Preservationists worry after Grand Avenue school closure
The historic Grand Avenue School closed its doors this month, but Orlando City Commissioner Sam Ings said he sees an opening for the 90-year-old building to continue serving young people and the community.
It could offer a new home for the recently displaced Nap Ford Community School or an expansion of the Parramore Kidz Zone that mentors youths from the low-income neighborhood, Ings said. It could house a public library and a community health clinic.
But Ings and local preservationists say they’re worried none of that will happen, and the historic building will be torn down.
“I’ve been worried about it for quite some time,” Ings said. “I’ve been saying that we definitely should save the building because it is a historic landmark and it means so much to the community. It was an anchor for the community for all of these years.”
Lauren Roth, a spokeswoman for Orange County Public Schools, said no decision has been made about the future of Grand Avenue School, at 800 West Grand St., in the Holden Heights neighborhood.
“When any facility is no longer being used as a school, we do a series of health and safety inspections to assess the conditions at the school,” she said. “That process is currently under way. Those results are needed before any future plans for the site are determined.”
In a letter to the school district this month, Raymond Cox, president of the Orange Preservation Trust, wrote that the “ambiguity of future use of the historic facility is a cause for concern."
The Grand Avenue School’s main structure is a two-story Mediterranean Revival building erected in 1926. It features stucco walls, a gable roof and a parapet entry with columns and an arched doorway. It was declared a historic landmark by Orlando in 1995.
Cox says that designation should protect the building.
“The people decided it was important enough to the community and to their culture to save this building,” Cox said. “The city and the county obviously agreed, because [the landmark designation]
The Grand Avenue School’s main structure is a two-story Mediterranean Revival building erected in 1926. It features stucco walls, a gable roof and a parapet entry with columns and an arched doorway. It was declared a historic landmark by Orlando in 1995.
went through.”
City law says historic structures are subject to a review process before they can be altered or destroyed, but Roth said it was too soon to say how that would factor into the district’s plans.
Woody Rodriguez, the school district’s attorney, wasn’t available for an interview, but he wrote an email on June 2 to the Orange Preservation Trust that said the state Department of Education has the final say on the school’s fate. The agency did not respond to a request for comment.
Two members of the Orange Preservation Trust’s board, Tana Porter and Joy Wallace Dickinson, toured the school in May. The group isn’t advocating for any specific use but says the building still has life in it.
“The school district can’t really say it’s falling apart because they kept it up really well so that it could be a school,” said Dickinson, who writes the Orlando Sentinel’s Florida Flashback column.
She noted that Grand Avenue’s sister school, Princeton Elementary, is still open on Princeton Street in College Park.
The two schools were among eight built during the land boom of the 1920s, when Orlando's population nearly tripled, from 9,282 to 27,330. The city is now home to about 275,000 residents.
Most recently known as Grand Avenue Primary Learning Centers, the school had about 200 students prior to being closed June 7 as the district prepares to open a new kindergarten-toeighth-grade school about two miles away in Parramore.
It’s possible the school district could hand over the Grand Avenue campus to Orlando. The district owes the city $1.58 million in land or cash, in exchange for property used to build the new school.
Ings argued the city should do what’s needed to acquire and protect Grand Avenue School. Failing to do so, he said, would represent the unequal treatment of historically African American communities on the city’s west side.
He noted that the city paid more than $5.8 million last year to acquire Constitution Green Park on the east side of downtown, to save the green space and its centuryold tree from private development.
"We can do that, but we don’t seem to have the urgency to reach into the heart of Holden Heights, in the black community, to champion it and to save it,” he said.
Heather Fagan, Mayor Buddy Dyer’s deputy chief of staff, said Holden Heights residents have told city staff the neighborhood needs more recreation areas. The city hasn’t determined if the Grand Avenue property can fill that need, she said.
“If we’re going to acquire that site, we want to be able to do something that he residents want,” she said.