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Jack Neely on abandoned schools
Posted By katie allison granju
As someone who has now lived in two wonderful Knoxville neighborhoods (Old North Knoxville and Oakwood-Lincoln Park) containing gorgeous, abandoned school buildings (although I am thrilled to see that it appears the Brownlow School renovations appear to finally actually be getting somewhere), I loved this week’s Metro Pulse cover story:
They’re often the most expensive and best-looking buildings in their neighborhoods, so central to the communities’ identities that often the neighborhoods themselves are named for them. Some of them look almost like big-city art museums or upscale apartment buildings.
But then, surprisingly often, we abandoned them. The buildings are still there, seven or eight of them around town, almost as handsome and prominent and permanent-looking as they ever were—just quiet now. And once they go quiet, after a while they tend to lose their windows, and their roofs, and then their value.
One interesting observation in Jack Neely’s excellent overview of this complicated issue of school building abandonment is how quickly it’s assumed that the only possible use for these old buildings is to convert them into condos. In fact, there are other options:
“We default to the condo-ification of schools,” says (Jeff) Talman. “We default to that as if it’s the only thing that can be done.” He mentions one remarkable exception. On a visit to Portland, Ore., he saw a recent project at the former Kennedy School. “It’s beyond cool, it’s fantastic,” he says. The 1915 public-school building is now a 35-room hotel, with guest rooms in the old classrooms. Also in the building, accessible to the public at large, are a restaurant, pool, brewery, movie theater, and art gallery. When Talman was there, a wedding was setting up in the gym.
Knoxville has a few tentative examples of that outside-the-box approach. East Knox County’s Riverdale Elementary closed in 1985. For years, the 11,000-square-foot building attracted vandals, druggies, and cultists, but is now the capacious home of one middle-aged couple, Connie and Wayne Whitehead. Connie Whitehead, an agricultural food specialist, discovered that the old girls’ room was an excellent space for her office; lately, the Whiteheads have been using it as their bedroom, too. Though a relatively small building by public-school standards, it makes for an enormous house; during the winter, they keep only parts of it heated. Though the building is primarily their home, the Whiteheads often open it up to friends and neighbors as a sort of ad-hoc community center. They’ve hosted several acoustic-music concerts in the building. During the holidays, they backed a community production of A Charlie Brown Christmas, which involved 20 local kids and drew about 250 attendees to the old school. In their gym, when the mood strikes, they take on challengers in badminton and ping-pong tournaments.
Jan 14th, 2008
While condos aren’t the only possible re-use, schools tend to be in residential neighborhoods… where many commercial uses would be neither appropriate nor welcome.