Vacant Elementary School Building in NJ

North Long Branch School-Primary No. 3, Long Branch New Jersey

Date added: June 18, 2024

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Long Branch emerged as a resort area on the Atlantic shore as early as 1788 when the residence of Ebenezer Wardell in Long Branch was used as a boarding house for Elliston Perot of Philadelphia and his friends. Along with its associated neighborhoods of Elberon, Hollywood, and Branchport, Long Branch became the focus of an extensive resort area that formed along the New Jersey coast from the early 19^th century onward. By the 1830s the town had added gaming and other entertainment to the natural attractions of the shore itself. Bolstered by the establishment of rail and steamboat lines that connected the city to Philadelphia and New York, Long Branch quickly eclipsed other Jersey shore towns as the premier resort for a loyal community of wealthy vacationers who had amassed fortunes in the country's 19th-century industrial success. Moreover, in 1869 President Ulysses S. Grant chose Long Branch as his preferred summer residence, and following him no fewer than six other Republican presidents through Woodrow Wilson effectively made the town the nation's summer capital. Favored by presidential prestige and burgeoning capitalist wealth, Long Branch achieved a reputation as an exclusive haven for the elite and fashionable.

The service economy cultivated by the tourist trade drew hundreds of semi-skilled and unskilled workers to work in the hotels, restaurants, and related businesses, and working-class neighborhoods accordingly formed in and around Long Branch and other resort towns. Inevitably, the city developed a more permanent, year-round life beyond the seasonal activity of the resort community. Just as the local and county governments sought to promote tourism and cater to vacationers, they were thus obligated to provide basic municipal services for their own people as well. Moreover, as Long Branch's prestigious status as the country's most popular resort began to fade in the early decades of the 20^th century, it was of course the more typical, everyday side of civic life that endured. The history of Long Branch the town parallels that of Long Branch the resort, and it is in the context of this relationship that the development of the city's educational system should be considered.

The first school house in the Long Branch area was built in West Long Branch on the property of Elisha West in 1780, prior to which education had occurred primarily at home, as it had throughout the country. In 1812 Benjamin Wardell, one of the town's leading citizens, organized the effort to provide another school house for the Upper Village of Long Branch. By 1844 two larger public schools had replaced these early structures and served both the Upper and Lower Villages of the town. Well into the middle decades of the century in Long Branch, however, private education seems to have received far more attention than the public school system, an imbalance deriving from "the snobbish objections of the aristocratic and the wealthy". Preferring to reserve a select education for their own children instead of furthering mass schooling, affluent taxpayers, most of whom had been attracted to the area for its resort reputation, founded and supported private schools such as the Bucktown School, founded in 1840.

On a fundamental level the developments in Long Branch paralleled more general educational patterns throughout the state and country in the first half of the 19^th century. Individual states, not the federal government, were entirely responsible for public education, and more often than not that responsibility was further transferred to local or private institutions, primarily religious groups. Privately funded academies, intended to prepare young students for college, inevitably provided educational opportunities only to those families who could afford them, as indeed happened in Long Branch. Whether private, parochial, or public, school buildings remained relatively small, one-room structures with common benches and desks and often unsatisfactory hygienic conditions. During these years, however, as the nation came to rely on industry more than agriculture, educators everywhere began to reconsider the social role of education. Across the country the accessibility of free, public, elementary education was deemed essential to social progress, a belief increasingly supported by legislative action. In New Jersey specifically, tentative efforts toward a free public school system had begun as early as 1809, and a State School Fund was established in 1817, although distributions from this fund did not begin until 1829 - indeed, the success of public education in the state remained limited at best through the middle of the century. It was not until 1867, when the state legislature passed the critical "Act to Establish a System of Public Instruction," that New Jersey seriously addressed growing concerns regarding both curriculum and school design. Established in the same year, the state's Board of Education provided the necessary guidance of a centralized administrative agency, capable of ensuring that legislation would in fact produce sufficient public education, particularly at the elementary school level.

During the same period, educators and architects together reevaluated school architecture in conjunction with the development of public school systems. The organization of schools into grades, for example, began to transform the one-room schoolhouse into a multiple-room building, at least in areas with sufficiently large student populations. Standard building types developed according to prevailing, accepted models, primarily that outlined by Henry Barnard in his 1841 treatise School House Architecture. Barnard's recommendations, which were emphatically endorsed by educational administrators in New Jersey and other states in the Northeast from mid-century onward, focused on improving the physical comfort and hygienic conditions of schools in order to encourage the learning process. Better light and ventilation, individual chairs and desks, and separate entrances for boys and girls were among the design features in Barnard's ideal plan, which could be adapted either to the traditional one-room format in rural areas or newer multi-room, multi-story structures. The latter type inevitably became increasingly more common in New Jersey following the administrative centralization occasioned by the 1867 public education act. Most significantly, in 1894 the state assigned responsibility for educational administration to townships, instead of local neighborhoods, consolidating previously fragmented districts and necessitating larger school buildings.

While reform thus gradually improved educational administration on the national and state levels, the actual implementation of successful public schooling continued to depend on local municipalities, a reality vividly illustrated in Long Branch. The above-mentioned inequity of mid-19th-century education in the town was the target of Dr. Thomas G. Chattle, superintendent of schools in Ocean Township from 1857 to 1889. Chattle first sought to reform the qualifying examinations and selection process of public school teachers, whom he discovered to be inadequately trained. More importantly, he urged the town to expand its educational facilities, which consisted only of the two 1840s buildings and a smaller third school even though the population of Long Branch had been steadily rising along with its tourist trade. Although financial appropriations for public schools doubled nationally from 1820 to 1850, students in Long Branch were crowded into schoolrooms for a mediocre education supervised by too few teachers. Resistance from the wealthier civic interests and an apathetic public persisted through the 1860s, however, until several editorials in the Long Branch News - the most scathing being that written by a correspondent identified only as "Growler" - lent Chattle's campaign the popular clout necessary to effect change. In 1870 two new schools were erected in Long Branch, and the following year the state legislature created Long Branch District No. 85 out of four smaller districts. The latter act enabled the planning of the town's first high school building, dedicated in 1876, and in order to complement the township's educational administration, a local public school administration was formally established in 1880. In 1890-91 four more schools were built in the town, including a new Primary School No. 1 (the Broadway School) in 1890 and its "twin," Primary School No. 3 (the North Long Branch School), the following year.

In 1889 New York City educator Christopher Gregory succeeded Chattle as superintendent. Over his subsequent thirty-two-year tenure he devoted himself to increasing scholarship standards and initiating progressive innovations, such as kindergarten, domestic science, and manual training and commercial courses, in order to bring Long Branch to the state's highest level of educational quality. Continuing the building program, another high school opened in 1899, this named in honor of Dr. Chattle, the figure who had begun Long Branch's educational reform four decades earlier. With vastly improved facilities and a progressively conceived curriculum in place, public education in Long Branch had advanced immeasurably from its neglected state in the mid-19^th century. By the end of Gregory's superintendentship in 1921, the school system had attained recognition as one of the strongest and best organized in New Jersey, and in 1924 the town commemorated his leadership by naming a new primary school after him. Even as the town's famed tourist fortunes were sadly declining, Long Branch had established itself as a state leader in education.

An analysis of the design of the twin primary schools on Church Street and Broadway further elaborates on the history of this significant period in Long Branch's educational system. As the schools evolved and transformed over their first four decades, they also reflect both local and national trends in school construction. As originally built in 1890-91, the two schools were typical for late-19th-century New Jersey and thus reflected the continued influence of Barnard's model. Amply ornamented with patterned brick details, the schools were modest-sized buildings of two-and-a-half stories in Romanesque Revival style, with Colonial details such as a hipped roof, large, gabled dormers, and a projecting entrance vestibule, all retained from mid-19th-century school design. Each of the first two floors featured an essentially square plan with two large classrooms around a central stair hall and no corridor through to the rear of the building, a characteristic arrangement for school buildings of the period. Most likely, in fact, the rear of the building featured separate entrances for girls and boys, again according to the Barnard plan. The third floor housed the auditorium, also following what was then common practice (Long Branch Daily Record 1954). With the continued expansion of Long Branch's school system and student population during the last decade of the century, the North Long Branch and Broadway Schools were enlarged, in 1900 and 1903 respectively, to roughly double their previous size by the addition of a rear wing similar to the original block. Since the original block offered no through-access, the two halves of each school were joined by a cross-gabled stairwell bay, with secondary entrance alcoves projecting from both sides (north and south). In order to rectify the limitations of the earlier design, hallways in the newer half were aligned down the middle of each floor between the two classrooms.

By the second decade of the 20^th century the design of school buildings nationwide had become a highly specialized architectural discipline, governed by widely recognized codes more rigorously developed than Barnard's earlier recommendations. New Jersey established particularly strict standards for improved spatial organization, lighting, ventilation, fireproofing, and design efficiency, instituting an innovative set of principles by which to test the adequacy of school construction. New codes also mandated that a building be easily capable of expansion, in order to allow for inevitably increasing numbers of students and to avoid the somewhat awkward Solution found in the two Long Branch schools. Many of these and other aspects of design had not commonly been implemented in older schools such as the North Long Branch School, and the School consistently scored well below average in State surveys based on the building codes instituted in 1912 (State of New Jersey 1923 and 1928). The School satisfied only 39 percent of a perfect score, for example, in the 1922 survey, which promised (or threatened, in the case of North Long Branch) that "each year new buildings are being constructed to take the place of buildings that have outlived their usefulness". Indeed, given the strictness of design standards by the 1920s, only its relatively recent construction and the pressing need for school space in Long Branch seem to have prevented the complete replacement of the North Long Branch School.

The North Long Branch School continued to function through these years, although its now outmoded design proved especially costly on one occasion - in 1929 the entire attic story was destroyed in a fire over the Easter holiday. The original hipped roof and dormers, by this time a roof type considered unnecessarily expensive compared to recently improved, cost-efficient flat-roof construction, was never replaced and the building remains a flattened two stories to this day. After the fire both the North Long Branch (1929) and Broadway (1931) schools received new one-story auditoriums, which as a rule were now located on the ground floor (never the third) for safety concerns. Like the earlier additions, the auditoriums had to extend further east from the original block, again revealing the limitations of the earlier mode of school design. Thus the North Long Branch and Broadway Schools both survived into the middle of this century as late 19th-century buildings distinctly altered according to a revised philosophy of school design.

Postwar population growth in New Jersey and other states naturally meant a corresponding increase in schooling needs, and the situation in Long Branch was no exception. By the mid-1950s the town's schools were unacceptably overcrowded, none more so perhaps than the North Long Branch School. The school was obliged to convert half of its kitchen into classroom space, use its auditorium to accommodate the fourth grade, and send its fifth and sixth grades to another school. As noted earlier, the building traditionally had not been suited for expansion, and the construction of the 1929 auditorium did not permit the addition of a second story of classrooms above it (the Broadway School featured such a design).

The possibility of new construction was further hampered for a time by financial difficulties, but in 1955 a new school in North Long Branch was finally dedicated on Long Branch Avenue. Appropriately, it was named in honor of Ms. Lenna W. Conrow, who for many distinguished years had been the principal of the North Long Branch School. The old building continued to serve as an elementary school until 1978, after which it was used for a brief period as office space and a senior citizens' center. Since 1986 the Long Branch Board of Education has used the space for storage.

None of the North Long Branch School's later history, however, significantly affected its architectural design or details, and thus it remains essentially the same building it was when the auditorium was added in 1929. Although missing its attic story, original interior features remain in excellent condition, including wood wainscoting, moldings, banisters, tin ceiling patterns, and plumbing fixtures. Its design is exemplary of late-19th-century school architecture as influenced by Barnard's plan, featuring vestiges of the mid-19th-century one-room schoolhouse type in its circulation patterns and entrance vestibule yet suggesting more current trends in its multi-story composition and Romanesque aesthetic. The North Long Branch School seems one of the last schools to have followed these design patterns, as revised building codes in the early 20^th century radically altered the common school type and rendered the North Long Branch School obsolete and unsatisfactory in certain respects. Considering these changes in school design - as well as the essential fact that all schools are generally subject to at least basic renovation and alteration - the integrity of the North Long Branch School as an early-20th-century structure is exceptional. Walking through the building today, from the rather confined front stair hall to the spacious classrooms, from the wood-paneled closets and hardwood floors to the cast-iron furnace in the basement, one is amazed to realize that this building continued to serve as a school through decades of more utilitarian school architecture.

Building Description

The North Long Branch School (Primary No. 3) is a two-story, flat-roofed, brick bearing-wall structure exhibiting both Romanesque and Colonial Revival influences. Constructed in 1891 as the "twin" of the Broadway School (Primary No. 1; now office space) in Long Branch, the school occupies a spacious lot on the east side of Church Street, 50 yards south of White Street in a residential neighborhood in North Long Branch, New Jersey (Monmouth County). Its long rectangular plan lies perpendicular to the street, with a one-story, gabled main entrance vestibule projecting from the five-bay west facade. A raised basement with straight-lintel, 8-over-8 windows (some of which are now boarded) is separated from the principal facade by a continuously corbeled, brick watertable. The building's primary fenestration includes Roman-arch and segmented-arch windows with brick rowlock-course lintels and bluestone sills. Corbeled brick brackets above support a plain, terra cotta cornice and a brick parapet. Turn-of-the-century interior trim remains almost entirely intact in good condition, including wainscoting, moldings, banisters, tin ceiling patterns and plumbing fixtures. Extending further east from the rear of the original building is a one-story, brick auditorium with less ornamental detail built in 1929. The auditorium was added after a fire that year destroyed the original building's third floor, a hipped-roof attic story with large gabled dormers and three chimneys, where the auditorium had previously been located.

The building's main west facade is symmetrically fenestrated with eight arched windows, two in each of the outer bays, one on either side of the entrance, and two smaller ones above the entrance, all of which feature small squared lights around the perimeter of two larger primary lights. Decorative bands of vertically laid, sawtooth brickwork run horizontally under bluestone window sills and along the spring line of the second-story arches. The middle three bays of the facade project slightly forward from the outer two, and the gabled entrance vestibule projects further from that. Enhancing this stepped effect of facade planes are brick pilasters framing the entrance vestibule, the three-bay central section and the outer bays. Fronted by a flight of twelve steps, the vestibule itself has a wide, basket-handle archway, a wood cornice with small scrolled brackets, and a square, slate plaque engraved with the designation "Primary No. 3" and the name of the original builder, C.V.N. Wilson. (The architect, A. L. Hartwell, is not named.)

Incorporating the same brick detailing as the west facade, the north and south side elevations reflect the two stages of the original building's construction (in 1891 and 1900), with two rectangular, six-bay blocks each with twelve segmented-arch, 4-over-4 windows. A raised horizontal brick course runs through each window level, continuous with similarly articulated window surrounds. The windows on the newer, eastern block are slightly larger than on the original western block and are more densely arranged, probably . reflecting both a modified structural system and contemporary concern for providing classrooms with more light. The two blocks are separated by a single-bay, recessed center section from which a one-story, plainly designed side entrance vestibule with a hipped roof projects on both the north and south sides. A small, square wooden storage shed also projects from a single bay on the basement level of the eastern block on both sides.

Before its destruction in the 1929 fire, the original third floor was contained within a hipped roof over each block joined by a perpendicular gable between them, as can be seen in historic photographs and currently on the school's "twin" on Broadway. A large, gabled dormer with three arched windows rose over the three-bay section on the main west facade, similarly sized gabled dormers with four straight-lintel windows faced north and south over the rear (eastern) block, and a smaller cross gable topped the side entrance bay in the middle. A large, square chimney with blind-arch faces rose in the center of the front (western) block, and a pair of smaller chimneys stood at the eastern end of the building, the brick shafts of which all remain visible today to just above the current flat roof. According to the building contract, the original cornice was made of wood with small scroll brackets, like those remaining on the entrance vestibule and on the Broadway School, and the original roof was covered with slate shingles. The replacement flat roof built after the fire involves a steel-frame support system visible from the interior of the second floor. The one-story auditorium added to the eastern end is plainly constructed in brick, ornamented only with the same terra-cotta cornice and parapet that was added to the original building. Five rectangular windows are irregularly spaced on both the north and south walls, with no windows to the east, and the walls are articulated with subtle brick buttresses.

The first and second floors of the original two-block section each comprise four large classroom spaces with either northern or southern exposure, around a dual-flight central stair hall accessed by the side entrances. The double doors of the main (west) entrance lead into a front stair hall with left- and right-hand staircases and access only to the classrooms in the western block, reflecting the limited capability for expansion of the initial design. Above the first-floor stair hall are two small teachers' lounges. The basement, accessed by an exterior door underneath the main entrance as well as the interior staircases, contains the furnace room, boys' and girls' bathrooms, and auxiliary rooms for art, music, and other purposes.

The building's original interior elements have largely survived intact, including all its windows, the furnace, and toilets in both bathrooms. The original wainscoting, shelves, door and window moldings, and stair banisters and railings all remain in place, as do sinks outside the first- and second-floor classrooms in the center landing. Pressed tin ceiling patterns exist throughout the entire building, including in the basement and auditorium. While most of the wood surfaces have been painted over, the original dark finish can be seen on the interior of several storage closets. The auditorium retains its original stage, above which is painted the motto "To Preserve the Good and Repudiate the Evil are the General Purposes of Education". A cast-iron plaque in the room commemorates the 1929 renovation and expansion of the school by the Board of Education, also listing the names of the project's architect Leon Cubberley, engineer Chester A. Slocum, and contractor Ehret-Day Co.

Since 1986 the building has been used by the Board of Education for storage, and due to its unoccupied state during that time, maintenance has been generally overlooked. As a result several interior and exterior areas have sustained water damage, particularly at the corner scupper areas below the cornice, the entrance vestibules, and the stage platform. The building's historical integrity remains intact, however, and with the exception of its minimal water-based deterioration, the school is essentially the same building it was following the 1929 renovation.