The Old High School

A post on Tiger Stadium from Shyster today reminded me of a similar situation in Wooster back in ~'95. After many years of hearing about how dirty, unsafe and generally awful the old high school was, the city ponied up somewhere in the the neighborhood of $39 million to build a new one.

Everything was great, the students (we) spent the last few weeks of the final school year committing random acts of vandalism that never would have been tolerated in any other situation (let's face it, the teachers hated that building, too) and the next fall we moved to the glittering new palace of secondary education. Of course, someone decided that the old high school was an architectural landmark worthy of preservation and mounted a long and expensive campaign to save it.

The original plan had been to tear it down and build a nice, new, state-of-the-art elementary school but, thanks to the "preservationists" (This building was a pretty common looking neo-gothic circa 1915 building, nothing special as far as I can see) the plan changed to preserving the facade and building the grade school inside of it, at god knows how much additional cost, and we ended up with a ridiculously expensive three story (when's the last time they built a school with more than two? One assumes there's some kind of fairly plausible reasoning for that...) grade school.

Sounds a little like a "recreational and educational" center in a Major League ballpark. Or a research center in an old Lazarus store. Actually, the school sounds better, but still a waste...