User:Sancho Mandoval/Louisville Male High School (building)

Louisville Male High School
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
Louisville Male High School building in 2009
Location	911 S. Brook Street Louisville, Kentucky
Coordinates	38°14′25.0794″N 85°45′5.3994″W
Built	1914-15
Architect	J. Earl Henry
Architectural style	Jacobean
NRHP reference No.	80001594
Added to NRHP	December 08, 1979

The Male High School Building is a building which was home to Louisville Male High School from 1915 to 1990. It is located in the northern end of the Old Louisville neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky USA. After 85 years as a school building, it was nearly demolished before a historic preservation group arranged a complicated land-swap deal and it was sold to private investors to develop as office space.

It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979 and designated a local landmark in 1998.

Neighborhood

When it was built in 1918, the school was amid the older, northern portion of Old Louisville, which was still Louisville's one of Louisville's most prestigious neighborhoods, with tree-lined streets and numerous Victorian mansions and upper-middle class homes. However, the neighborhood was already beginning a slow decline, as automobile-oriented neighborhoods to the east with newer housing became fashionable.

The 1937 Ohio River Flood devastated the area, and Old Louisville went into a long decline. Outside of a few pockets such as St. James Court, most of the old houses were either abandoned or cheaply converted to boarding houses or student housing by the 1960s. The northern section was also changed considerably by numerous urban renewal projects of the 1960s and 1970s, and the blocks around the Male High School building retain only a few pre-war developments as Interstate 65 was built directly across the street from the school building. This is a contrast to Old Louisville further south, where far fewer original buildings were razed and there were only a few urban renewal projects.

Design

Detail of the main entrance

J. Earl Henry, the school district's chief architect in the 1910s, designed the Male High School building. Henry is one of the more prominent names in Louisville architecture, having designed other historic school buildings like Albert S. Brandeis Elementary School. It is designed in the style of Jacobean architecture. As was his practice, Henry modeled his design for the Male building after well-known buildings in England. The entry portal is patterned after that of Bramshill House in Hampshire, while the rest of the school building, especially its projecting end bays, are inspired by Charlton House in Greenwich.

It is built of red brick for the surface, with limestone for the portal, parapet, Quoining, banding and all windowsills.

History

Male High School went through several buildings in its early years. In 1894 it moved into a building at First and Chestnut Streets. Alumni purchased a site at Brook and Breckenridge and donated it to the school board with the stipulation that the school be boys only.

The new building opened in 1915 and was part of a plan to merge the academically-oriented Male with the technical training of duPont Manual High School. Manual training classes occured at Manual's old building, while academic courses were taught in the new building at Brook and Breckenridge. The experiment was abandoned in 1919 as cost savings were nonexistent and students protested the long walk between classes.

By the late 1980s, the building was overcrowded, with 41 classrooms for 1,500 students, requring academic classes be held in the lunchroom. Another major concern was the constant noise and pollution from I-65, directly across the street from the building. In late 1988 the school board proposed moving Male to the former site of Durrett High School and performing a multi-million dollar renovation. The plan met with a mixed reaction, as many, especially former students, questioned the wisdom of spending so much money to renovate a 1950s-era building while leaving a historic one abandoned. They also pointed out that the new site, near heavy industry and Louisville International Airport, would also have noise problems. Residents in the neighborhood protested that the loss of the school would be a devestating blow to a neighborhood already in severe decline. Renovating the historic building to modern standards, however, would have cost an estimated $14 million, compared to the $6 million cost of the move, and the school board eventually approved the move, which was completed in 1991.

After Male left, the building was used for public meetings, as office space for Jefferson County Public Schools, and as a location for alternative program for students with behavior problems. However, in 1997, a facility reviews committee issued a final report which suggested demolishing the building to make way for a long-delayed stadium for Central High School as well as a new facility housing school administrators and Jump Start preschool classes. This met with community protest, especially from Old Louisville neighborhood groups and the State Historic Preservation Council. Nevertheless, demolition was scheduled for Summer 1999 and much of the original 8-acre campus, including the old football stadium, Maxwell Field, was razed in Summer 1998.. Opponents of demolition succeeded in persuading the Historic Landmarks and Preservation Districts Commission to designate the building a local landmark in September 1998, but that designation wouldn't actually prevent demolition. The Louisville Board of Alderman passed a resolution opposing the demolition, declaring that the building was "the embodiment of high architectural style" but this too was not binding. People involved with Central High were lukewarm about the proposal, as the stadium would be some distance from the school site. Finally, the Louisville Historical League pushed a complicated four-party land-swap proposal, which involved the Courier-Journal selling a warehouse near Central to the school board, which would raze it to build a stadium there, and thus preserve the Male building, and the school board buying a new property for the Courier-Journal to use as a warehouse. The plan was finally approved in July 1999.

As a part of the plan to prevent demolition, the school board sold the Male high building to a group of investors, all Male graduates, which renamed it the Spectrum building and developed it as office and meeting space. The investors found 125 tons of coal in the basement of the building, which apparently had been there for decades since the facility converted to gas heating. They bottled it and sold it as souveneirs to former students. The gym, which seats 3,500, was used by the Louisville Eagles of the United Pro Basketball League in 2003, and by St. Francis High School's basketball teams since 2004.