported education in “household arts,” pushed for bath facilities in the schools, and originated the “penny lunch,” which provided inexpensive hot lunches to poor school children. (1)

© 2013 Brooke Collins

Not long after her death in 1922, the Board of Education recognized O’Keeffe’s contributions by naming a school building in her honor. The new O’Keeffe Elementary School was to be located in the rapidly expanding South Shore neighborhood, where it would relieve overcrowding in the older Parkside School, not far to the west.

O’Keeffe School, ca. 1935. Courtesy of Bill Latoza.

The Annual Report of the Business Manager [of the Board of Education] for 1925 reported that Board Architect John C. Christensen “has completed plans and specifications, contracts have been awarded, and construction of [O’Keeffe Elementary School] is now in process.” (2) In point of fact, the O’Keeffe design can be credited not only to Christensen, but to Edgar D. Martin,and George D. Tesch as well. (3)

© 2013 Brooke Collins

O’Keeffe was just one of an unprecedented number of elementary and junior high schools, including Hirsch Junior High, which the Board of Education pushed to build over a short period of time during the mid-1920s. In 1924, the reform-minded school board appointed by recently-elected Mayor William Dever had hired Edgar Martin to supervise the ambitious building program, in effect elevating him over “Board Architect” Christensen, who was assigned to run the newly-created “Bureau of Architecture.” In any event, Martin and Christensen apparently worked closely with other staff architects to design the many new schools. The O’Keeffe School blueprints credit Christensen as “Architect,” Martin as “Supervisory Architect,” and George Tesch, a staff architect who worked for the Board of Education into the 1950s, as having “designed” the school. (4)

© 2013 Brooke Collins

In the fall of 1926, O’Keeffe Elementary students began attending a handsome and eclectic two-story building incorporating many Tudor Gothic elements. The red brick structure, trimmed with limestone, runs north-south, facing Merrill Avenue. The main, east façade features a central block capped by a slate mansard roof. A projecting, one-story bay and finialed, engaged buttresses enliven this section of the building. Thin, octagonal Jacobean towers with wind-vane-topped copper domes bracket the central block. Just beyond these tall, narrow towers are the building’s Tudor-arched portals, each set into a more squat, crenellated block tower and recessed beneath a projecting oriel bay. Beyond these entrances, at either end of the building, are crenellated end sections enhanced with additional buttresses and Tudor-arched windows. Another set of Tudor-ornamented entrances can be found at each end of the building, on the north and south facades.

© 2013 Brooke Collins

The impressive architectural detailing carried over to the building’s interior. Heavy Tudor Gothic ornament, including a Tudor-arched proscenium, adorned the assembly hall. The kindergarten room featured a fire place an inset mosaic tile panel.

To speed the construction of O’Keeffe and the many other new schools of the mid-1920s, Supervisory Architect Martin and Board Architect Christensen had developed a streamlined new building process.As Christensen explained in the 1925 Report of the Business Manager, “the former method of construction requiring the use of steel and tile for the structural parts has been replaced by reinforced concrete” and the Board had begun “awarding general contracts” in place of hiring various sub-contractors on a lowest-bid basis. (5) Unfortunately, it soon became apparent that these supposedly more efficient construction methods had backfired when the structural concrete at O’Keeffe and 31 other schools constructed in 1925 and 1926 began to fail.

© 2013 Brooke Collins

In May of 1929, a group of three structural engineering firms issued a scathing report detailing failures in “design, construction, and materials” at the 32 schools, most notably the failure to properly tie the reinforcing rods back into the walls. (6) The School Board immediately shut down two schools – the Hale and Peck elementary schools — for fear that they were an imminent danger to students. Eleven other schools (Edwards, Gompers, Cook, Farnsworth, Ebinger, Twain, Lyon, Hitch, Brennan, Clinton, and Lewis) were deemed to be “in advanced stages of disintegration,” but were thought to be salvageable with prompt repairs.” (7) The fault for these “defectives,” as they were known, was laid variously at the feet of Supervisory Architect Martin, who was indeed known for his experimentation with concrete building methods, and the general contractor and his sub-contractors, who were said to have supplied inferior concrete.

Fortunately for the students of O’Keeffe Elementary School, their facility was not among the worst of the defective buildings. In fact, O’Keeffe was among the last seven of the schools to be repaired. In June of 1934, the Chicago Daily Tribune reported that the schools would be repaired with “suspended roofs similar to the hanging domes of the Travel and Transport building at the [Century of Progress] World’s Fair.” (8) Rather than completely reconstructing the schools’ faulty roof structures, the existing roofs would be hung from new “iron beams which will be supported from heavy brick pilasters which will be erected on the sides of the building.” (9) At an average cost of $16,000 per school, this approach was both “novel” and “economical.” In addition to O’Keeffe, the Cook, Mann, O’Toole, Ruggles, Scammon, and Shoop schools received the new suspended roofs.

Two years later, the School Board expanded O’Keeffe Elementary with the help of Federal Works Progress Administration funds. The two-story, 12,000-square-foot addition to the structure’s northwest side supplanted three portable classrooms. Designed by Board Architect Christensen, the addition opened in September 1936. (10) (Christensen had regained his previous role as department head with Martin’s departure in early 1926.)

During the 1920s, the population of O’Keeffe School’s South Shore neighborhood had grown dramatically, from nearly 32,000 in 1920, to nearly 79,000 in 1930. The new arrivals had been mostly of Irish, Swedish, German, and Jewish extraction, joining the native-born white Protestants who already lived in the area. African Americans increasingly moved into South Shore after 1950, constituting about 10% of the neighborhood’s population by 1960. (11) Nevertheless, O’Keeffe Elementary remained an all-white school until January of 1962, when African American 8th graders from the overcrowded Parkside School joined the O’Keeffe student body. (12)

© 2007 Brooke Collins

By the mid-1960s, the O’Keeffe School, too, was again overcrowded, and six portable classrooms were placed in use. In 1971, “a 14 classroom ‘relocatable’ annex” was built on the school property. It is still in use today. O’Keeffe Elementary, a “turnaround school” now operated by the Academy for Urban School Leadership and known as O’Keeffe School of Excellence, was renovated in 2013. (13)

 Notes

1. Isabelle C. O’Keeffe, booklet published in conjunction with the naming of the O’Keeffe School in the collection of the Chicago History Museum; Isabelle C. O’Keeffe, undated memorandum in the collection of the Chicago Board of Education Archive.
2. The Annual Report of the Business Manager [of the Board of Education]for the Year Ending December 31, 1925, p. 17.
3. Architectural drawing dated December 17, 1924, in the collection of the Chicago History Museum.
4. Architectural drawing dated December 17, 1924, in the collection of the Chicago History Museum. George D. Tesch, A.I.A., designed schools for many years, resigning his longtime position with the Board of Education in 1957. “Tesch Resigns School Board Architect Post,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 21, 1957;1955 American Architects Directory George S. Koyl, editor (New York: R.R. Bowker Company, 1955), p. 554.
5. Report of the Business Manager for 1925, p. 18
6. “Reveal Neglect, Poor Work on Closed Schools,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 18, 1929.
7. “City Schools Shut; Unsafe; Engineers Find New Buildings Peril To Pupils; 30 Others Rapidly Falling to Ruin,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 17, 1929.
8. “Seven Schools to Get New Roofs of Suspended Type,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 14, 1934.
9. Ibid. (6/14/34)
10. “Locke and O’Keefe (sic) School Additions Get O.K. of PWA, Chicago Daily Tribune, January 11, 1936; “School Building Program to Get Under Way Feb. 8,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 1, 1936; The Annual Report of the Business Manager [of the Board of Education]for the Year Ending December 31, 1942, p. 75.
11. The Chicago Fact Book Consortium, eds., “South Shore,” Local Community Fact Book: Chicago Metropolitan Area (Chicago: The Chicago Fact Book Consortium, 1984), pp. 116-119.
12. “Parents Hear School Aid on Integration, Chicago Daily Tribune, November 3, 1961.
13. http://okeeffe.auslchicago.org/about; http://www.pbcchicago.com/content/projects/project_detail.asp?pID=18950.

George D. Tesch served as a Chicago Board of Education staff architect for many years. Born in New Jersey, Tesch practiced architecture in Ohio for a few years before arriving in Chicago. Hired by the Board of Education in 1921, Tesch worked under the supervision of John C. Christensen and Edgar D. Martin, when the Board of Education undertook ambitious building program that included such buildings as Isabelle O’Keeffe Elementary School, a handsome Tudor Revival-style school in the South Shore neighborhood . He continued as a staff architect to the Board for decades. According to the Chicago Tribune, by 1948, he was the board’s “Chief Architectural Designer,” a position in which he remained until he retired in 1957.

Tesch’s design work includes the Green School (now the private Hanna Sacks Bais Yaakov High School) at 3201 West Devon. A 1954 Chicago Tribune article entitled “Tribune Tower Stones Inspire School Design,” featured the modern concrete and stone school, with its colorful terra cotta plaques depicting topics of educational significance, including the Atomic Age – represented by the atom bomb test on Bikini Atoll.

Throughout his career at the Board of Education, Tesch pursued outside architectural projects. In the 1920s, Tesch worked on designs for several Chicago buildings. In subsequent decades, he became interested in portable, low-cost, and pre-fabricated buildings, developing a series of designs and filing a number of patent applications for such structures over the years.

Richard Yates School 1839 North Richmond Historical profile by Julia S. Bachrach

Yates School, ca. 1900. Courtesy of Bill Latoza.

In 1896, when construction began on a new school that would be located just east of Humboldt Boulevard and Cortland Avenue, the Board of Education referred to the building as the “Boulevard School.” (1)  Earlier that year, the board had proposed naming the school for Herman H. Kohlsaat (1853 – 1924), a nationally-influential Chicago newspaper editor and publisher.  Kohlsaat responded with a letter to board officials declining the gesture.   He explained that he had “… always opposed naming the schools after living men,” and suggesting that it would be “inconsistent for him to accept the honor.” (2)  After receiving Kohlsaat’s letter, the board officially named the “Boulevard School” in honor of Richard Yates (1818 – 1873), the thirteenth governor of Illinois. (3)  A prominent supporter of President Abraham Lincoln and a well-known antislavery figure, Yates was nicknamed the “War Governor” because of his strong support of the Union Army during the Civil War. (4)

©2013 James Iska

Richard Yates School was one of a dozen schools designed by the Chicago Board of Education’s head architect, W. August Fiedler, that opened in 1896.  Others include August Burley School, Henry Nash School, George Schneider School (now Alcott College Prep West Campus), Charles Kozminski School, D.R. Cameron School, and John M. Smyth School. (5)  All of these buildings are similar in design.  Rectangular in plan and having flat roofs, they are composed of red brick with rusticated limestone bases. Among other shared architectural elements are arched windows and doorways, three-sided projecting bays, intricately patterned brickwork, and fanciful carved limestone details.

©2013 James Iska

While Fiedler produced a large collection of stately school buildings, Richard Yates School is among the loveliest and most highly ornamented structures within the group.  Its exquisite details include side porticos with two-level balconies that have carved limestone Corinthian columns and upper railings of metal tracery.

©2013 James Iska

The building also has unglazed terra cotta panels of Sullivanesque foliage, as well as arched window hoods pierced by sculptural busts that serve as keystones.  The projecting central portion of the west façade features a second-story terra cotta stringcourse bearing the words “Richard Yates.”  An exquisite pair of five-foot-tall, terra cotta angels embellishes the corners of this stringcourse.

©2013 James Iska

©2013 James Iska

Shortly before the completion of this school, the Board of Education boasted about the success of August Fiedler’s recent work in its 1896 annual report.   The document states:

“…under the administration of the present architect, our buildings have become models, in consonance with the grandeur of our city.  Architectural beauty and stability have gone hand in hand, and we take pleasure in commending the head of this bureau, as well as his subordinates, all of whom have added responsibilities, since the more important repairs are now under their control.” (6)

©2013 James Iska

When W. August Fiedler replaced John J. Flanders in 1893, the board altered the role and pay structure of the head architect.  Flanders had earned a percentage commission on design and repair projects, and was allowed to accept outside architectural commissions.  In contrast, Fiedler received a flat annual salary, and could not accept outside work.  School administrators described the changes to the position of head architect as “advantageous from a business standpoint and economical.” (7) Despite such claims, the board launched a detailed investigation in 1896, harshly criticizing Fiedler for spending too much funding on employees in his department.  Fiedler responded to the charges by supplying detailed financial information showing that the board “had saved no less than $100,000 in eighteen months” under his management as compared to that of his predecessor. (8)  Ironically, the investigation occurred at roughly the same time as the board praised Fiedler in its annual report.

©2013 James Iska

Over the years, Yates School has been enlarged several times.  The building’s first extension opened in 1939.  A Board of Education staff architect, Albert Maley, designed a much larger, 50,000 square foot addition in 1961.  Then known as the Yates Upper Grade Center, it included a gymnasium, library, science room, laboratories, music and art rooms, teachers’ lounge, and 17 new classrooms.

Archives, Chicago Board of Education.

In the late 1990s, the Chicago Public Schools invested more than $3 million for additional improvements to the building.  This work included a full exterior restoration project, a new roof, and upgraded mechanical and electrical systems.  This thorough project included meticulously conserving the building’s details and replicating one of the two original terra cotta angels, which had been damaged beyond repair.

Courtesy Ed Torrez, BauerLatoza Studio.

©2013 James Iska

Yates School, ca. 1900. Courtesy of Bill Latoza.

Notes

1. Proceedings of the Board of Education of the City of Chicago, July 17, 1895 – July 1, 1896, p. 488.
2. “Defeat for the Trust,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Jan 18, 1896, p. 13.
3. Proceedings of the Board of Education of the City of Chicago, July 17, 1895 – July 1, 1896, p. 269
4. Bradley W. Rasch, The Governors of Illinois and the Mayors of Chicago, 2012, p. 16.
5. Forty-Third Annual Report of the Board of Education for the Year Ending June 25, 1897, pp. 35-36.
6. Forty-Second Annual Report of the Board of Education for the Year Ending June 26, 1896, pp. 160-61.
7. Ibid.
8. “Find Fiedler a Tartar,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 6, 1896. P. 13.

15th Street and Wabash Avenue
Historical profile by Elizabeth A. Patterson

The second Haven School, erected in 1884 and demolished in 1974, was designed by John J. Flanders. Archives, Chicago Board of Education.

One of Chicago’s earliest substantial works of school architecture stood at the corner of what is now 15^thStreet and Wabash Avenue.  It was named for early Chicago Board of Education President Luther Haven.  Designed by Vermont-born Chicago architect Gurdon Randall, who was then known throughout the Midwest for his institutional buildings, the Haven School opened in September of 1862, with accommodations for 756 students.  The structure’s red brick walls, punctuated by tall, limestone-hooded windows, rose three stories above a raised stone basement.  Narrow, buttress-like appendages ran from top to bottom, masking ventilation stacks.  A high attic was tucked beneath a gambrel-dormered slate mansard roof.  Each of the three main floors held four classrooms, while the high-ceilinged-attic comprised two larger rooms, one an assembly hall, and one a girls’ gymnasium.  Though Randall himself described his Haven School as being of “plain Americo-Italian style,” the Board of Education boasted in its 1862 Annual Report that:

“The Haven School building…is a beautiful specimen of school architecture, and,… it is safe to say that this house is not surpassed by any school building in the country.”

Haven School, G.P. Randall, Architect, from Descriptive and Illustrative Catalogue Containing Colleges, SchoolHouses, Churches, and Other Buildings and Suggestions Related to their Construction, Heating, and Ventilation, 2nd Edition, 1866. Courtesy Chicago History Museum (www.chicagohistory.org), ICHi 68211.]

Despite these accolades for Randall’s Haven School, the Board of Education ordered its demolition only two decades later.  A new, much larger and more flamboyant, building designed by official Board Architect John J. Flanders took its place in 1884.  The new Haven School stood four stories over a raised basement. Executed in rusticated stone and pressed brick, the building featured a prominent oriel window over the arched main entrance.  Ornate Flemish gables capped the portion of the structure nearest the street.  The school, which held 24 classrooms, recitation rooms,a small library, and a fourth floor assembly hall, could accommodate 1,400 students.  Flander’s Haven School building remained in use until 1974, when it was closed due to low enrollment.  It was later demolished, and the former school lot is now the site of Coliseum Park.

Ravenswood School, 1915. Chicago Public Library, Sulzer Regional Library. http://digital.chipublib.org/cdm/ref/collection/rvw/id/2505

Ravenswood Elementary School
4332 North Paulina Street
Historical profile by Elizabeth A. Patterson

Ravenswood Elementary School has been a focal point of the surrounding community for nearly 150 years. In 1869, a group of real estate speculators known as the Ravenswood Land Company platted the Village of Ravenswood on farmland and wooded acreage north of Chicago and west of Lake Michigan and Graceland Cemetery. Residents of this new leafy suburb in Lakeview Township could soon commute to the city on the Chicago & North Western Railroad. Or, as the author of Chicago and Its Suburbs noted, they could make the “very pleasant” drive “through Lincoln Park, and along the Lake Shore drive to Green Bay road” by horse and carriage. (1)

Ravenswood’s founders almost immediately built a basic one-room schoolhouse at Hermitage and Wilson Avenues. By early 1873, though, the Village had enough well-to-do inhabitants to support a handsome Italianate schoolhouse with four classrooms. This two-story brick building, topped by a fanciful cupola, was built at the cost of $15,000. Known as the Sulzer Street School or Ravenswood School No. 1, the structure stood at the corner of Sulzer and Paulina Streets, facing Sulzer (now Montrose Avenue). (2)

Sulzer Street School (on site of present Ravenswood School), 1873. Chicago Public Library, Sulzer Regional Library. http://digital.chipublib.org/cdm/ref/collection/rvw/id/2505.

In the mid-1880s, Ravenswood’s citizens battled fiercely over whether to add onto the existing Sulzer Street School, but an addition would not materialize until the following decade. (3) In 1889, the Sulzer Street School became part of the Chicago Public School system when the surrounding Village of Ravenswood and, indeed all of Lake View Township, was swept into Chicago as part of a great annexation of suburban communities during that time. Annexation brought more residents to Ravenswood, and by early 1891 the Chicago Board of Education purchased several lots south of the Sulzer Street School for an addition. (4) By June of 1892, the Board had signed construction contracts and rented space at the nearby Ravenswood Historical Society to accommodate the large overflow of students awaiting the building’s completion. (5)

Class photograph, Sulzer Street School, September 26, 1892. Courtesy of David Dahlgren.

The “addition” erected by the School Board was actually a free-standing building facing Paulina Avenue. Designed by Board Architect John J. Flanders, this buff “Racine” brick structure is the oldest extant part of the building today. It rises two and three stories over a high basement clad in rusticated limestone. (6)

Free-standing addition to Sulzer Street School, ca. 1900. Courtesy Bill Latoza.

A far more complex building than the boxy 1873 structure, Flanders’ school comprises three main masses running from front to back (west to east) on the lot. (A narrow, single-story utility block is hidden at the back of the building.)

© 2014 Frederick J. Nachman

The structure’s primary façade features a central portal set into the raised basement, above which rises a projecting three-sided bay. A wide terra cotta band visually separates the first and second stories. The school’s name spans the central portion of the bay, while foliate ornament extends beyond, stretching across the remainder of the bay as well as the entire facade. The other three facades lack the ornamentation of the Paulina Avenue side of the building, but feature the same large, six-over-six double-hung windows.

© 2014 Frederick J. Nachman

Flanders topped the building with a complex arrangement of crossed, hipped slate roofs. Above the main roof level is a large, hipped-roofed, recessed dormer. Above and behind the dormer is a still-higher hipped roof capped by a cupola echoing the one on the original Sulzer Street School. The new structure held twelve classrooms, several recitation rooms, and a small library. Bathrooms occupied two corners at the back of the basement, and an assembly hall sat at the very top of the building, tucked under the highest hipped roof.

© 2014 Frederick J. Nachman

Flanders’ handsome addition opened for classes in September of 1893, by which time the school had become known officially as the Ravenswood School. The work of constructing the building had in fact been overseen by Flanders’ successor, August Fiedler. (7)

© 2014 Frederick J. Nachman

During the following decades, the area surrounding the newly-constructed Ravenswood School continued to develop. Less affluent residents gained easier access to the neighborhood as electric street car lines supplanted horse cars on Montrose and other area streets in the 1890s, and the Ravenswood “L” line opened in 1907. (8)

By mid-1912, the Board of Education had decided to build another addition to the Ravenswood School. Arthur Hussander, then Acting Architect to the Board, prepared plans for this pair of two-story wings extending along Paulina Avenue on either side of the 1893 building. (9) (The wing to the north would take the place of the 1873 building, which would be demolished.)

Ravenswood School, ca. 1925. Archives, Chicago Board of Education.

Hussander’s additions to Ravenswood School differed from many of his other school designs, which were monumental in scale and Classical in style. His Ravenswood additions respectfully echoed the details of Flanders’ earlier structure, featuring brick with terra cotta detailing beneath a slate roof. In contrast to the original buff brick, Hussander selected red brick for the twin wings. To further tie the three masses together, Hussander reconfigured Flanders’ original columned entryway with a simpler portal to match those of the new wings. These additions extend backward onto the lot to envelope the older building. (10) The wings, however, have a much more horizontal feel than the earlier building. The yellowish terra cotta ornament, which dramatically stands out against the red brick, also accentuates the facades’ horizontality.

© 2014 Frederick J. Nachman

The additions alleviated overcrowding while providing state-of-the-art upgrades to Ravenswood School. The smaller south wing held new classrooms, including a kindergarten room, and girls’ bathrooms on each floor.

© 2014 Frederick J. Nachman

The more expansive north wing featured still more classrooms, boys’ bathrooms, and a spacious new first floor assembly hall. Only two stories tall, the additions followed the innovative precedent of Hussander’s predecessor, Dwight Perkins who eliminated the commonly-used raised basement. (11) Because Flanders’ 1893 structure included such a raised basement, Hussander had the challenge of incorporating many staircases to connect the various levels. (12)

Ravenswood School, ca. 1925. Courtesy Archives, Chicago Board of Education.

The 1912 wings featured “fireproof” design: the staircases were wide and constructed of metal, the wainscoting was of “cement,” and the theater curtain was fire resistant. Such safety features had become a pressing concern to Chicagoans after the 1903 Iroquois Theater fire disaster killed more than 500 people, many of them children. (13) To further address these fears, Hussander also made modifications to the earlier building. For example, he retrofitted the original wood staircases and wainscoting and repurposed the third floor assembly hall as a presumably less intensively-used gymnasium. (Typical of his time, Flanders had provided his third floor assembly hall with only a single, open staircase exit, and it therefore would not have been the safest place for a large number of people in an emergency.)

© 2014 Frederick J. Nachman

Over the decades, the population of Ravenswood School ebbed and flowed. By the late 1920s, though the neighborhood’s population had continued to grow, the number of students at Ravenswood School was down. More elementary schools had been built nearby, and the removal of seventh and eighth graders to the new Stockton Junior High (now Mary E. Courtenay Language Arts Center) at Montrose Avenue and Beacon Street left some Ravenswood School classrooms empty. Soon, however, they were filled by freshman from Lake View High School, which remained so overcrowded that it needed to operate in several branch schools until an addition was completed there in 1938. (14)

© 2014 Frederick J. Nachman

Today, Ravenswood School is filled with a 500 pre-school through 8th grade students, and has a particular focus on the fine and performing arts. (15) With its exquisite terra cotta ornament and its varied roof height, the historic building stands out from its low rise commercial and residential surroundings and remains a neighborhood icon.

Notes

1. Everett Chamberlain, Chicago and Its Suburbs (Chicago: T. A. Hungerford & Co., 1874), p. 370; “Ravenswood,” The Encyclopedia of Chicago, p. 679.
2. Chicago and Its Suburbs, p. 370; “Suburban News: Ravenswood,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 11, 1873; A.T. Andreas, History of Cook County, Illinois, From the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Chicago: A.T. Andreas, Publisher, 1884), p. 710; John Drury, “Historic Chicago Sites,” Chicago Daily News.
3. “Suburban: Excitement Over a Schoolhouse,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 7, 1883; “Education Enjoined: A Quarrel Over a Schoolhouse in Ravenswood,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 9, 1883.
4. Thirty-Seventh Annual Report of the Board of Education for the Year Ending June 30, 1891, pp. 68-69.
5. Thirty-Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Education for the Year Ending June 30, 1892, pp. 103-105.
6. “Sulzer School to be erected on Paulina Street near Montrose Boulevard, Chicago, J.J. Flanders, Architect, September 1892,” plans, elevations, sections, heating plans in the collection of the Chicago History Museum. The addition was said to be “similar in character and description to the Addition to the Kershaw School” at 65th and South Lowe. Thirty-Ninth Annual Report of the Board of Education for the Year Ending June 30, 1893, p. 207. Though there is still a Kershaw School, the Flanders’ addition is no longer extant.
7. Fortieth Annual Report of the Board of Education for the Year Ending June 29, 1894. p. 30; Thirty-Ninth Annual Report of the Board of Education, p. 209.
8. “Ravenswood,” Encyclopedia of Chicago; “Lincoln Square,” Chicago Historic Resources Survey: An Inventory of Architecturally and Historically Significant Structures (Chicago: Commission on Chicago Landmarks and the Chicago Department of Planning and Development, 1996), p. III-24; “Lincoln Square,” Local Community Fact Book: Chicago Metropolitan Area, 1990. (Chicago: The Chicago Fact Book Consortium, 1994), p. 46.
9. “Society, Meetings & Entertainments,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 1, 1912.
10. “Sulzer School,…, J.J. Flanders, Architect, September 1892,” in the collection of the Chicago History Museum; “Additions and Alterations to Ravenswood School, Corner of Paulina Street and Montrose Avenue, A.F. Hussander, Acting Architect, Board of Education, Chicago, July 28, 1912,” in the collection of the Chicago History Museum.
11. One of the reasons raised basements could be eliminated was that bathrooms no longer needed to be there. For further information on Perkins’ innovations regarding bathrooms in the Chicago schools, see the Lyman Trumbull and Bernhard Moos School profiles on this website.
12. “Sulzer School,…, J.J. Flanders, Architect, September 1892,” in the collection of the Chicago History Museum; “Additions and Alterations to Ravenswood School, Corner of Paulina Street and Montrose Avenue, A.F. Hussander, Acting Architect, Board of Education, Chicago, July 28, 1912,” in the collection of the Chicago History Museum.
13. “Fire in the Iroquois Theater Kills 571 and Injures 350 Persons” and “571 Bodies Found In Ruins; Iroquois Theater Fire Reaps An Awful Harvest,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 31, 1903.
14. “Ravenswood’s Early Pupils Trudged Miles,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 3, 1929.
15. Retrieved October 20, 2014, from http://ravenswoodelementary.org.

Tuley High School (Jose De Diego Elementary School), ca. 1955. Courtesy of Chicago Board of Education Archives.

Jose De Diego Elementary Community Academy
1313 North Claremont Avenue
Historical profile by Elizabeth A. Patterson

Located in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood, Jose de Diego Elementary Community Academy is one of many schools across the country named for Puerto Rican statesman, jurist, and author Jose de Diego (1867-1918). Born in Puerto Rico and educated both there and in Spain, de Diego advocated for the political independence of his homeland from Spain and later from the United States. (1) Chicago’s Board of Education recognized his contributions as “Father of Puerto Rican Independence” by converting a historic school into Jose de Diego Community Academy in 1982. At that time, it was, “one of six elementary schools that integrated special education services with basic curriculum to assist students in achieving their highest potential.” (2)

©2015 Frederick J. Nachman

Though the Jose de Diego school did not exist until the 1980s, the building and its site have a long and rather complex history. The first school building constructed here was the Northwest Division High School, built ninety years earlier. Northwest Division High School was the last in a series of divisional high schools opened by the Chicago Board of Education in the final decades of the 19th century. The board established these large regional schools to meet the needs of the growing ranks of students who continued their educations past the eighth grade. The divisional high schools offered not only traditional academic classes, but also a limited number of manual training classes aimed at educating teenagers for industrial jobs.

Northwest Division High School had originally opened in 1888 as a branch of the West Division High School in the nearby Columbus School. (Located on Augustus Street, between Hoyne and Leavitt Streets, that structure no longer exists.) The branch school’s student body had grown so rapidly that, by the end of that year, it had become an independent high school. In September of 1892, the new Northwest Division High School moved into its own, newly-constructed building “located on the northeast corner of Davis Street [now Claremont] and Potomac Avenue.” (3)

©2015 Frederick J. Nachman

Designed by Board Architect John J. Flanders, the large, limestone-trimmed, brick building rose two and three stories above a raised basement. The primary facades on Claremont and Potomac featured a high “rock-face rubble” foundation, substantial rusticated stone entryways, red brick walls adorned with areas of diaper-patterned brick, and limestone lintels and stringcourses. Typical of Flanders’ work, the school exhibited a complicated roofline, with both engaged octagonal turrets and gabled dormers of various sizes. (4) Other examples of such features can be seen, for instance, on Flanders’ designs for Ray Elementary (built in 1894 as Hyde Park HS) and Ariel Community Academy and North Kenwood Oakland Charter Elementary (built in 1892 as Shakespeare Elementary).

Northwest Division High School, Thirty-Eighth Annual Report of the Chicago Board of Education for the Year Ending June 30th, 1892. Courtesy of Chicago Board of Education Archives.

Inside, the school had “16 classrooms, besides four recitation rooms, … also a large lecture room, room for classes in drawing and for chemical laboratory, and an assembly hall on the third floor, facing Potomac Avenue, about 83 x 116 feet.”(5)

At the north end of the building, occupying the basement and first floor levels, was a 40×86 foot gymnasium. Commonplace in public schools today, in the 1890s gymnasiums could be found in private schools and universities across the country. In Chicago, institutions such as the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and the German immigrant Turnvereins featured gymnasiums, and by 1891, all Chicago public school children participated in a regular program of calisthenics and other physical activities as part of the curriculum. Still, as the Board of Education’s “Director of Physical Culture” boasted in 1892, the Northwest Division High School’s was not only Chicago’s first public school gymnasium, but also “the nation’s first gymnasium in a public school.”(6)

In the summer of 1898, as the student population continued to surge, the Board of Education awarded a contract for a six-room addition to Northwest Division High School, which the Superintendent hoped would “serve that district for two or three years.”(7) Board Architect Normand Patton placed the additional classroom space atop the northern, two-story portion of the building. Patton echoed Flanders’ original design, using patterned brick and limestone window surrounds to complete the third story. (8)

Tuley High School, ca. 1910. Courtesy: Chuckman’s Photos website: https://chuckmanchicagonostalgia.wordpress.com/2011/02/01/postcard-chicago-tuley-high-school-c1910/postcard-chicago-tuley-high-school-c1910/

Patton’s respectful repetition of Flanders’ diaper-patterned brickwork was dramatically called into question, however, when Board Building and Grounds Committee member Joseph Downey accused Patton of using “rotten brick” that was “soft as soap” rather than the hydraulic red pressed brick favored by Downey and made by one of his cronies. (9) The Board brought Patton to trial for this and other acts of “insubordination,” and he lost his job in November of 1898, shortly before the addition opened. (For additional detail on this controversy, see Julia S. Bachrach’s profile on Pilsen Community Academy.)

In 1906, the Board of Education renamed Northwest Division High School in memory of Murry F. Tuley (1827-1905). A veteran of the Mexican War and an attorney, Tuley served over the course of his distinguished career as Attorney General and Territorial Legislator of New Mexico, Chicago Corporation Counsel and Alderman, and Cook County Circuit Court Judge. (10)

©2015 Frederick J. Nachman

By the time Northwest Division became Tuley High School, the surrounding West Town community had long been a center for Polish culture, becoming one of the largest Polish-speaking communities outside of Poland. (11) A significant portion of these immigrants were Jewish. Many Russian Jews had also moved to the area, and, according to the Local Community Fact Book, by the early 1900s, about one quarter of Chicago’s Jewish population lived in the neighborhood. (12) As a result, Tuley High educated many notable Jewish students over the years, including prize-winning authors Saul Bellow and Nelson Algren and Chicago newspaper columnist Sydney J. Harris. (13)

Though West Town’s population apparently peaked in 1910, the number of school children warranted a larger school by 1914, when Superintendent Ella Flagg Young called for a second addition to Tuley. (14) The Board finally decided to move forward with that addition (and many other school buildings) three years later. (15) Though the U.S. entry into World War I slowed the Board’s building program, the Tuley addition was under way as of June 30, 1918.

©2015 Frederick J. Nachman

Designed by Board Architect Arthur Hussander, the large addition stood north of the original structure. Hussander’s addition, intended to house another 1,000 students, would “not only…provide much needed accommodations, but also…proper facilities for up-to-date modern high school buildings.” (16) The new building included 25 classrooms, a first floor assembly hall, two gymnasiums, and “laboratories, shops, swimming pool, etc.” (17)

©2015 Frederick J. Nachman

Its exterior design closely followed the work of Flanders and Patton. Hussander’s addition rose three stories, and featured red patterned brick, limestone trim, and a gabled and turreted roof line.

©2015 Frederick J. Nachman

©2015 Frederick J. Nachman

©2015 Frederick J. Nachman

©2015 Frederick J. Nachman

The most obvious distinction between the 1918 addition and the earlier building was that the raised basement was of cut limestone rather than of rusticated ashlars.

©2015 Frederick J. Nachman

Three decades later, on February 6, 1938, a deadly fire substantially destroyed the oldest section of Tuley High School. The fire caused an explosion in the third floor biology laboratory, sending a shower of bricks and limestone down on two Chicago fireman, one of whom, Thomas Vaid, died. Tuley’s 3,300 students returned to the undamaged north section of the school almost immediately, and the 1890s building was soon demolished. (18) Only a few architectural elements could be salvaged.

This octagonal bay, with elements from both the original 1891 building and the 1898 addition, appears to have survived the 1938 fire. ©2015 Frederick J. Nachman

To replace the original building, Board Architect John Christensen designed a new three-story structure to the south of Hussander’s 1918 addition. Like its predecessors, Christensen’s addition rose three stories over a raised basement, with red brick walls and a limestone base and trim.

Undated rendering of proposed post-fire addition to Tuley High School. Courtesy of Chicago Board of Education Archives.

Built primarily with Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works funds during the lean times of the Depression, this new structure featured none of the ornamental details of the earlier buildings. (19) The addition, which could accommodate 980 students and included a new gymnasium, opened in September, 1939. (20)

Addition to Tuley High School, ca. 1939. Courtesy of Chicago Board of Education Archives.

Poles and Russian Jews remained the largest ethnic groups in the neighborhood surrounding Tuley High School until at least 1960. Only a decade later, though, Latinos comprised 39% of the area’s total population, and that proportion continued to grow. (21) It was in the midst of this demographic shift that calls came to replace the aging Tuley High School building, which was no longer deemed suitable to accommodate a growing student population that sought not only traditional academic programs, but also innovative trade programs that featured job training outside the classroom. (22)

Initial plans called for the new Tuley High School to be built several blocks to the west, near Division and California, in Humboldt Park. This was part of a broader new policy of the Chicago Board of Education and the Chicago Public Building Commission to build a number of public schools in established Chicago parks. The plan was a controversial one, and a group of Chicago residents filed suit to prevent this intrusion on Humboldt Park’s open space. In September, 1970, the Illinois Supreme Court decided that the city did indeed have the right to use this public land for school building. By that time, however, the Board of Education and the Public Building Commission had already chosen an alternate site for the new Tuley High. (23)

Located at Division and Western, only a block south of the existing high school and across a newly-created greenspace, the new high school opened in June of 1974. The unusual eight-story “mini high-rise” school was designed by the Office of Mies van der Rohe. (24) Rather than transferring the Tuley moniker, the Board of Education decided to name the new high school for Puerto Rican professional baseball player Roberto Clemente (1934-1972). (25)

Roberto Clemente High School, ca. 1974. Courtesy of Chicago Board of Education Archives.

After the high school students moved south across the new Clemente Park to the Roberto Clemente High School, 300 students in a bilingual program temporarily occupied the old Tuley building at 1313 North Claremont. (26) By the fall of 1975, the structure had become home to the Tuley Middle School, a role it served until 1982, when the board reopened it as the new Jose de Diego Community Academy. The Public Building Commission is in the process of renovating the nearly 100-year-old school building. (27)

©2015 Frederick J. Nachman

Notes

1. Retrieved October 20, 2014 from www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/diego.html; “Jose de Diego,” Who’s Who In America, Vol. I, 1897-1942 (Chicago: The A.N. Marquis Company, 1942), p. 3233.
2. Retrieved October 20, 2014 from www.josedediego.org.
3. Thirty-Eighth Annual Report for the Year Ending June 30, 1892, p. 99.
4.  “Northwest Division High School, Northwest corner Davis and Potomac Sts., Chicago, IL, J.J. Flanders, April 1891,” in the architecture collection of the Chicago History Museum; Proceedings of the Chicago Board of Education, January 22, 1891, p. 254.
5. Thirty-Eighth Annual Report for the Year Ending June 30, 1892, pp. 99, 134-135.
6. Ibid., pp. 237. In the early years, these gymnasiums were often built on the top floors of schools, though they were later placed lower in the buildings to provide better emergency egress for large groups of people.
7. Forty-Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Education for the Year Ending June 24, 1898, pp. 77, 164.
8.  “Alterations & Additions to N.W. Division High School, S.E. Cor. Claremont and Potomac Aves., Normand S. Patton, Architect, Board of Education, Schiller Building, June 15, 1898” in the collection of the Chicago History Museum.
9. “Downey Makes Sharp Retort,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 1, 1898; “Patton Faces Inquiry Board,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 4, 1898.
10. “Tuley High School,” document in the Chicago Public Schools Archive.
11.  “Murray F. Tuley High School,” Chicago Public Schools Archive.
12.  Local Community Fact Book: Chicago Metropolitan Area, 1990 (Chicago: The Chicago Fact Book Consortium, 1995), p. 92.
13. Irving Cutler, The Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), pp. 237-238; Retrieved October 20, 2014, from www.josedediego.org.
14. Local Community Fact Book, p. 92; “Asks Schools at $20,000,000 Cost,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 17, 1914.
    (15)
15. “Trustees Start 27 New Schools and Additions,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 24, 1917.
16. Sixty-Fourth Annual Report of the Chicago Board of Education for the Year Ending June 30, 1918, p. 24.
17. “Buildings Under Construction June 30, 1918,” Sixty-Fourth Annual Report of the Chicago Board of Education for the Year Ending June 30, 1918, p. 25.
18. Fire and School Officials Open Inquiry in Blaze,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 7, 1938. It is possible that a small fragment of the original building — the southernmost turret and entrance — may remain, though this is not at all clear from the available evidence.
19. “Tuley High,” document in the Chicago Public Schools Archive.
20. “Pupils Ready for School Bells,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 3, 1939.
21. Local Community Fact Book, p. 92.
22. “Murray F. Tuley High School,” document in the Chicago Public School Archive.
23. “Board Approves Sites for New Austin Schools,” Chicago Tribune, May 29, 1969; New Tuley High to be 9 Stories,” Chicago Tribune, August 4, 1970; “Court Rules Schools Can Take Parks,” Chicago Tribune, September 30, 1970.
24.  “New Tuley High to be 9 Stories,” Chicago Tribune, August 4, 1970; “Our City’s Exciting New Schools,” Chicago Daily News, September 30, 1970; “School Board to Weigh $23 Million Tuley Plan,” Chicago Tribune, November 17, 1970.
25. “Roberto Clemente Community Academy High School” and “Murray F. Tuley High School,” documents in the Chicago Public School Archive.
26. “School Bells Beckon Students Back to Textbooks,” Chicago Tribune, August 29, 1974.
27. Retrieved October 20, 2014 from http://www.pbcchicago.com/content/projects/2013_school_investment_program.asp

Nobel School, ca. 1930. Courtesy of Chicago Board of Education Archives.

Nobel School
4127 W. Hirsch Street
Historical profile by Julia S. Bachrach

In 1909, The American School Board Journal described Dwight H. Perkins’s plans for the new Alfred Nobel School as a national model for modern school design. Published prior to the school’s completion, the article explained that the 26-classroom structure would have six additional rooms for special purposes such as “manual training, domestic science, drawing, construction work, kindergarten and a library.” (1) It went on to say that building’s plan provided a library, kindergarten, and playrooms on the first floor. This layout provided the community with direct access to the library during non-school hours, kept small children from having to climb stairs, and sited playrooms in close proximity to the playground “equipped with swings, horses, giant strides, and running track.” (2) Though commonplace today, at that time, the idea of designing schools to include adjacent green space with play equipment was very innovative, and Perkins figured prominently in the national playground movement.

©2014 James Iska

Identifying another pioneering aspect of the design, The American School Board Journal reported: “Tower toilets for pupils are located on each floor; the girls’ and boys’ at opposite ends of the building.”(3) When Perkins had introduced this innovation in twin plans for Trumbull and Tilton Schools two years earlier, the Chicago Tribune described “toilet conveniences…in ‘tower rooms’ on each floor,” as a “radical feature” of school architecture because teachers would no longer have to herd children down to dreary overcrowded basements to use the bathroom. (4)

©2014 James Iska

The light brown brick building is T-shaped in plan. Heavy in its massing and flat roofed, the structure was quite modernistic, especially in comparison with the large collection of Chicago schools designed in historical styles only a decade earlier. Perkins’s plans for Nobel School were guided by his intention to provide as much natural light in the classrooms as possible. In fact, he provided “one square foot of glass for each four square feet of floor area” in the building. (5)

©2014 James Iska

In addition to the bold and geometric massing, one of the most innovative aspects of the building’s appearance is its use of tapestry brick. Rather than using the lavish cut stone decorative details commonly used by earlier school architects, Perkins enlivened Nobel School’s façade with patterned brickwork and terra cotta. He created the decorative motifs by incorporating “a wire-cut face and mat-Finish brick” called “Rugosa” with rough-faced types known as “Devonshire,” alternating the size, shape and shades of the grey and tan brick. (6) Brick piers that divide the window bays stretch from the second story to the top of the third story, emphasizing the contrasts between the vertical and horizontal lines.

©2014 James Iska

Perkins advocated using identical or at least similar plans and construction documents for multiple school buildings as another cost-saving measure. Nobel was one of four structures following a “new type of school to meet Chicago’s needs.” (7) The others were Cleveland, Gary, and Harper schools. Unlike some of the other types specifically designed to accommodate later additions, the Nobel type was meant “to be built all at once” to accommodate locations “where the immediate need of a large building is apparent.” (8)

©2014 James Iska

Many architectural historians consider the Nobel School type an important example of Prairie style architecture. The Grover Cleveland School, one of the four buildings that followed the “Nobel-type” is featured in both Chicago’s Famous Buildings and the AIA Guide to Chicago Architecture. (9) Renowned architectural historian H. Allen Brooks declared the Nobel School type “the finest design prepared under Perkins’s stewardship.” Brooks elaborated: “There is dignity and repose in the design; it is monumental without being formidable.” (9)

©2014 James Iska

During Perkins’s own period, his efforts to revolutionize school architecture and bring reform to the Board Architect’s office proved extremely controversial. Throughout his five-year tenure, board members were increasingly displeased with his efforts to stave off political pressure. When the board charged him with “incompetency, extravagance, and insubordination” in 1910, he defended his work citing “four schools now under construction from the Nobel plans” as a specific example of good a design that incorporated cost-saving measures. (11) Despite strong support from the public and the architectural community, the board officially ousted Perkins in April of 1910. (12)

On September 6, 1910, the newly completed Nobel School opened its doors at the same time as its three sister buildings—Cleveland, Gary, and Harper Schools did—along with Perkins’s most famous educational building—Carl Schurz High School. The Chicago Tribune reported that “the five new buildings” were “of the most modern type.” (13) The article also stated that for “the first time since Chicago graduated from village into the city class, the school facilities are able to accommodate the total school population.” (14)

Nobel type school drawing. Chicago Daily Tribune, February 4, 1909, p. 5

The Board of Education’s Special Committee on Naming had decided to name a school for Alfred Nobel in 1904, several years prior to the construction of the building. (15) The board first named a branch school in honor of Nobel while awaiting completion of Perkins’s new Nobel School in 1910. A Swedish scientist and entrepreneur, Alfred Nobel (1833 – 1896) held patents on more than 350 inventions including dynamite. In his will, he left an enormous endowment to establish the Nobel Prize to honor men and women throughout the world who have made outstanding contributions in work for peace or achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, and literature. (16)

©2014 James Iska

Notes

1. “The New Chicago 1909 Type,” The American School Board Journal, vol. 38-39, 1909, p. 10.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. “New Type of School; No Basement: Expected by Board of Education’s Architect That It Will Stop Crowding,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 14, 1907, p. 3.
5. Ibid.
6. The Clay-Worker, vols. 53-54, 1910, p. 69, and Brick, vol. 32, 1910, p. 84.
7. “The New Chicago 1909 Type,” p. 10.
8. Ibid.
9. Siegel, Arthur, ed., Chicago’s Famous Buildings, University of Chicago Press, 1965, p. 160; Sinkevitch, Alice & Laurie McGovern Peterson, AIA Guide to Chicago Architecture, Third Edition, University of Illinois Press, 2014, p. 280.
10. Brooks, H. Allen, The Prairie School: Frank Lloyd Wright and his Midwest Contemporaries, University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1972, p. 113.
11. “ ‘Ajax’ Perkins Struck by Bolt: Lightening Demand is Made on School Architect, but He Refuses,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Feb. 4, 1910, p. 1.
12. “School Trustees Oust Architect: Board at Regular Meeting Upholds Action of Perkins Trial Committee,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 7, 1910, p. 9.
13. “Schools Open: Seats for All” Chicago Daily Tribune, Sept. 6, 1910, p. 5.
Ibid.
14. Proceedings of the Board of Education of the City of Chicago July 8, 1903- June 22, 1904, Chicago, 1904, p. 653.
15“Alfred Nobel: The Man Behind the Nobel Prize,” Nobelprize.org: The Official Website of the Nobel Prize, Available on http://www.nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/

Grover Cleveland School. Courtesy of Chicago Board of Education Archives.

Grover Cleveland School
3121 West Byron
Historical profile by Julia S. Bachrach

Grover Cleveland School is considered one of the finest designs produced under the leadership of renowned Prairie style architect Dwight H. Perkins. “There is dignity and repose in the design” suggests Prairie School historian H. Allen Brooks “…it is monumental without being formidable.” (1)

©2014 James Iska

Perkins designed Cleveland School in 1909 as one of four nearly identical buildings described as a “new type of school to meet Chicago’s needs.” (2) These four structures —the Nobel, Harper, Gray and Cleveland schools — were essentially built from the same set of construction documents. The prototype was considered the Nobel Type.

William Rainey Harper High School. Courtesy of Chicago Board of Education Archives.

In 1909, prior to the completion of the four schools, The American School Board Journal cited the Nobel Type plan as a national model for modern school design. The article explained that this type of 26-classroom structure would have six additional rooms for special purposes such as “manual training, domestic science, drawing, construction work, kindergarten and a library.” (3) It went on to say that building’s plan provided a library, kindergarten, and playrooms on the first floor. The layout would afford the community direct access to the library during non-school hours and keep small children from having to climb stairs.

Nobel type, 1909.

Perkins sited the first floor playrooms of the Nobel Type in close proximity to the playground, which would provide green space “equipped with swings, horses, giant strides, and running track.” (4) The Chicago Tribune noted that having playground space in front of the building was especially beneficial because the play spaces would be “entirely under the eye of the principal.” (5) Although commonplace today, the idea of designing schools that would include ample breathing space and play equipment was quite innovative at that time. Perkins was a member of the Chicago Playground Association’s board of directors, and a leader in the national Playground movement.

©2014 James Iska

T-shaped in plan, the building has a bold geometric massing and a flat roof. Like the other Nobel type schools, it “displays the architect’s characteristic preference for large areas of patterned brickwork set in massive cubic compositions with generous provisions made for natural lighting of the interior.” (6) Perkins’s plans for Nobel Type were guided by his intention to provide as much natural light in the classrooms as possible. In fact, he provided “one square foot of glass for each four square feet of floor area” in the building. (7).

©2014 James Iska

Perkins eliminated the costly cut stone details that had frequently been used in the design of earlier school buildings. In addition to its modern-looking massing, he enlivened the facades of the building through “… a repetition of inverted U-shaped motives formed in a variety of ways — the piers and lintels of the base, the patterned bands of brick enframing the individual bays of the fourth story, and the similar bands inclosing the entire window area of each elevation.” (8)

©2014 James Iska

Throughout much of Perkins’s five-year tenure with the Board of Education, his efforts to revolutionize school architecture and bring reform to the Board Architect’s office proved extremely controversial. School board members were increasingly displeased with his efforts to stave off political pressure. When the board charged him with “incompetency, extravagance, and insubordination” in 1910, he defended his work by citing the “four schools now under construction from the Nobel plans” as a specific example of good design that incorporated cost-saving measures. (9) Despite strong support from the public and the architectural community, the board officially ousted Perkins in April of 1910. (10) At that time, Cleveland and the other three Nobel Type schools were under construction. When the four school buildings opened along with Perkins’s most famous structure, Carl Schurz High School, on September 6, 1910, the Chicago Tribune reported that this group of schools were “of the most modern type” and added that for “the first time since Chicago graduated from village into the city class, the school facilities are able to accommodate the total school population.” (11)

©2014 James Iska

Despite Perkins’s political difficulties with the Board of Education, over the years, he has been well-recognized for his impact on school design. In 1952, the Architectural Forum described Dwight H. Perkins as “father of today’s ‘new’ school ideas.” (12) The Nobel Type, and particularly Cleveland School have received significant attention from architectural historians and other schools. Carl Condit, author of The Chicago School of Architecture, considered Cleveland School to be one of Perkins’s “most striking and original designs.” (13) The Historic American Building Survey documented Cleveland School in 1965, as part of an initiative to record “the significant architecture of Chicago,” with “special attention” to “the Chicago and Prairie Schools of Architecture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” (14)

©2014 James Iska

The Chicago Board of Education had decided to name this “Nobel Type” school in honor of Grover Cleveland when it was under construction in 1909 (15). Grover Cleveland (1837 – 1908) served as both the 22nd and 24th President of the United States of America. In Chicago, he officially dedicated the World’s Columbian Exposition at its opening day, on May 1, 1893.

Notes

1. Brooks, H. Allen, The Prairie School: Frank Lloyd Wright and his Midwest Contemporaries, University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1972, p. 113.
2. “The New Chicago 1909 Type,” The American School Board Journal, vol. 38-39, 1909, p. 10.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. “New Type of School to Meet Chicago’s Needs,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Feb. 4, 1909, p. 5.
6. Larry Homolka, Historic American Building Survey Documentation Form, ILL HABS- 1079, August, 1965.
7. “New Type of School; No Basement: Expected by Board of Education’s Architect That It Will Stop Crowding,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 14, 1907, p. 3.
8. The Clay-Worker, vols. 53-54, 1910, p. 69, and Brick, vol. 32, 1910, p. 84.
9. “‘Ajax’ Perkins Struck by Bolt: Lightening Demand is Made on School Architect, but He Refuses,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Feb. 4, 1910, p. 1.
10. School Trustees Oust Architect: Board at Regular Meeting Upholds Action of Perkins Trial Committee,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 7, 1910, p. 9.
11. Schools Open: Seats for All,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Sept. 6, 1910, p. 5.
12. “Dwight H. Perkins- Father of Today’s ‘New’ School Ideas,” Architectural Forum, v. 97, Oct. 1952, p. 119.
13. Brooks, H. Allen, The Prairie School: Frank Lloyd Wright and his Midwest Contemporaries, University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1972, p. 113.
14. Larry Homolka, Historic American Building Survey Documentation Form, ILL HABS- 1079, August, 1965.
15. “Leaflets May be Used in School,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 10, 1909.