Sunday, July 12, 2009

All gone....

.... I moved to Salt Lake City when I was 14, so I only went to two public schools here.  Clayton Jr. High and East High School*.  Neither of them exist anymore.  Well, at least not the buildings I was in.  The Salt Lake City School District has torn down both the buildings I went to and replaced them with newer, but not always nicer, buildings.  They started tearing down Clayton this week, it's front wall is still standing, but you can see the mountains behind it.
.... As much as I hate to see the buildings of my youth turned to rubble, I can understand why they did it, especially the high school.  East High is built right on top of the Wasatch Fault, the hill it's built on was created by the two plates slipping eons ago.  When they built it in the 1910's, they had no concept of earthquake ready.  Brick and mortar, with not a single piece of rebar, when the next big earthquake hit's Salt Lake (we get one every 150 yrs or so, and we're due for one soon) nothing would be left but rubble and bodies.  So, rebuilding it made sense.  But it's nowhere near as nice a building as the original, and inside it feels just like a hospital.
.... Clayton, on the other hand, I would guess was built sometime in the 50's or 60's, so the old one didn't have the same architectural details that the high school did. The new one, at least from the outside, looks pretty nice.  I have no idea what it looks like inside.
Regardless of the new v. old architecture, I feel a little sad at the loss of the schools I went to.
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*On the front of the building I went to, it was officially called Salt Lake City High School East.

2 comments:

A Paperback Writer said...

Since both my brother and I attended those same two schools, I feel the same way.
I may add that his elementary was torn down and never replaced, and that my elementary was torn down and rebuilt about 5 years ago, so all of my schools have been re-done.

Max Sartin said...

My schools are spread out from Seattle to Grenoble, France, so it's hard to keep track of them. But I do know that the elementary school I went to in Mass was turned into condos.