They Tore A Schoolhouse Down Today

I’m always sad to see a classic three-story red brick schoolhouse torn down.

September 24, 2009. Philadelphia, PA.

I DO understand, it is being done in the name of our children's brighter future. The new school, I am sure, will be smart-wired and green and energy efficient and ADA compliant and all those good things.

William Brantly Hanna Pvblic School, 1908-2009.

But, still I can't help but think we lose something intangible.

Could not shake the feeling, she was not quite ready to go.

I taught in one of these sturdy old behemoths, General Wagner Middle School in East Oak Lane, Philadelphia. Shabbily maintained though she was, smelling of sour milk and old floor wax, she had good bones. Beneath grime and neglect, at least a little grandeur undergirds bureaucratic negligence. On certain clear sunny mornings after a holiday floor buffing, you almost felt hopeful ascending that marble staircase.

I am pretty sure the School Reform Commission is staffed by those same people as on the committee in 12 Monkeys.

An inherent public spiritedness pervades these durable old structures. From the carved limestone nameplates to the embellishments in stone and copper, a trace of civic pride remains from when this was a bustling city, a growing neighborhood, a new school, a hopeful place.

Before it was a boulevard, it was Broad Street, and there was a red brick schoolhouse there.

 Maybe my own past haunts me here. The low-slung brick and cinderblock elementary school I attended sat on the former playground of a three-story red brick schoolhouse it replaced. Broad Street School's cornerstone sat in the courtyard of our new school, a vestigial remnant of what was no longer there. Its presence was felt, but rarely referred to. One of my older teachers (she seemed elderly at the time but was probably only in her 50s) told the story of the students and teachers walking across the playground from the old school to the new on that bright spring morning in 1970. They carried their old books across the asphalt to the new.

The Broad Street name plate, in DeWitt's courtyard

That story stuck with me. I remember the jarring feeling as a student at the new Gordon M. DeWitt Elementary School, opening my battered old red Dick and Jane reader in Mrs. Suter's first grade reading class, to see "Broad Street School" stamped on the inside cover of that tattered old text. In a few months those battered old readers would be replaced by the new McGraw-Hill Reading series, orange and green and yellow and alive with 70s color, as the adventures of Dick and Jane and their ornery pet goat gave way to stories about Hector and We Lei.

Gordon M. DeWitt faculty, circa 1974

A shiny new school is a good and hopeful thing. All children deserve it. I just fear that something solid and durable and permanent is being replaced by something lesser and synthetic and faux stucco and somehow more shabby. I hope that is not the case. I hope for the students at whatever the school is that replaces Hanna, that it stands as a beacon in this rough but enduring neighborhood, that it stands among but above the rowhomes that it surrounds, that it offers a vision for the future that respects the place where these children come from, but also sheds a light toward someplace new and unforeseen.

A mighty task for a mere building to perform. I hope our school reform leaders understand that it takes more than a new building. Even our neglected aging red brick behemoths, on certain February mornings when the winter sun hits the buffed marble staircase jut right, were big enough places for the most audacious of dreams.

And I just couldn't shake the feeling that Hanna wasn't quite ready to go.