Abandoned school in Oakland CA
University High School - Oakland City College, Oakland California
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Construction on University High School was begun in May 1922 under building permit 69600 for a 2-story reinforced concrete school, and completed in August 1923 at a cost variously reported as $518,569 and $541,716. The architect was Charles W. Dickey, then Supervising Architect for the Oakland public schools, and the builder was R.W. Littlefield. In 1926-27 a detached gymnasium was built at the rear, and a manual arts wing was added to the south end of the main building. Building permit records give the cost for the gym as $103,000 (permit A23190) and the builder as J.E. Branagh, and $37,516 for the shop wing (A22552, E.T. Leiter & Son, builder). The final phase of construction on the existing buildings took place in 1939, when the gym and the shop wing, both of hollow tile, were rebuilt in reinforced concrete and "earthquake resistive" frame construction respectively. Permits for the 1926 and 1939 work name only "Buildings and Grounds Department, Board of Education" as architect. Other permits on file are for removing plaster ornamentation in 1958, and moving numerous portable buildings onto the site in 1958, 1962, and 1976. (the shop wing is considered part of the main building, to which it is internally connected, and the gym is considered a second building on the site.)
Organized in 1914 with 8 teachers and 87 students and originally located in the old Temescal School at 48th and Webster Streets, University High School occupied a special place in Oakland's educational system as a laboratory school for the University of California education department, modeled after Columbia University's Horace Mann School and similar schools at the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin. It was conducted and financed jointly by the University and the Oakland Board of Education. It became noted for its high standards of student achievement, written code of behavior, innovative six-year junior-senior high school curriculum, advanced pedagogical ideas, and school spirit. By 1918 parents were reportedly taking their children out of private schools to enroll them in University High, and the school was rapidly outgrowing its facilities. A new University High School was one of the projects financed by a $5 million bond issue passed in 1919.
The development of the Oakland school system was marked by a series of voter-approved bond issues roughly every decade from the 1890s: 1892 ($400,000), 1904 ($960,000), 1911 ($2,493,000), 1919 ($4,975,000), 1924 ($9.6 million), 1945 ($15 million), and 1956 ($40 million). These projects earned Oakland a reputation as a progressive city with an excellent school system. The 1919 bond issue, which financed University High, was said at the time to be the second largest ever passed in the nation (Oakland Tribune Year Book, 1921, p.38). Each successive wave of construction, besides creating new schools on new sites, replaced old schools considered inadequate or outmoded.
The first Oakland High School opened in 1869. When it moved to a new building in 1895, its old campus became a vocational high school. A third high school, Fremont, was brought into the school system when East Oakland was annexed in 1909. The original University High opened in 1914, and the new Oakland Technical High School at 45th and Broadway in 1915. The first junior high school opened in 1912, and there were four by 1918. By 1931 the Oakland public schools numbered 76: 10 high schools, 13 junior highs, and 53 elementary schools. Few of these buildings still stand. Most of the city's existing school buildings date from after World War II. Of about 90 schools now in use, less than 20 retain significant portions of their prewar physical plant, while a few others have fragments. The oldest functioning public school buildings are McChesney Junior High (1913) and Oakland Technical High School (1914-15). Clawson (1915) and University High (1922-23) are physically fairly complete but are vacant and deteriorating.
The 1919 school bond issue was used largely to expand the junior and senior high school system, with three new high schools (McClymonds, replaced in 1953; Roosevelt, of which fragments survive; and University High), four new junior high schools, and parts of other junior highs. The new University High site was assembled from 17 residential lots and a former baseball park, in a mostly earthquake-era streetcar-suburb neighborhood. It was reported that "securing sites for school buildings has been an extremely difficult task … Under the State law all junior high and high schools must be equipped with. gymnasiums and playgrounds of sufficient area for running tracks, tennis courts, handball courts, and drill grounds for the R.O.T.C. The ideal requirement for a high school is fifteen acres of ground …" (Tribune Year Book, 1921, p.38). Besides being available and relatively undeveloped, the new site was near Berkeley, convenient for student teachers. Proximity to Oakland Tech was apparently not a problem, since University High functioned as a magnet school rather than a neighborhood high school.
Groundbreaking for the new University High School took place on May 19th, 1922. Leonarde Keeler, student body president, turned over the first shovel full of dirt. (The son of Berkeley poet Charles Keeler, and a future professor at Northwestern University, he was representative of the children enrolled in this "public prep school.") A year and a half after groundbreaking principal F.H. Boren described the completed work with approval in the October 1923 University High School Journal. He remarked that the building was externally of the mission type, that simplicity had been the aim of the designer, and that the beauty of the architecture was in the harmony of the proportions and color tones. As an educator, he was pleased that the lighting and ventilation of the building were in accordance with the latest developments, and the classrooms were specially arranged to give the greatest convenience to the teacher training center, as well as to the students. The library offered facilities that might serve an entire community, and the auditorium seated 1300, the entire student body.
Other local publications concurred with Boren. The San Francisco Chronicle enthused, "One of the most novel and beautiful edifices in the city's school program." The Oakland Tribune called the school "unique in organization and character." Examples of this uniqueness included the wide corridors to deaden the noise of the street, the landscaped study courtyards, and the way the design of the classrooms dovetailed with the specific educational objectives of the school. A University High School graduate, John Caffrey, recalls (1990), "The building was part of the whole design. I later taught in other schools and came to realize that the well-designed, airy classrooms and the well-equipped labs and arts and music facilities were not commonplace. All of us who went there were very lucky."
University High School owed its origin to Dr. Charles Rugh, Professor of Education at the University of California at Berkeley. The Oakland Board of Education Bulletin of 1914-15 explained that the school was "not in any sense a local school, but under the sponsorship of the Oakland Board of Education, the Superintendent of Schools, and the Supervisory force of the Oakland School Departments. The University School is open to all pupils in the city who desire to avail themselves of such advantages as it may offer." Rugh was praised a quarter-century later (Superintendent's Bulletin, Oct. 6, 1938) as "an educator of national reputation. Thousands of teachers studied with him and were influenced by his personality … a man whose whole life was devoted to an ideal."
Other faculty members and advisors in addition to Rugh were renowned educators: professor and principal Frank Boren, library scientist Elsie Boyd, Dr. George Rice, John Soelberg, and Dr. Wilford Aiken, chair of the National Progressive Education Association. Designed for an enrollment of 1200, Uni High already had 1300 students by 1925. In 1931 the junior high grades were discontinued and it became a senior high school only. By 1934 it was chosen as one of 30 schools in the entire country to take part in a national study by the Progressive Education Association. Teachers trained in this special educational atmosphere took advanced ideas with them to their new teaching posts throughout the state. The unique arrangement between the University of California at Berkeley and the Oakland school system continued for more than 30 years. Enrollment peaked at about 2000 in the late 1930s but fell off sharply during World War II, to 669 in 1946. Reportedly because of this decline in enrollment, University High School closed in the summer of 1946, after 32 years of operation.
In the fall of 1946, the building reopened as the Merritt School of Business and the Joseph P. Laney Trade and Training Institute, postgraduate public schools which evolved into today's community colleges. From focusing on the special academic needs of advanced high school students, the campus now served the practical needs of returning veterans and other adults entering the postwar workforce. The school came to be known as Merritt Junior College, Merritt College, Peralta Community College, and finally Oakland City College or Grove Street College. As a community college, the school offered a "second chance" to students who were not prepared to go directly to the University of California or another four-year school. Merritt alumni include prominent names in Bay Area public service, arts, and professions today.
If University High School achieved national recognition for its progressive curriculum and student achievement, the 1960s and early 1970s brought national attention to the campus as an epicenter of the black, feminist, and anti-war movements. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was begun by Merritt College students Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. They split off from the Afro-American Society which was led by lawyer Donald Warden who advocated a more "moderate" course of advancement through a liberal education and economic development. Ethnic studies also pioneered at this site with the founding of the Black and Chicano Studies programs in 1968-69. The Bay Area Chicano muralist movement began here, with several artists going on to achieve wider acclaim, among them Manuel Hernandez, Domingo Rivera, Andres Cisneros, David Bradford, Patricia Rodriguez, and Lem, whose work is documented in Community Murale: The People's Art, by Alan Barnett.
As a result of a 1969 seismic study applying Field Act earthquake standards to the building, the original main building was vacated in about 1970. The manual arts wing continued in use until 1974. A new Merritt College, displaced to the Oakland hills, opened in 1971. The trustees of the Peralta Community College District sold the building to the Oakland Unified School District in 1980. The gymnasium, manual arts wing, and portable buildings on the rear of the site became the temporary campus of Oakland Technical High School while Tech itself was receiving seismic retrofitting. University High School was finally abandoned completely in 1983 when Oakland Technical High School reopened, and the City of Oakland assumed control from the school district. Several development schemes have been proposed for the site in succeeding years.
An unsuccessful effort by Grove Street faculty, students, and supporters to retain a North Oakland community college at the existing site led to a lawsuit by Berkeley City Council members, which "won" the creation of Berkeley-based Vista College instead. A widely shared suspicion at the time held that the seismic issue had been exploited to defuse the militancy associated with Merritt College. Merritt College still receives national mention in connection with its more recent past: the obituaries (including the New York Times) after the death of Huey Newton in 1989 detailed the genesis of the Black Panther Party at the campus; former Black Panther Party member and now Oakland educator Erika Huggins was shown in the May 1990 Essence magazine outside the cyclone fence surrounding the building, a symbol for her of the tragic waste of an educational resource.
Building Description
University High School is a mostly two-story, 114-room school building plus a detached gymnasium, located on a 9-acre parcel one city block deep by three blocks long. The main classroom and auditorium building is of reinforced concrete construction, Spanish Colonial in style, with exterior walls of tan-colored stucco, red tile roofs, and terra cotta trim. Its 650'-long quasi-symmetrical facade is set back about 65' from the street. The gym, behind the main building, is about 100' x 115', two stories high, reinforced concrete, utilitarian-moderne in appearance. Roughly the east half of the site, behind the main building and around the gym, is level open space, historically school yards, and sports fields and at various times occupied by portable school buildings.
Major character-defining elements of the exterior include the long arcaded expanse of the front facade, the contrasting bell tower, and gabled auditorium at the north end, the tile roofs with narrow eaves, the large arched windows on the ground floor and smaller rectangular casement above, six monumental entrances embellished with pilasters and arches and cornices, and spacious outdoor study courts wrapped within the building. The interior is distinguished by well equipped classrooms along long, well-lit, mostly single-loaded corridors, large and elaborate library and auditorium, and much original woodwork.
The main building is an expansive, loosely rectangular two-story structure about 750" long by 200' deep, with most of its architectural elaboration concentrated on the west facade (the two-block-long front of the building) and north side (the auditorium wing). It is stucco-surfaced, with low-pitched red tile gable and hip roofs. Its general composition resembles a California mission, with a gabled assembly structure and bell tower at one end of a long arcade, with a series of inner rooms and courtyards. The courtyards produce a rough figure 8 plan inside. The auditorium and tower at the north end are balanced by the (original) science and (added) shop wings at the south end. The center (classroom) part of the facade is nearly symmetrical, with an ornate central entry and two end entrances, each ornamented somewhat differently, linked by long tile-roofed sections of nine bays each. Each bay has a wide 36-light segmental-arched window on the first floor and a smaller multi-paned rectangular awning-type window on the second floor. Plain pilasters with urn-shaped capitals at the second-floor sill level separate the bays.
The science wing at the south end is about 40' wide and projects about 20' forward from the main facade. It has a tiled hip roof. On its north side is a small tile-roofed second-floor oriel window. Off center on the front of this wing is an entry framed by pilasters and a heavy molded cornice, with a flight of about 10 concrete steps with metal railings. The small window above the entry was originally tied to the cornice by terra cotta ornament, and there were more elaborate columns and capitals.
The main entrance, at the center of the facade, has an interrupted segmental arched parapet above the roofline, pilasters and a shell-shaped niche at second story level, and a molded cornice, keystone, arched recess, and paired pilasters framing the doors. There are wide concrete steps with metal railings. This entry opens into the main front corridor directly opposite the library.
The auditorium and its ornate entrance dominate the north end of the building. The auditorium has a front-facing gable end, its peak higher than the rest of the roofs. The center of the auditorium facade projects slightly, and the tile roof with its narrow eaves is notched correspondingly. In the projecting section a two-story slightly recessed arch frames the cornices, pilasters, upper niche, and deeply recessed door opening. Turned wood trim survives at the doorway. The tower, south of this section, has a two-story base containing another less elaborate entry under a small arched window with balcony. The belfry, eight-sided with arches, pilasters, and a tiled low pyramid roof, stands 56' high according to Sanborn maps and is visible from all sides of the building. Small narrow recessed windows, both arched and rectangular, flank the auditorium and tower entrances.
Plans and early photos show that all the entrances had much more ornament originally, with freestanding Corinthian columns at the center and auditorium entrances at both the first and second-floor level, terra cotta finials in the center broken pediment and on the tower, and other objects in the niches and around openings. These were removed, presumably as earthquake hazards, in 1958 (Permit B76351, "remove plaster work on three entrances … paint entire outside of building") and perhaps at other times.
The two-story north facade (auditorium and art wing, toward 58th Street) is also a major design face, with three entrances and large multi-paned windows. At the west end of this facade is a side entrance to the auditorium, with a stucco shield and decorated segmental arched recess over the door. Five tali 32-light rectangular windows with quarter-round corner details open into the auditorium. As in front, pilasters with urn-shaped caps separate the window bays, and dentils line the narrow eaves. Toward the rear, a tall hip-roofed wing contains the backstage entrance to the auditorium and the fly loft. A one-story flat-roofed wing behind this and extending north is the entrance and foyer to the rear north-south corridor and art wing. It has an arch and a stepped parapet over the entry doors, and tile coping on the roof. It is of wood-frame construction but has the same stucco surfaces as the rest of the building.
The south facade (the science wing, toward Aileen Street) is also stucco, with two stories of rectangular multi-paned windows, dentil trim, narrow eaves, and a red tile roof. A south ell at the back of the building connects this wing with the one-story, rectangular shop addition parallelling the science wing along the south edge of the property. This addition is wood frame, stucco-clad, described by Sanborn maps as of "earthquake resistive construction." It is about 60 x 155', with large windows, skylights, a low-pitched roof, and no ornament except for buttress-like pilasters between the windows on the south side. It is a 1939 "reconstruction" of a 1926-27 hollow tile addition, which had the same footprint as the present addition, and resembled the north foyer in appearance, with tile coping and a flat roof.
The east (rear) face of the building is also clad in stucco, but unornamented. Except for the ends of the science and auditorium wings, roofs are tar and gravel and windows are smaller. Classroom windows occupy most of the second floor, while the first floor has a utilitarian mixture of windows and five plain entrances, most with double doors, to the corridor, kitchen, cafeteria, and locker rooms. Some of these utility areas have one-story flat-roofed extensions to the rear.
The main front entrance on the west facade opens into the center of a 400-foot-long north-south corridor, directly opposite the library which occupies the center of the building. The front wall, with the 13 large west-facing windows, forms one side of the corridor, and a single row of classrooms and offices are located on the east of the corridor. Interior walls are lath and plaster, with wood-paneled wainscoting in the corridors and special areas such as the library, auditorium, and offices. There are wood window and door frames, wood moldings, and wood and linoleum flooring. Built-in furnishings in the library, science labs, and other rooms include (or included) bookshelves, desks, lab tables, and blackboards (some sliding or double hung). Classrooms are mostly about 20' deep, and range in length from about 15' at the smallest to 40' for some of the labs (physics, sewing, millinery, drawing, etc.). Special rooms in the south (science) wing include an "academic lecture room" with raked seating, stage, vaulted ceiling, and projection booth, and a cooking classroom with bay-windowed "model dining room" attached. Classrooms are typically arranged in pairs, joined by a shared office/storeroom area about 9' wide. Rooms in the newer shop wing are plain, tall, with skylights and exposed rafters.
The centrally located library is approximately 70' by 30', slightly sunken below the level of the corridors, two stories in height, with elaborate close-set wooden ceiling beams running north-south. An intricate plaster surround about a foot wide accents the opening between the hal) and library. Shelves line the north and south sides of the library, with rows of large multi-paned windows above. Midway down each side double doors lead to the outdoor study courts. The east end of the library has bookshelves at floor level and an upper balcony reading room with a wood-paneled railing and turned posts.
Twin stairways to the second floor flank the wide library entrance. On both levels, corridors run north-south along the front and back, and east-west down each end, with additional east-west crossings over the library and between the courtyards. The plan is basically a large figure 8. At its north end is the auditorium, at its canter is the library, and its sides and south end are made up of classrooms and other specialized rooms. The hollows of the 8 enclose outdoor courts on either side of the library. The courts are subdivided by covered passageways into quiet landscaped study courts about 70' x 40' adjoining the library, and larger informal courts (about 70' x 90') to the north and south. Classrooms, study halls, and offices generally face the inner courts, while noisier areas, corridors, cafeterias, labs, face outward to the street and schoolyard.
The kitchen, cafeteria, teachers' room, and locker rooms are located on the east side of the rear corridor, and open to the back of the building. Shop and science classrooms are at the south end. The second floor has the same basic configuration of corridors as the first floor and contains special rooms for home economics, typing, accounting, and drawing, as well as generic academic classrooms. Large windows make all of the rooms light and airy. In addition to exterior windows, most classrooms have transoms and clerestory level windows to the single-loaded, well-lit corridors.
The north wing has music and art rooms along the rear, and otherwise is entirely occupied by the auditorium and its foyer. The two-story auditorium has a raked floor, coffered ceiling, and wainscotting. It is a self-contained theater with its own entries, insulated from the rest of the school by corridors. (There is a clerestory vantage point into the theater from the second-floor classroom corridor.) It seats 1300, and has a balcony with a projection booth and a stage with a fly loft, The proscenium was topped by the Latin motto of the school, hand carved by students of the California College of Arts and Crafts and presented to University High by the Senior Class of 1927 to be displayed "forever" above the stage.
The two-story gymnasium building is located behind (east of) the main building. It was built in 1939, a complete "reconstruction" in reinforced concrete of a 1926-27 hollow tile building of the same size and shape (about 100' x 110'). Clad in stucco and trimmed with minimal moderne molding, this flat-roofed building has large rectangular windows (now boarded up) on the second story. The main gym space is divided by a folding wall, so that girls and boys could have separate gyms, or the whole could be combined for court space and bleachers. The first floor has a recessed public entrance and ticket booth on the east side, plus locker rooms, showers, and offices.
The buildings are presently boarded up, and deterioration has occurred due to vandalism, small fires, and the elements. Skylights have been broken, as has most of the glass in doors and window sash. Water damage has occurred under skylights and in front of previously unboarded doors and windows. Most classrooms, however, are almost intact, and damage is largely cosmetic. The building apparently sustained no damage in the Loma Prieta earthquake.
North end of main (west) facade, looking northeast: auditorium, bell tower, and three bays of front classroom corridor (1991)
North half of main (west) facade, looking NE from center entry toward auditorium (1991)
Courtyards in center of building. View from roof of east (rear) classroom corridor, looking northwest across south court and study court. Second floor corridor at right runs across the top of the library (1991)
Auditorium, view from balcony looking east toward stage (1991)
Typical classroom off west corridor, looking south. Window faces courtyard (1991)
View southeast along main facade, from auditorium to science wing. Taken from median strip under BART tracks on Martin Luther King Way (1991)
South end of main (west) facade, looking southeast, showing science wing with bay window on model dining room, and part of 1l-story shop wing at far right (1991)
North facade (side of auditorium), looking southeast, showing fly tower and one-story entry wing to back corridor (1991)
Schoolyard, gymnasium, and rear of main building, looking SW from 58th Street (1991)
