Valentine School, Chicopee Massachusetts

Date added: February 18, 2024 Categories:

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The Valentine School was originally known as the Grape Street School; its name was changed in 1908 to honor a former principal, William Valentine. Designed by George P.D. Alderman, a highly successful Holyoke architect who was responsible for numerous churches, mills, commercial, and civic buildings in western New England, including the main Holyoke Post Office, the school is a sophisticated Renaissance Revival design, the city's finest representative of that style. Both the elegance of its design and the superb craftsmanship of its construction testifys to the expansive civic spirit that characterized the last two decades of the 19^th century in Chicopee. It was a period that saw the near doubling of the population, the incorporation of Chicopee as a city, and the institution of municipal water and electrical power systems.

The Valentine School was located in a residential neighborhood close to the river, but east of the most densely built-up industrial area. At the time of the Valentine School's construction, there was already a school on the block, the Robinson, built in 1842 and later named for a former principal who went on to become Governor of Massachusetts, the only Chicopee native to serve in that office. The Valentine School was connected to the older building by an underground passage until the demolition of the Robinson School in the 1950s.

The Valentine School remained in use until 1980, continuing a tradition of public education on the site dating back to the early 19^th century and the beginning of Chicopee's growth as an industrial center.

Building Description

The Valentine School (1898-1899) is a two-story, flat-roofed Renaissance Revival style building of red brick and sandstone, capped by a metal entablature. Set well back from the street in a wide, shallow lot now largely covered with asphalt paving, the building remains in excellent structural condition, virtually unaltered since its construction just before the turn of the century. Its neighborhood remains a handsome one, with tree-lined streets and well-maintained houses in styles ranging from Greek Revival to Queen Anne.

The Valentine School's well-proportioned facade is symmetrical in design. The entrance block at the center projects from the wider block immediately behind it, which in turn is narrower than the rectangular main block of the building stretching across the rear. The main entrance, its double doors, divided by narrow wooden Tuscan pilasters, is recessed in a rusticated arch with a console keystone. Directly above is a Palladian window with sandstone trim.

The strong differentiation between stories, characteristic of the Renaissance Revival style, is carried out in the treatment of the building's front and side elevations. The raised basement and first floor are distinguished by regular recessed courses of brick, which create a rusticated effect in contrast to the smoothness of the wall above. The first-floor windows are rectilinear, with square-off stone lintels, while those of the second floor are round-headed, with sandstone-framed arches and sandstone impost blocks and sills. The two levels are also marked by horizontal dividing lines, a strip of sandstone between the basement and first floor, and a course of brick dentils between the first and second stories. A broad red metal entablature, rising to a projecting cornice on scroll modillions, runs around the building on three sides.

The rear of the building is less elaborate but also symmetrical. While most of its 36 windows are capped by simple brick segmental arches, a group of four at either end of the second floor has semicircular heads.

The building's interior retains its original oak woodwork throughout. The hallways are finished with horizontal boarding, and the staircases with narrow vertical paneling. Halls on both main floors are lined with freestanding glass-fronted oak cabinets.