Spring Street School

Last updated August 16, 2024

Spring Street School was the first public school in Los Angeles, California, built first at Second and Spring streets and then moved to a lot between Broadway and Spring Street midblock between Fifth and Sixth streets in the Downtown district.

Campuses

Second and Spring

Spring Street School was the first public school in the city of Los Angeles. constructed at Second and Spring streets, where the longtime Los Angeles Times building now stands.^[1]

In 1873 this school housed a hundred pupils and one teacher; in the five schools in Los Angeles there were 14 teachers and 835 pupils, or 60 children per teacher.^[2] Two years later it was noted that the school was "running a double set of scholars, one class filling the rooms in the morning, and the other class receiving instruction in the afternoon."^[3]

Mrs. F.A. Parker, the school's only teacher, complained to the school board about her workload in January 1876, stating that two teachers "were allowed in accordance with the law." She said she was teaching "a double number of scholars, and that she acted as Janitor and washed her own towels." She was paid $80 a month and wanted a raise to $100. Superintendent W.T. Lucky told the board that Spring Street was "a hard school."^[4]

In 1875, the Los Angeles Herald opined that "The play-grounds of the Spring street school are a disgrace to the School Board. No flowers, no grass, but only unsightly grounds covered with rubbish and old school furniture."^[5]

Six years later, the school board appointed a committee of two medical doctors, R.W. Ellis and Walter Lindley, to examine the school.^[6] Their report concluded, among other things:

The grounds are . . . so low that the water stands on them and through its stagnancy is a rich source of miasm. . . . The privies are not connected to any sewer. The filth in the vaults . . . is now accumulating and permeating the atmosphere with its poisonous vapors. The school building is old. A portion of it fell down a few years ago and was repaired, but great cracks yet remain in it.^[6]

There are two rooms on the first floor. The largest one is occupied by a teacher who has one hundred and forty pupils. [Italics in the original.] She teaches about ninety of them in the morning and fifty in the afternoon. . . . We were not surprised that the teacher, having an ominous cough, had left for the balance of the school year. . . . We go up stairs by a very narrow flight of steps on the outside of the house. Here we find the worst school room we have been in, ceiling very low, atmosphere very depressing. . . . when the little children sent through an exhilarating exercise the building swayed to and fro.^[6]

Broadway-Spring

In 1883, the school board purchased a parcel of land adjoining both Broadway and Spring Street, midblock between Fifth and Sixth streets (the present site of the Broadway-Spring Arcade), for $12,500, and a new Spring Street School was built there.^[7]^[8]^[9] The more commodious structure hosted gatherings of educators^[10]^[11] and parents,^[12] it had an auditorium used by the public and it was the home of special education for "deaf-and-dumb" children, with the "oral method or lip-reading system" as the method of instruction.^[13]

In January 1914, the school hoisted two U.S. flags, one on the Spring Street side of the campus and one on the "Broadway front," noted as "an exceptional event in the school's annals. . . . Perhaps that which elicited the most comment was the flag presentation, made by Melville Mathels, a boy born deaf, and who was once dumb. Careful instruction and natural intelligence, however, have taught him to properly manipulate the vocal organs whose sound he can never hear."^[14]

In April 1887, the Times noted that "great discomfort" was occasioned during a teachers' convention when 250 adults were crowded into "three rooms, each designed for only fifty pupils."^[10] By 1899, however, the school was in good enough condition that it was able to host an educational exhibit on both of its floors, in conjunction with the annual convention of the National Education Association held that year in Los Angeles.^[15]

Lease and sale

By 1904 the Broadway-Spring real estate had become so valuable that the school board decided to put the land up for lease but to retain the material in the old brick schoolhouse, which by then was noted to be a "landmark."^[16] As a result, in that year work began on Mercantile Place—what was planned to be "something entirely new in Los Angeles development"—a private shopping street under the aegis of C. Westley Roberts, who secured a ten-year lease from the Los Angeles School Board and bought the material of the old brick school building, which was to be demolished.^[17]

As the ten-year anniversary of the lease approached in 1913, school board members realized that the value of the property had increased from $400,000 to $1 million, which meant that the rental charged to the Mercantile Place lessee was amounting to only 2.5% a year on the valuation. A move was begun to sell the property instead of renewing the lease,^[18] and in February 1914 the board signed a renewable lease with the Mercantile Improvement Association for $3,500 a month "in order that the property may not be empty pending the sale of the property or the erection of a building thereon."^[19] The next month a special referendum election was held to ask voters what they wanted to do with the property, and in a lightly attended response 2,003 votes were cast for "lease for fifty years," 1,478 for "sell" and 931 for "neither sell nor lease for fifty years."^[20]

The school board sold the property for $1.155 million in 1919 to Adolph Ramish, president of the Hippodrome Theater Company^[7]

Related Research Articles

Louis Laurent Marie Clerc was a French teacher called "The Apostle of the Deaf in America" and was regarded as the most renowned deaf person in American Deaf History. He was taught by Abbé Sicard and deaf educator Jean Massieu, at the Institution Nationale des Sourds-Muets in Paris. With Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, he co-founded the first school for the deaf in North America, the Asylum for the Education and Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb, on April 15, 1817, in the old Bennet's City Hotel, Hartford, Connecticut. The school was subsequently renamed the American School for the Deaf and in 1821 moved to 139 Main Street, West Hartford. The school remains the oldest existing school for the deaf in North America.

Van Asch Deaf Education Centre was located in Truro Street, Sumner, Christchurch, New Zealand. It was a special school for deaf children, accepting both day and residential pupils, as well being as a resource centre providing services and support for parents, mainstream students and their teachers in the South Island and the Lower North Island.

Nichols Canyon is a residential area in the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles, California, bounded by Hollywood Boulevard on the south and Mulholland Drive on the north, lying between Laurel Canyon and Runyon Canyon. It was also known as Miller Canyon.

Broadway, until 1890 Fort Street, is a thoroughfare in Los Angeles County, California, United States. The portion of Broadway from 3rd to 9th streets, in the Historic Core of Downtown Los Angeles, was the city's main commercial street from the 1910s until World War II, and is the location of the Broadway Theater and Commercial District, the first and largest historic theater district listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). With twelve movie palaces located along a six-block stretch of Broadway, it is the only large concentration of movie palaces left in the United States.

Owen McAleer was a Los Angeles, California, businessman who was mayor of the city between 1904 and 1906. His brother Jimmy McAleer played in Major League Baseball.

The American School for the Deaf (ASD), originally The American Asylum, At Hartford, For The Education And Instruction Of The Deaf, is the oldest permanent school for the deaf in the United States, and the first school for deaf children anywhere in the western hemisphere. It was founded April 15, 1817, in Hartford, Connecticut, by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, Mason Cogswell, and Laurent Clerc and became a state-supported school later that year.

The Broadway was a mid-level department store chain headquartered in Los Angeles, California. Founded in 1896 by English-born Arthur Letts Sr., and named after what was once the city's main shopping street, the Broadway became a dominant retailer in Southern California and the Southwest. Its fortunes eventually declined, and Federated Department Stores bought the chain in 1995. In 1996, Broadway stores were either closed or converted into Macy's and Bloomingdales.

Oregon School for the Deaf (OSD) is a state-funded school in Salem, Oregon, United States. It serves deaf and hard of hearing students from kindergarten through high school, and up to 18 years of age.

The Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf was an international conference of deaf educators held in Milan, Italy in 1880. It is commonly known as the "Milan Conference" or "Milan Congress". This Congress was preceded by the First International Congress in Paris in 1878. Joseph Marius Magnat, a Swiss former oralist, received a significant donation to organize the more well-known Second Congress two years hence.

Spring Street in Los Angeles is one of the oldest streets in the city. Along Spring Street in Downtown Los Angeles, from just north of Fourth Street to just south of Seventh Street is the NRHP-listed Spring Street Financial District, nicknamed Wall Street of the West, lined with Beaux Arts buildings and currently experiencing gentrification. This section forms part of the Historic Core district of Downtown, together with portions of Hill, Broadway, Main and Los Angeles streets.

The Pennsylvania School for the Deaf is the third-oldest school of its kind in the United States. Its founder, David G. Seixas (1788–1864), was a Philadelphia crockery maker-dealer who became concerned with the plight of impoverished deaf children who he observed on the city's streets. The current school building is listed by the National Register of Historic Places, and two former campuses are similarly recognized.

The Sir James Whitney School for the Deaf is a provincial school in Belleville, Ontario with residential and day programs serving elementary and secondary deaf and hard-of-hearing students.

The Spring Arcade Building in Downtown Los Angeles, also known as the Broadway Arcade, refers to three adjoining buildings opened in 1924 on the site of the historic Mercantile Place, which in turn had been constructed on property once used as a schoolhouse, facing both Broadway and Spring Street midway between Fifth and Sixth streets in the Downtown district. The Arcade Building was built in the Beaux Arts and Spanish Baroque styles.

William Miller Bowen was an American lawyer and civic leader in Los Angeles. He was a member of the Los Angeles City Council is known as the "Father of Exposition Park."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Halifax School for the Deaf</span>

The Halifax School for the Deaf was an institution in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, which opened on 4 August 1856. It was the first school of the deaf in Atlantic Canada. There was later a dispute over who the true founder was, William Gray (1806-1881), a deaf Scottish immigrant who was the first teacher in the back room of a house in Argyle Street, or George Tait (1828-1904), another deaf Scot, who claimed to have been the driving force behind the establishment of the school. Gray was sacked in 1870 for being intoxicated and for threatening pupils with violence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bumiller Building</span> Mixed in Los Angeles, California

The Bumiller Building is a residential building in the Los Angeles Historic Broadway Theater District. Built in 1906 and designed by the architects Morgan & Walls, the Bumiller Building was constructed of reinforced concrete in Renaissance Revival style. Historically the building has been a department store and a theater.

Samuel Thomas Greene was a Deaf American educator and Ontario's first Deaf teacher in 1870 at the Ontario Institution for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb, which later changed to Sir James Whitney School of the Deaf in Belleville, Ontario, Canada. He was born in 1843 in Portland, Maine and attended America's first Deaf school in Hartford, Connecticut.

Joseph Watson was an English teacher of deaf children, and writer on teaching the deaf.

The late-Victorian-era Downtown of Los Angeles in 1880 was centered at the southern end of the Los Angeles Plaza area, and over the next two decades, it extended south and west along Main Street, Spring Street, and Broadway towards Third Street. Most of the 19th-century buildings no longer exist, surviving only in the Plaza area or south of Second Street. The rest were demolished to make way for the Civic Center district with City Hall, numerous courthouses, and other municipal, county, state and federal buildings, and Times Mirror Square. This article covers that area, between the Plaza, 3rd St., Los Angeles St., and Broadway, during the period 1880 through the period of demolition (1920s–1950s).

Jacob Frankenfield was an American businessman and politician who served in the Minnesota Senate from 1874 to 1875 and Los Angeles City Council from 1885 to 1890. He was the President of the Los Angeles City Council for a year, and during his tenure helped with the building of the Los Angeles City Hall and helped change the name of Fort Street to Broadway.

References

Access to the Los Angeles Times links may require the use of a library card.