Historic Milwaukee Public Schoolhouses ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
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CfV!bert 'T'anzilo l •' Ol~ E\\ ' ORD BY DH. GRl ~ (;()l~ Y E . THOH~ rrox •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• HISTORIC MILWAUKEE PUBLIC SCHOOLHOUSES •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • HISTORIC MILWAUKEE PUBLIC SCHOOLHOUSES • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • ~be rt 'T'anzilo FOREWORD BY GH.IDG ORY E . 'I'IIORNT' ON H istory PRESS Published by The History Press Charleston, SC 29403 www.historypress.net Copyright © 2012 by Robert Tanzilo All rights rese1ved Bollom right cover image courtesy or Yancy Marti Archives. Some portions or this work were previously puhl.ishcd, sometimes in altered form, on OnMilwaukee.com, which reserves its rights. The charts in the appendix are excerpted from Our Roo fs Grow Deep, 2nd edition, 1836- 1967. © 1974 Milwaukee Board of School Directors. Certain photographs or MPS schools included in this work are owned by the Milwaukee Board or School Directors. Permission to use this material was granted by the Milwaukee Board or School Directors, which rese1ves all righ ls in the material. Please support public education by making a donation at DonorsChoose.org or by volunteering your time at your local school. First published 2012 Manufactured in the United States ISBN 978.1.60949. 780.4 Library of Congress CIP data applied fo r. Notice: T he information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part or the author or The H istory Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use or this book. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be rep1·oduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations emboclied in critical articles and reviews. For Mi: J ack Pepjm ef Brooklyn, New York, and to all qf lt£s fellow public school teachers, because as love61as sclzoolhouses can be, bricks don't make a school- teachers and their students do. CONTENTS Foreword, by 01~ Gregory E. Thornton 9 Preface: What Schools Mean to Us 11 Acknowledgements 17 A Brief History of fil waukcc's Public Schools 19 Quiet Garfield Avenue School ls an Architectural Treasure 39 1891 Walker's Poi nt School Salutes Albert K agel 45 Brown Street to Groppi High 49 Twins, Triplets and Even Q uadrup.lets in Vintage Milwaukee Schoolhouses 55 A Closer Look at ecskara 63 Tracing the Decades al M aryla nd Ave nue School 67 High Schools Carve a Special Place in Our M emories 79 Bay View Feared Closure of Mound Strccl School 103 Potter's Legacy Lives On at Gaenslcn School 111 Looking At, and Into, Trowbridge Strccl School 11 7 Architectural Gems " Haunted" by Schoolhouse Echoes 121 U p in Smoke: T hree Buildings Lost to Fire 125 ew Uses for O ld Schools 13 1 The State of Milwaukee's Vimagc Schoolhouses 137 Lost l\l[ilwaukcc Schoolhouse Treasures 143 Ten Must-Sec M ilwaukee Schoolhouses 147 Appendix: :t-.1IPS Chans 153 About the Author 187 F OREWORD ho doesn't love a schoolhouse? There are images of an old school W that come to mind for most of us- at least for those of us who grew up in th e age when school buildings were solid things of brick and stone and soaring panes of glass. I haYe spent the whole of my working life in such school buildings. There is a great comfort for me in a shiny te rrazzo floor and in the gleam of an oak door that is worn from the touch of thousands of tiny hands, as well as in the brass knob of a classroom door that is all bright and shiny and ready to tell its stories, if only it could. There is a different perspective that comes from being a t the helm of a large public clistrict with more than 160 school buildings in a variety of styles, some built in the 1890s a nd a few erected in just the past ten years. Each builcling is the selling of ma ny thousands of precious memories for the children who attended th ere- children who are now grown and have moved on. They still want to sec the old bui ldings in their old neighborhoods when they come back to town. T hose of us in the administration of public school districts are as much the caretakers of structures as of students. Robert Tanzilo clearly values the memories as much as he loves the architectural cliscussion. He explores the value of school buildings to the fabric of the city's neighborhoods with as much fascination as he explores boiler rooms and attics in our most elderl y structures. T his book relies on early documentation of the physical fo otprint of Milwaukee Public Schools (M PS) as published in Our Roots Grow Deep, a district journal that, unfo rtunately, captures histo1y only up to 1967. \Ve have been wanting F OREWORD more. ' Ve arc grateful fo r the additional effort in these pages to nail down the past and present state of our M PS houses. They are integral to this city's future, creating long-lasting images based in brick, stone and glass for generations Lo come. Gregory E. Thornton, EclD SupcrimendenL, i\!Iilwaukcc Public Schools June 2012 10 Preface WHAT ScttooLs MEAN To Us rmving up, my brother and 1 we nl to our neighborhood schools. As G fa r as I ca n tell , there wasn'L much discussion. Brooklyn's PS 199 was closesL to our home, and so we enrolled there (or rather where District 21 enrolled us). We spcnl seven years in the circa 1920s, nat-roofed, red brick, three-story, U-shaped school, the wings or which engulfed the schoolyard and fo rmed it imo a capital "T," more or less. Every day for ten months a year, for those seven years from age five to twelve, we were in the classrooms, the hallways, the gym, the lunch room, the auditorium and the schoolyard at PS 199. ls it any surprise that we feel a connection lo our schools? H ere we learn to read, write and create social bonds of all kinds. It is potentially the scene of our fi rst crush (and Lhe second and Lhird). IL is where we .learn to create ourselves, out of the shadow and Lhe close watch of our parents. It is where someone other than our parents or a close li·icnd or relalive mentors us for the first Lime. We walked to school every day, trudging through the snow and shuffiing through Lhe autumn leaves on the sidewalk, re-creating the sound of a train. PS 199 was as much a part or us as our house, our block or our friends. 1 \ Ve learned in most of the classrooms at some point across all those years. ' 1\le stopped in the offi ce and were in the gym and the auclitorium every week, as well as the lunchroom and the fenced-in yard, with its faded painted lines. At the same time, there were places at school we never visited. Those doors on either side of the south wall of the gym? W here did they lead? There were locker rooms up there, but we never used them. They were used PREFACE l<..ids mugging fo r the camera al Brown Street School, Twentieth and Brown Streets, as an addition to the 1898 building is erected inJunc 1952. for storage, and the one time I can remember going in there, I felt like an archaeologist entering an Egyptian tomb. From one of my stations while serving as a door monitor 1 could see through the small pane of glass in the door leading to the bomb sheller beneath auditorium stage, but I never entered that mys terious space. We had climbed the caged-in staircases all the way up to the third floor by the time we reached the sixth grade, but in all those years, we never got to descend the same stairways to the locked doors of the basement. If you were lucky, you caught a glimpse while the janitor had the door open, perhaps moving his cleaning equipment in or out. vVhat on earth was dovvn there, and why didn't they want us to see it? Even at that young age, I had already stumbled on the mystique and the emotional strength of schools. In his 1989 article "Cathedral of Cultu re: The Schoolhouse in American Educational Thought and Practice Since 1820," published in Hist01y ef Education OJl.arter61, 'William W. Cutl er III wrote: The schoolhouse il' .rynonymous with edul'ation and a reminder to all ef an imj1ortant time in their lives .. .M ore than 150yean ago reformers and educato1s 12 PREFACE in tJze Unit,ed States began to claim that !he sdzoolhouse wasji.mdamental Lo the education of the)!Ou ng, One of the most prominent school refom1l'1:Y q/ the nineteenth cen tu'I)~ Henry Barnard, insisted that the "sc/zool/wuse should be a temple, consecrated in prqyer lo Llze physica4 intellectual and moral cultui·e of every child." His sentiments were lzardf)1unique. Perhaps oddly, perhaps not, I feel more ent11ralled by schools now that I don't attend them. Ask my mom and she'll tc.1 1 yo u that I wasn't all that eager to go to PS 199 for at least a few years, despite the fact that I liked most of my teachers, had a fair number of fri ends and, as you can see, have a lot of fond memories of school.