You know you are getting old when:

[HoosierDaddy]

Ten Hut didn't work in my company. That was an automatic immediate no no.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I did this a couple of years ago about this time of year.

My elementary school was built in 1907 so the architecture is what you'd expect - very different than the building I am currently teaching in, which was finished in 2002.

The hallways of my old elementary school were tiny, and the auditorium, which I remember as being this huge place where it seemed the entire school held 'assemblies' every Tuesday, was like a postage stamp compared to more modern schools I've been in these last 20 years.

But I didn't crouch down. I should have thought of it to see the change in perspective would have made a difference.

The school where I attended sub-primary and first grade was built in 1930, and was burned down by the fire department for practice in the mid-1990s. I revisited it only once after the first grade, when I went back there in the '80s when it was being used for district office space, to interview the superintendant. There was no gym -- we did phys-ed outside in the yard, and we ate lunch in the cellar, in a space which had once been a coal bin. You'd eat lunch down there in this dark hole with bare 40 watt bulbs hanging over your head for light, and then you'd blink when you went out into the yard for recess because the sun hurt your eyes. It was like convicts being let out of solitary.

The thing that I remembered most about it as a pupil was the smell -- it had a dead, dusty smell like the inside of a mildewed old book. I don't know if that was the kind of plaster they used in the walls, or the paint, or the chalk dust, or what, but it was the most sepulchral building I've ever been in. And twenty-odd years later, when I went back to interview the superintendant there, the first thing that caught me as I walked in the door was exactly the same smell.

 

[scottyrocks]

As long as we're doing pictures, P.S. 114, The Ryder School, Brooklyn, NY.

 

[2jakes]

My elementary school is still active.

Although there’s more paved parking lots & a freeway has been built in front of
the building .


Also the original desks have gone the way of the “dodo”!

 

[HoosierDaddy]

No photo of my grade schools ( as there were several )...but here is a pic of Fairmount High School in 1965 when I graduated...


And as it was being demolished last winter....

 

[2jakes]

^^^^^
I remember this Fairmount High alumni !

 

[BobHufford]

My elementary school is still around (as is my junior high and about 1/3 of my high school).

Rountree Elementary. Built in 1915.

 

[Stearmen]

I can't find a picture of my first grade school, I went to several. It was torn down in 1972, and a modern one story school was put there. My mother said I was afraid the school was going to cave in, we were in the basement in 1st grade, with two stories above us. The old building really made a lot of strange sounds!

 

[2jakes]

And on a patriotic note for those who served!

 

[BlueTrain]

Lots of lovely photos of school buildings. I don't do photos and anyway, I don't have any photos of schools I went to, at least not that I can put my hands on. The elementary school I attended is gone and the remaining space, still empty, seems way too small for the building that was there. For a while there were lots of temporary buildings on what was the playground. But nothing remains there now. It was an old building but did not have the style of the junior high school I attended.

The junior high school had been the high school when my mother was going through school. It had fairly typical styling for something built before WWI. There was a gym virtually underground with the auditorium (with balcony) above on the first floor. It was a small town but the school was literally inner city and there was no parking lot. I guess high school students didn't have all those jalopies like we imagine they did before WWII. By the time I was there, a modern addition had been built. Sometimes years later, the old part burned down leaving only the new part, which is still in use.

A brand new high school building had opened three or four years before I started high school. It was modern styled, meaning it was a nice, sunny and efficient building with zero style. It is presently the middle school, there having been built yet another high school sometime since I moved away. Schools in that county and that part of the state have been drastically consolidated and many older schools have gone out of business. Some have been demolished and others used for some other purpose. The population in that part of the state has dropped dramatically, which is the reason for the school consolidations and closures. People move to wherever there is a boom.

I have noticed that many towns, usually not really small towns, but larger towns, like for example Asheville, North Carolina, sometimes have very remarkable buildings. They can be real architectural gems, too. Typically they invariably date from before 1930 and probably most from before WWI, judging from the styles. I sometimes wonder what level of wealth and economic activity, not to mention confidence in the future, that led to buildings like that being built.

That is also true sometimes of certain neighborhoods in larger cities and suburbs that are no longer the nice places they once were (to put it one way) but still contain some especially well-built and very interesting structures, typically either churches or homes. Sometimes smaller towns will have a house or neighborhood that contains some really wonderful house or neighborhood, clearly from a long time ago when people, people with money, anyway, had a real sense of style and probably a wish to show off, too. I'm thinking of a certain house in my hometown that I think is in an Italianate style, with a full porch with big columns, beautifully landscaped and still well-maintained and even a tile roof, the only tile roof in town, I think. I never knew who lived there but whoever it was had style and money. Who was that person in a town with less than 8,000 people?

 

[LizzieMaine]

In my hometown the houses like that were built by 19th century sea captains. They always overlooked the ocean and were ostentatiously large, with "widow's walks" on top of the porches, lots of columns or other such details -- basically the Northeastern equivalent of a southern plantation house. But nobody could afford to keep up houses like that after the sea-captain era ended, and by the middle of the 20th century they'd all been divided up into apartments which furnished a lot of the cheap working-class housing in town. Most of them today have been "restored" into bed-and-breakfast type places for tourists wanting that "authentic Down East experience."

 

[Fading Fast]

^^^ We bought a bunch of push-button brass light switch plates from a woman on Ebay who said they came out of one of the ship captain mansions on the promenade that was being renovated.

Other than that her address was Portland Maine and she seemed nice, I have no idea if it is true or not - but it made sense (we actually got a four "gang" one, which would probably only have been used in a big home at the time). Here are a couple of them (now installed in our much, much humbler than a ship captain's home apartment):

 

[LizzieMaine]

My grandparents' house, built in 1920 and decidedly not a sea-captain kind of place, had exactly those same switches. They were standard issue around that time, and you could still find them in the hardware section of the Sears catalog into the 1930s.

 

[BobHufford]

The house I grew up in (built in 1910) had the same push button switches.

 

[2jakes]

King Williams district.

There are many beautiful houses for several blocks.
The streets are paved with bricks & the light posts are old fashion.

I enjoy cruising on my old Iver Johnson bicycle in this area.
I feel like I have gone back in time .
It’s very relaxing.

My grandmother’s house was similar.
But now, only exists in my memories.

 

[MisterCairo]

I was the first student ever enrolled at Dr. Charles Best Elementary School, Burlington, Ontario, when it was built in 1972. 44 years ago this past May. It is unusual in that it's Kindergarten to grade 5 (still open), not many of those around then or now.

 

[Fading Fast]

My grandparents' house, built in 1920 and decidedly not a sea-captain kind of place, had exactly those same switches. They were standard issue around that time, and you could still find them in the hardware section of the Sears catalog into the 1930s.

That makes sense as we had no trouble finding all the ones we needed at very reasonable prices, except for the four "gang" (four switch openings - hence eight holes - in one plate) one. But even that one, while it took time to find (the woman in Portland had it), was not expensive - not everything "rare" is expensive, sometimes it's just rare.

Edit add: we also see these switch plates in movies from the period and in tenement and other not-high-end dwellings.

 

[scottyrocks]

King Williams district.

.

Absolutely lovely.

 

[EngProf]

My grandmother's house had those push button switches and they were great fun and a novelty for a kid to play with - until one of the adults yelled, "Hey, quit doing that!"

As for my old schools, my kindergarten and first grade were in an OLD school - Warren G. Harding Elementary, just like "Ralphie" in "A Christmas Story".
After that, as a leading-edge Baby Boomer, it was a race between our increasing numbers and the ability of the city to build schools. I went to a new school in the second grade, another new one in the third grade, and they were finally beginning to catch up so I spent fourth through sixth in another new school.

All the new ones were the fifties-era flat-roofed brick buildings with the flat metal windows. No need for a picture since they all look alike.

 

[tonyb]

In my perfect world, schools would all be splendid spaces in their own way, whatever their era or architectural style.

Schools are a big, big part of a kid's world, and I like to see the little bastards get off to a start in a world that shows it takes them seriously.