Vashion High School
(originally Hadley Technical High School)
Location: 3405 Bell Avenue (Midtown)
Built: 1931
Architect: George W. Sanger?
Demolished: January 2003

A massive warehouse of a school building with spare trim here and there; a considerable break from the city's typical humanely-scaled school buildings. Vashon High, the city's second black high school, transferred to this building in 1963, following diminishing enrollment at a previous location.

Operations ceased here in spring of 2002, as Vashon High moved to a brand new building further north; an online history of Vashon notes conditions in the building were "a disgrace" and "a most unfitting educational climate for the young men and women who are entitled by law to much better facilities". I recall seeing the building's massive windows tinted or painted out while passing by on earlier occasions, giving the building a down-at-the-heels look. Those massive windows, however, also hint at how much daylight could be provided to the interior spaces, and I wonder what a renovation might have been able to accomplish.

Two 1955 additions were already gone by the time I happened upon the half-demolished facility at the beginning of 2003.