Duffy Moon ([info]duffymoon) wrote,
@ 2009-04-13 16:21:00
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Selling, Old School
















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[info]comeflywithme_
2009-04-14 12:22 pm UTC (link)
when i was in eighth grade, my school system embarked upon a massive school building overhaul. three of our four elementary schools (some dating back to the early 1910s) were demolished, along with the magnificent-looking high school that nearly everyone in my family had attended. it was utterly heartbreaking. although the new schools built in the old schools' places are nice, you said it best: there's no school like the old school. sometimes it just makes me sad to think of all the built history we've collectively lost.

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Farewell to the Old Schools
[info]clickthing.blogspot.com
2009-04-14 08:55 pm UTC (link)
I think I attended that school.

Or rather, I attended its spiritual twin. Actually, my hometown is (or was) home to many such buildings, as a sleepy rural community found itself as both the county seat and a "college town" with the subsequent population and baby boomlets that came with them. The large brick school downtown (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckhannon-Upshur_High_School#History) became the primary school, and all the high schoolers were moved a couple of blocks eastward, and then those schools grew, and the high school moved down the street, then out to the edge of town, and then out Route 20 in the mid 70's, a flat-roofed marvel of modern design.

This was all before my time, of course, but I attended elementary school in one of those old buildings, the wooden steps creaking and smooth and black from years of student's shuffling feet, the walls and floors and high arched ceilings smelling of that magical perfume of coal-fired steam heat, pencil shavings, and (on Friday) fresh-baked pepperoni rolls wafting up from the basement cafeteria and kitchens. I played in the shadow of the old high school -- the one eventually condemned and now torn down -- and wondered about the years of students who passed through its Gothic-style arches, looking through the warped and bubbled glass panes. We eventually moved "into town" and I was just a block and half from these schools, although by that time they were just a bus stop for me to head out to the more modern middle and high schools.

Long after I left, the old buildings were torn down. The elementary school building is gone, replaced by a huge windowless brick gymnasium, then the old empty high school down the street was leveled. Our alumni site has video of the demolition, I still can't bring myself to watch it.

If I close my eyes, I can still feel those old steps creaking and flexing as we filed down into the basement, the hissing, clanking radiators nearly too hot to stand near as the rain and slush of another West Virginia January slops outside. It will be decades before those new buildings ever earn that patina of memory of the Old Schools.

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Re: Farewell to the Old Schools
[info]duffymoon
2009-04-15 06:24 pm UTC (link)
I think there are a lot of people our age for whom this happened, just about like this. Lots of nearly-identical, beautiful old brick schools were knocked down and replaced, in the 70's, with lots of identical ugly new brick buildings.

I've only lived in this town for five years, but the school is where my daughter started kindergarten, and we're apparently way more attached to the old building than many of the other residents, whose parents and grandparents were schooled there.

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[info]duffymoon
2009-04-15 06:25 pm UTC (link)
"They tore down my beautiful school, and all I got was this awesome pencil sharpener."

Thanks for stopping by my LJ. I'm wondering if I know you from somewhere else, outside of LJ?

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School Memories
[info]justwriteblog.blogspot.com
2009-04-14 10:57 pm UTC (link)
Ow.

Yeah...something very similar happened to me when I was a youth. The elementary school that I attended in Sacramento, Walnut Wood Elementary, was torn down one Summer to accommodate a newer, less asbestos-ridden building. The local free rag (The Grapevine, if I recall correctly) ran a comic soon after depicting overjoyed students rushing out of a school and watching with zeal as the building was destroyed.

Even as an extremely young man, this upset me to a point that I penned a letter to the editors (on recycled paper with a Dixon Ticonderoga) lamenting the loss of the school that so many of the students loved so well. When it ran the next month with an actual apology, I felt vindicated.

Still, though, the memories make me sad. Those were good times.

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(Anonymous)
2009-04-15 04:07 am UTC (link)
Nice post. I think these kinds of eviscerations/transformations are especially weird for children. I'm getting a sort of literary sense of your town, what with the depressed mannequins and schoolhouse auctions, and cracking ice rivers.

Strikethru

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[info]duffymoon
2009-04-15 06:21 pm UTC (link)
Well, the ice river and the school are my town: the depressed mannequin is from Columbus, just north of tOSU and just south of where I work during the week.

Sadly, there are no businesses in my town that might require a mannequin, depressed or not.

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That explains it
[info]clickthing.blogspot.com
2009-04-16 06:08 pm UTC (link)
I've driven across Ohio on a couple of occasions, going from Indiana to Pennsylvania and back, and Columbus is really the only practical landmark on that east/west run. It goes like this:

* You cross the border, heading either direction, and you're about 250 miles from Columbus
* Six hours and four hundred soybean fields later, you're now 100 miles from Columbus
* Sometime the next day, eyes glazed with the endless onrushing view of corn tassels and the back end of trucks, you finally make it to the grand metropolis, and then realize...

My God... I'm only

Half.
Way.
Through.

Some, like the poor mannequin, never make it out. She's chained to that pole for her own safety, I tell ya'.

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Re: That explains it
[info]duffymoon
2009-04-20 12:08 am UTC (link)
See, your problem was going through on I70. Nothing to see from I70. You've got to wind your way through all the small towns, where the real people live.

(Of course, that's assuming you have a few extra days for the trip.)
((PA is way, way worse, I think))

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Re: That explains it
(Anonymous)
2009-04-21 09:19 pm UTC (link)
Yup, I-70, voted "The Most Soul-Suckingest Highway in America"

I agree about PA, too. There they make you pay for the privilege of being bored out of your skull.

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Oh my...
[info]freshribbon.blogspot.com
2009-04-17 12:37 am UTC (link)
Heartbreaking. I've traveled a bit down the Arkansas backroads as an itinerate poet and those old buildings are the charm. I'll miss them when they've been torn limb from plank.

Watched the high school where I had my first teaching job fall to rubble just last year. I taught in the same classroom where my father had HIS first teaching job, and we both just stood there behind the yellow tape and shook our heads. I'd give anything for a pencil sharpender from that old room.

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Never Going Back to My Old School
(Anonymous)
2009-05-04 11:14 pm UTC (link)
Cool Shots from the school auction. I entered the halls for the last time in November for the Farewell Party. I considered attending the auction but I couldn't bring myself to watch the "dismemberment" of a building that saw three generations of my family attend as well as a parent who taught in the building for 10 years. I took several shots of the school in November but far better are my memories as a student attending Fairbanks Middle School.

EarlM, the Exile from MCO (Milford Center,Ohio)

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