Thomas Edison High School
Courtesy of Radical Ed
"The following b&w photo and text is from an article in a local
news-blog about the demise and demolition of a turn-of-the-century-built
North Philadelphia public high school. It was known by three different names in
it's long history. Northeast Manual Training School, Edison High, and Julia
DeBurgos. Now it's gone.
I have visited and photographed this structure many times over the last few
years, logging in hundreds of hours doing so. I've partied here, slept here,
quaffed hundreds of beers here, burned mass-quantities of cannabis here, and
generally had some of the most wonderful, artistically satisfying times of my
life in this building with the best of friends and some awesome strangers as
well.
The numbered photos under the text are but a small selection of some of the best
photographs I've taken at the school. I hope you enjoy them, this school is now
a pile of rubble on a vacant lot in North Philly as of this time.
As a side note, this school had the highest number of graduates killed during
the Vietnam Conflict in the late 60's and early 70's in the United States of
America. May she (and they) rest in pieces. "
The former Northeast Manual Training High School
looks as if it had been plucked from the Princeton campus and dropped into the
middle of North Philadelphia. Constructed in 1903 at the intersection of North
8th Street and West Lehigh Avenue, the “Collegiate Gothic” building has walls of
granite, traceried windows, and gargoyles sprouting from the central tower. The
auditorium boasted a magnificent pipe organ. This was not a school for the rich
and privileged, but for the sons of working class Philadelphians. The School
Board believed that traditional beauty could be a form of uplift for the
students, most of whom lived in tightly-packed, tree-less neighborhoods,
befouled by smoke from the surrounding factories. Architect Lloyd Titus followed
his client’s wishes, and created a dignified structure that loomed dreamily
above the neighborhood’s squat rowhouses and warehouses.
It is an edifice built to last. Over a century after its completion, there is
not a crack in the foundations and walls are still plumb and level.
Yet on August 3, 2011, the school caught fire and the upper floors were
completely burned out. Nothing short of a total gut-renovation could make it fit
for reuse. The school, most recently known as the Julia DeBurgos Middle Magnet
School, had been closed two years before the conflagration. Because it was not
properly sealed, the old school became a magnet for squatters, drug-addicts, and
vandals, and quickly fell into ruin. The four-alarm fire, possibly the result of
arson, was the coup de grace.
Last Tuesday, I stood with demolition superintendent Devon Jackson in the
groin-vaulted Gothic vestibule of the school’s auditorium, just as demolition
started. It was a dreary, gray day. Rain spat through the vacant windows, and
bright construction lights shone through the swirling dust. Piles of rubble
filled the courtyard. A few weeds still clung tenaciously to life, poking
through the debris.
“The toughest part of the demolition is removing all the wood from the
structure,” Devon explained. It was not just in the floor planks and joists, but
also buried behind plaster walls. Much of the wood that escaped the fire was
either water-damaged or had succumbed to rot.
I asked Devon if it was OK for me to step into the auditorium. It was a
cavernous space, two stories high. The stage, surrounded by crumbling plaster
moulding, still remained. A tattered blue curtain shung from the proscenium. The
seats had already been removed, the flooring material ripped up. The pipe organ
once stood behind the stage.
Eric Smith, Jackson’s supervisor at A.T. Russell Construction (the company in
charge of demolishing the school), was alerted to the long-sealed organ shortly
after demolition started, but by the time he arrived to photograph it, his
workers had dismantled the instrument. While wandering through the school, Smith
saw pitiful reminders of the squatters who used the squalid structure as their
home. One illegal tenant had set up a suite of sorts, using a room for
discarding his soiled clothes, one as a closet, and another as his bedroom.
Since the building had no working plumbing, he poked a hole in a chair and used
it as a toilet. Bottles he used for urination lay scattered around the space.
Taking down such a massive structure is no easy task, yet Smith predicts that
his team of about 20 men will demolish it in a mere three months. The first task
is to gut the interior and salvage anything of value. Unusable wood components
will be shredded into mulch, and sheetrock pulverized into gypsum fertilizer.
The 10-inch veneer of exterior granite, as well as the gargoyles, cornices, and
window tracery, will be sold to architectural salvage dealers, who have found a
brisk market for such elegant pieces of history. Men wielding sledgehammers and
a swinging wrecking ball will then knock down the brick-and-masonry structural
walls.
Smith knows he has a job to do and that economically the building is probably
beyond saving. Yet he still regrets its destruction. “It’s a shame to see a
building like that torn down,” he said. “You take a school hat’s been around for
110 years and then replace it with a Save-A-Lot, Burger King or a sneaker store.
Change is necessary, but it would be nice if there was a better way to preserve
structures like that. Even if you tried to save a portion of the building and
preserve the history of the site.”
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