South Tacoma says goodbye to 101-year-old school building

After four days of demolition, what was left of the oldest school building in South Tacoma was nothing but a cloud of dust and a mass of bricks and broken lumber.

By early Thursday, the last standing bits of the 101-year-old Barlow Annex were ready to be hauled off for recycling. Over the next month, the rest of the adjoining Gray Middle School will follow. Both were still active school buildings filled with students just two years ago.

The people demolishing the buildings say they have never seen anything like South Tacomans' long goodbye.

"I've been on hundreds of job sites, all kinds of buildings, lots and lots of schools," asbestos consultant Jason Carlson said. "I've never seen so much interest in a school coming down. I've never seen people care so much about a building."

James Zahnow, who works for Wm. Dickson Co., carried out bits of history left behind in the move to the new Gray in 2009. He found a box of choir shirts and another of band letters and brought one to his girlfriend, Gina Paris, a former Gray student. She teared up.

Zahnow understands. All the schools he attended are gone.

"It's just so hard," he said. "It's gone, gone, gone. When they go away, it tugs at my heart."

Don Robison leaned on a fence and watched excavator jaws tug at the Barlow Annex's third floor. The site smelled of musty wood and plaster, like an old classroom. He could put five generations of his family in those beige classrooms with the tall windows.

"It was a good place to go to school," said Robison, 44. "A lot of people in the neighborhood can't believe that this particular portion of Gray is coming down."

The old Gray campus is an architectural mash-up. The main school, at 3901 S. 60th St., is, for the next week or so, a red brick collegiate Gothic designed by E. J. Bresemann and built in 1926. In 1962, the district built a three-story glass-and-concrete connector from the main school to the older Barlow Annex.

Barlow is the building that Robison misses already.

"Originally, this was going to stay, because it was one of the oldest schools in Tacoma," he said of all the talk during the planning for the new Gray on Tyler Street.

"We were asking about it before Gray got the new school," said neighborhood activist Andrew Mordhorst.

There was a request, he said, to get the annex onto Tacoma's Register of Historic Places. But the neighborhood groups, busy with safety and beautification projects, lost touch with it until it was too late.

The school district hired architectural historian Caroline Swope to rate its buildings by preservation priority. She gave 11 buildings high priority, including Gray and the Barlow Annex, Gault, Hunt, Stewart and Jason Lee middle schools, Oakland Alternative School, the Central Administration Building and McKinley, McCarver, Wainwright and Hoyt elementary schools.

In 2010, the Tacoma School Board agreed to nominate Fern Hill, McCarver and Whitman elementary schools, Jason Lee and Stewart middle schools, and the Central Administration building to Tacoma's Register of Historic Places. It also closed Gault, McKinley and Wainwright.

But neighbors thought Barlow Annex met the register's criteria for age and integrity, and had historic and architectural significance.

Architect Frederick Heath set up practice in Tacoma in 1901. Between 1908 and 1912, he designed McKinley, Fern Hill, Central, Oakland and Park Avenue elementary schools, and Lincoln High School.

In 1910, another Heath-designed school opened. It was originally called Edison but later renamed for Orin Watts Barlow, first president of the Tacoma School Board.

Tim Smith, who settled in the neighborhood after he retired from the Army, thinks history is what gives a neighborhood identity. When he learned the district intended to raze the old Gray campus to make room for new play fields, he tried to stop it. Since the school district had not, he nominated the buildings for the Tacoma Register.

He looked for a use for the buildings and got support for an outreach center for honorably discharged veterans. At the June 22 meeting of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, Swope spoke against saving them. She'd put Gray on the priority list, she told commissioners, not as individual buildings but as a "thematic school nomination."

Earthquake repairs and removal of some dormers compromised the buildings' integrity, she said, though that had not been an issue when she put them on the first high-priority list.

School officials, including Superintendent Art Jarvis, spoke against saving the buildings. They spoke in favor of installing the play fields and expanding the pick-up area at nearby Edison Elementary School.

The commissioners voted 5–2 against preservation.

For the last week, the people of South Tacoma have been saying goodbye.

Robert Waldron, 17, took photos of his old school's death.

Teacher Debra Spencer-Grant cried, though the old Gray had bad floors, outdated classrooms and smelled of mold. She was glad to hear commemorative bricks will be available, metal will be melted again, beams salvaged, and crushed wood turned to productive mulch.

Robison, the middle man in his family's five generations of students, figured taxpayers had sunk enough into trying to make the 85-year-old Gray building earthquake safe, without good results.

Barlow Annex, he said, was different.

"That building looked like it was built good and strong," he said. "That's why they're taking so long. Otherwise, it would have been down in one day. They could have invested in it and turned it into something."

Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677
kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com
blog.thenewstribune.com/street