Central High School (1893)

Four stories of brick over a heavily rusticated stone base, Richardsonian Romanesque in manner. Round-arched openings run through the lower floors, deepest at the entrance, which is set within a broad stone arch beneath a triangular pediment. A square corner tower rises above the roofline and is capped by a steep pyramidal roof flanked by smaller finialed turrets; a second, lower tower with a pointed cap stands further along the front. HIGH SCHOOL is cut in stone across the wall above the second story. Steep dormers break the roofline, and the corner bays are carried up as rounded turrets.

The high school moved from Fifteenth and Olive to a larger building at 1030 North Grand Avenue, at Grand and Finney, in 1893. The Board of Education had hired the architects Furlong and Brown to design it in 1891; the firm later sued the board, claiming it had been underpaid for its services. Until McKinley and Yeatman opened in 1904 this remained the district's only high school building, and in his annual report for 1899-1900 Superintendent Louis Soldan attributed the city's low high school enrollment rate to the system containing only one school for white pupils, and to the difficulty of reaching a single school from across a city of some 600,000 people spread over 66 square miles. Crowding was met with double time sessions, in which two teachers taught a full day's lessons in half a day and then repeated the process with an afternoon class. The school became known as Central High School as further high schools were built. A tornado severely damaged the building at the start of the 1927 school year; students and faculty transferred to the Yeatman High School building on Garrison Avenue, took the Central name with them, and the Grand Avenue building was demolished.