It was 1914.
The Borough of State College was, officially, a teenager — just 18 years past its municipal incorporation. Penn State, in its 59th year, was on its third name: The Pennsylvania State College.
And on the 400 block of South Fraser Street, on then-outskirts of town, State College got its first high school: the original State High. Just more than 120 students enrolled, according to a historic marker.
It was not — to be clear — the first time the town had high school-level classes. But it was the first time they were separated out into their own school, their own building, historical accounts show.
In the century since then, the building has grown repeatedly; emerged as a landmark under various names and ever-evolving purposes; and — most recently — begun to rust and flake, shedding thin layers of limestone from its Fairmount Avenue entrance, added in 1942.
‘It’s going to be a safety hazard soon,’ said Ed Poprik, the school district’s facilities director, looking up at south-facing stone facade last week.
With funding constraints in recent years, he said, the district just hasn’t had money for the maintenance ‘that (the building) deserves.’
(More than a half-dozen related photos are posted in the gallery to the right. Click on the large image to open the gallery.)
Poprik at times sounded apologetic on a roughly hour-long tour of the facility, known popularly now as the Fairmount Avenue building. He said the old place, covering about a half-block, is maintained — but not maintained well.
And that trend probably won’t change any time soon, it appears.
‘It’s tough to talk about this building,’ Poprik said. ‘I think the priority is where we have 2,400 high school students.’
That, of course, would be the current high school complex on Westerly Parkway. At age 54, it’s deteriorating in its own way. Until the school board decides exactly how to handle that situation — and how to pay for it — the old Fairmount Avenue building will likely be left to stay its current course, Poprik said.
The current course on Fairmount seems to include fix-up projects only on a very strict, as-needed basis. Some exterior woodwork and a portion of a roof are being replaced this summer for just more than $200,000. Those efforts were clear, unavoidable necessities.
‘It was getting to the point where some of (the woodwork) was going to fall off the building,’ Poprik said.
Granted, a long-term district facilities plan tentatively calls for the retention and eventual renovation of the Fairmount Avenue building. But until the school board decides to follow through on that plan, and allocates money for it, the future remains decidedly undefined.
***
Poprik is right: It’s tough to talk about.
My own experience with the Fairmount Avenue building is limited. I attended a few elementary-level classes there in the late 1980s and early ’90s, having been bussed over from my native Corl Street Elementary with a few classmates.
Fascinated by the place — it was serving partly as Fairmount Avenue Elementary School at the time — I remember thinking the corridors smelled funny. Not in any kind of bad or offensive way, just in a mysterious way. An interesting way, even to my little third-grade mind.
Made me wonder what else was going on under that roof, who had been there before me, and why my own elementary building — in a physical sense — wasn’t so damned interesting.
I’ve remained fascinated by the place for years, even researched it when I was a State High student.
But it wasn’t until this summer, when I asked Poprik if I could have a building tour, that I got a full, first-hand sense of the landmark.
We walked in through the 1914 entrance last Monday morning. You can still see the outline of the original structure there, facing Fraser Street. The oldest of the old exterior brick has been painted red. An original-looking ‘State College High School’ sign, engraved nicely, still rests above the original doors.
Inside, in the un-cooled corridors, it’s uncomfortably warm and humid this time of year. You’ll notice plenty of window-mounted air-conditioning units, visible outside. They may be inefficient, Poprik conceded, but they’re still a lot less expensive than a building-wide cooling system would be.
So, I asked him, really: How much of this place is still used?
And, really, he told me: Pretty much all of it.
Sure, the Fairmount Avenue Elementary School, which consumed a chunk of the building for more than 30 years, closed about a decade ago.
But the north-facing portion of the building, added in the 1930s along Nittany Avenue, is occupied primarily by the Delta Program, the district’s alternative high school program. Delta also uses the building’s gymnasium, which is available for community-education purposes, too.
The gym still sports Cold War-era ‘Fallout Shelter’ signs, an endless source of intrigue for Generation Y’ers like me.
Elsewhere, the building houses community-education functions, including a room converted for pottery classes. A variety of administrative and educational-support offices fills other rooms, including former instructional space.
A central office for the district’s technology services sits on a second level, in an enormous, airy room above the old auditorium. Apparently added in the 1930s, the big room was once the building’s library. And get this: It was constructed with very early versions of skylights.
Many, unfortunately, have since been covered up and sealed off, probably because of rain leakage.
***
Look closely in the Fairmount Avenue building, and you’ll see clear vestiges of State College past: what it was, what it stood for, how it’s changed.
After all, in its years as a conventional high school — from 1914 to 1957 — this building saw history.
Classes thought to be the first public-school driver-education instruction in the U.S. happened here in the 1930s, thanks to Amos E. Neyhart.
That same decade, the school library — Remember the airy room above the auditorium? — doubled as one of State College’s first community libraries.
The next decade, students painted gorgeous murals in the basement-level cafeteria. Illuminating the region’s history and culture, and guided in part by the globally known Viktor Lowenfeld, the murals remain visible down there. One is called the ‘Pioneer Mural’; the other, ‘Mount Nittany,’ featuring the rumored Princess Nita-Nee. Both remind me of the Henry Varnum Poor frescoes painted in Old Main during the same period.
Paint jobs — including punchier murals — with bold colors and contemporary themes have taken root throughout the building in recent decades. Of course, much of the building’s beautiful interior woodwork, tiling and fixtures remain, reminders of a time when buildings were built … well, differently.
Perhaps less noticeable are a few other cultural cues.
For one thing, all the Fairmount Avenue building’s bathrooms are on its lower levels. Poprik could only speculate that it was much less expensive to plumb the structure that way.
On another front, it appears that the building wasn’t equipped with a gym until the 1930s. The accompanying boys’ locker room — still intact — is relatively expansive, includes showers and sits just adjacent to the gym, on the same level.
But the girls’ locker room included no showers, as best Poprik can tell. To add insult to the ladies’ injury, their locker room was situated one floor away from the gym itself, right beneath the bleachers.
The old girls’ locker room has since been converted to a changing room for State High football players, who play at the adjacent Memorial Field. Visiting teams are offered the old boys’ locker room — the one with showers.
That’s Little Lion hospitality.
***
Every so often, someone talks about how perfectly redevelopment could fit on the Fairmount Avenue building’s site.
I wouldn’t doubt that it could.
But Poprik said no one has even informally approached the district about redeveloping the land for another use. Seems the commercial speculation over the acreage has remained just that, at least for now.
Whenever it happens — assuming it happens — sprucing up the building will cost some money. Poprik said an expenditure of a few million dollars would allow workers to address the most egregious shortcomings, including lackluster access for people with disabilities.
At the same time, he said, the district could spend as much as $10 million and still not fix all the building’s problems. They include heating, wiring and plumbing systems that are well past their prime.
No one knows where we go from here — not yet, anyway. The Fairmount Avenue building didn’t rate as even a minor concern in the school-board primary forums and public conversations this spring.
With the November general election on the horizon, though, maybe it’s time that we start asking the candidates what they think.
There’s a piece of ourselves under that roof. We ought to know what the would-be school board would do with it.
