I'm sure most people know that many NOLA school buildings sit vacant and are falling apart. This is one of them.
On a chilly February day last year, I went and visited this school with a coworker I had met just a month earlier. He had been dying to check this place out and since it was an endangered property, there was a chance this property would soon be sold.
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This school was built around 1900. It's a solid brick building on the outside, but its innards have collapsed pretty much entirely. This is all quite a shame, since this school has some important history attached to it.
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In 1960, New Orleans began to integrate their schools. This was one of the early schools to be integrated. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've seen a period photo of this very playground in use in an article where white parents protested the integration of the school.
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The school has been empty since the 80s, but a fire a few years back has caused the 2nd and 1st floors to collapse into the basement. The 2nd floor stairways lies directly on top of the 1st floor stairway, so there's no way to safely check out the upper floors.
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A good portion of the roof is missing, so everything is just wide open to the elements and people who graffiti and do all the hoodlum things one does.
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(Obligatory chair-in-abandoned-place photo hahaha)
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The current issue with the property is that the owner continues to pay the fines for not keeping the building up to code. However, he doesn't actually stabilize the place; he just continues to get citations and pays the fines. Classic demolition by neglect.
Besides almost getting attacked by a random rooster who was in a bad mood, the place was luckily empty the day I went. Rumors at work have been that this place will soon be bought however; perhaps for apartments, or something else. I hope that it gets saved as it's a really important Civil Rights landmark for our city!
Thanks for looking!