Going to High School in Phoenix in 1909


Let's time-travel back to Phoenix in 1909, and go to High School.

Luckily, the High School is easy to find. It's the old Churchill Mansion, and it's quite a place. It's a gigantic Victorian house, built by the guy who is just about number one in Real Estate, Clark Churchill. That's him over there, the guy with the goat beard. Hey, that's a good look! Maybe when I'm old enough to grow a beard, I'll go with that fashion, too.

Clark Churchill

Phoenix sure has been growing! Look at all of those people, and the kids have been growing up, too. I remember when they built the Central School over on Monroe, and a lot of people wondered if it would be too big. And now it's practically overflowing!

Central School in 1909, northwest corner of Central and Monroe, Phoenix, Arizona. About where the San Carlos Hotel is nowadays.

At the rate this town is growing, I'm sure that the High School will need to grow, too. I've heard that there are plans for building a bunch of new buildings around the High School building. They say that they're going to make a regular campus of it.

View of the Phoenix High School from along the town ditch (The Salt River Valley Canal, Swilling's Ditch). You're looking west at about 7th Street north of Van Buren

I understand that they're very strict over at the High School, and that you have to wear shoes. Sounds uncomfortable! I'm not exactly sure what they teach there, I thought that I'd had enough learnin' after going to Central School. I guess there must be more. In fact, I understand that you can go on learnin' after High School, down in Tucson at the University of Arizona, or in Tempe at the Normal School.

OK, I've got my shoes on, let's go. There's the building, you can't miss it. And look! Girls! I think I'm going to like High School!




Phoenix Union High School added several new buildings, many of which are still there in downtown Phoenix, on Van Buren west of 7th Avenue, in use by the University of Arizona, and Arizona State. The Churchill Building (the Commercial Building), which was at where Polk and 5th Street would be, didn't survive past the 1940s.
If you liked this article, and would like to see more in the future, along with a LOT of cool old photos of Phoenix, please consider becoming a patron of History Adventuring on Patreon. If you're already a patron, thank you! Your pledge makes this happen!

 Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Learning to drive in the 1970s

Image
Although most of my history adventuring is done in my imagination, traveling into the distant past or future, I was actually there in the 1970s. In fact, that's when I learned how to drive a car. Time-travel with me. I learned to drive on my parents 1973 Ford Torino Station Wagon, which was a monstrous, clumsy boat of a car that had a hood that a friend of mine in high school described as "getting there fifteen minutes before you did". In fact, the nose of the car was so ridiculously long that my dad actually made a bump-out at the end of the garage for it to fit so you could close the garage door. Parking that car in the tiny garage that my parents had was like threading a needle! By the way, we're in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the neighborhood where I grew up, which was built in the late 1920s. But don't imagine that it was some kind of historic neighborhood, it was just old, and very worn. The streets were terribly narrow, and even more so after it snowed (which...
Read more