Can we save the old Horace Mann School?

One consequence of the Seattle School District’s January 29 vote to close five public schools this year is the historic Horace Mann building in the Central District will soon be shuttered indefinitely. That's bad news for its sketchy neighborhood along Cherry Street.

“Right now we plan on mothballing the building. We don’t have an immediate plan for doing anything with it,” says Kathy Johnson, the school district’s lead facility manager. Johnson says the district will evaluate it and make a recommendation to the school board, which will cast the final vote on the building’s fate. “Please allow us to sell it, or rent it, or make it vacant,” is what the study will say, explains Ron English, deputy general counsel for the district, who also handles its real estate. But that won’t happen until late fall.

As part of the district’s budget-cutting “Capacity Management Plan,” the nearly 300 students of Nova alternative high school have been evicted from the 100-year-old building on E. Cherry St. and 24th, where their school program had been since 1975. They are being sent to Capitol Hill to share the Meany Middle School building with the Secondary Bilingual Orientation Center students.

The district is also closing T. T. Minor Elementary, less than a mile away. The prospect of two more vacant buildings in the CD has raised some concerns in this neighborhood that is riddled with crime, much of it youth violence, and already pocked by empty buildings. Although Mann is directly across the street from the Garfield Community Center, the newly renovated Garfield High School, and the new Quincy Jones Performing Arts Center, this is one of the city’s more crime-ridden zones.

Johnson claims the district has had “multiple inquiries on both buildings regarding rentals from various community groups and organizations.” But because Mann is on a tighter parcel of land and is a historic building, it makes it in some respects less obvious choice for repurposing than T. T. Minor. It also brings up a lot of issues about historic preservation.

In the meantime, the district will board the windows, change the locks, and keep some heat on in the building, says Johnson. A custodian will check in on it about once a month while doing the rounds on the district’s other unused properties. “We’ll have 10 or 12 buildings that will be vacant,” says Johnson.

Built in 1902, the stately three-story blue and white Beaux Arts Neoclassical building was first called the Walla Walla School after the original name of the neighborhood, one of the oldest in the city. It was renamed Horace Mann in 1921 in honor of the 19th century champion of universal free education, and served as an elementary school until 1968, housing various, mostly alternative, schools after that. In 1975, Nova moved in.

According to Chris Moore, field director for the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation, the building qualifies for landmark status and has been included in the city’s historic sites inventory database. “The building has been identified as meeting the criteria for listing in the National Register of Historic Places (…) and the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Ordinance, and is located in a potential national and/or local historic district,” says Moore.

“I think there is no doubt it is significant,” says preservation consultant Mimi Sheridan. “Certainly it is an important school. It is one of the oldest schools in the city. It was done by a prominent architect, Charles Saunders of Saunders and Houghton,” which designed five schools in Seattle, according to Sheridan: Mercer, Minor, Columbia, Rainier, and Walla Walla.

What’s more, Mann may be the last of Saunders’ school buildings left standing, she says. Indeed, according to Building for Learning, Seattle Public Schools 1862-2000, by Nile Thompson and Carolyn Marr, the original T.T. Minor building was demolished in 1940, Mercer was demolished in 1948, and Rainier (originally the Jackson Street School) was razed in 1957. Columbia, built in 1890, was originally the Pontius School; the name was changed to Lowell in 1910, which remains in Capitol Hill, but the original S&H structure was demolished in 1959. So that leaves Horace Mann.

That would further qualify Mann for landmark status, says Washington Trust’s Moore, since categories used to designate buildings include: “best examples” of a style or architect’s work, “first/only built,” and “last remaining.”

“It’s likely the land holds more value than the building,” Moore also points out, a fact that worries some members of the community who don’t want to see the building replaced with condos. That wouldn’t happen easily, says Moore. “Given the size of the building, any proposal to demolish it from a future owner would have to go through the Landmarks Board,” says Moore. Another factor that might save the old building are also federal tax incentives for renovating a historic building.