Save CR Heritage hosted tours of Harrison Elementary School on Friday and Saturday to increase awareness of the school’s history and generate support for preserving the almost century-old building. Harrison is slated for demolition in the Cedar Rapids Community School District’s current Facilities Master Plan.
The building received a temporary reprieve earlier this year, when the district decided to pause its construction plans. The master plan still calls for Harrison to be torn down and replaced by a new school on the same property, which will be attended by students currently attending both Harrison and Madison Elementary School. Madison is scheduled to be closed once the new building is ready.
But in the November election, voters rejected the CRCSD’s proposed $220 million general obligation bond to fund the next phase of its Facilities Master Plan. A post-vote survey found approximately 42 percent of respondents said their no vote was in part because of the demolition plans for Harrison. The bond failure, along with multiple petition drives and a demonstration by Save CR Heritage, led to the district announcing that Harrison would still be in use this fall.
“I appreciate the Board of Education asking us to pause our plans and really take a look if there are any possibilities for renovation,” CRCSD Superintendent Dr. Tawana Grover said at the school tour on Friday evening. “Really, [the tour] was an opportunity to honor the history [of the school] and understand … what was done during times of transitions and really think about how that inspired our students for the future.”
Mark Stoffer Hunter, a local historian and a specialist in Cedar Rapids architectural history, led the tour of the middle school, located at 1310 11th St NW.
The current Harrison Elementary School isn’t the first one with that name in the Time Check neighborhood in southwest Cedar Rapids. The first was built in 1885, closer to the river, next to where the Flamingo Restaurant currently stands. The school could boast a mural by Grant Wood, painted when the artist still lived in Cedar Rapids. However, neither that mural nor that school building still exist.
In January 1929, the school was gutted by a fire. Three months later, the badly damaged building was inundated when Cedar Rapids suffered the worst flood it would experience until 2008.
Construction on the current school began later that year. Like its predecessor, the school is named for William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States, who is best remembered for dying a month after arriving at the White House.
Construction on the second Harrison began in 1929, and fortunately it was able to avoid disasters experienced by its predecessor (and by the namesake of both schools), because the school district had secured funding to build it before the stock market crash in October that year upended the country’s economy.
The school formally opened on November 7, 1930.
“People were able to work here building Harrison School into the year 1930, and it became a symbol of hope for Cedar Rapids,” Mark Stouffer Hunter explained during the tour.
Harrison’s aesthetic takes inspiration from the English Tudor period. This influence can be seen primarily in the large, sculpturally-detailed front entrance, which juts out from the building towards 11th Street. It’s also seen in the diamond-framed windows, and the large bay window designed to replicate the look of a traditional wood-framed window, complete with trompe l’oeil shingles on the top made from the same molded concrete as the rest of the structure.
The design was in keeping with the trend of revivalist architecture common to the period. Theatre Cedar Rapids, the Scottish Rite Temple, the Veterans Memorial Building, as well as several more buildings exhibiting this trend were all built within a five-year period.
“It was a real exciting revival in classical styles in the 1920s, a hundred years ago,” said Hunter.
“That’s why you see classical styles, all the ornate decorations in the Paramount Theater in Cedar Rapids … These were all statement buildings. They were making statements about where Cedar Rapids was and its progress and its prosperity.”
While the first Harrison had an original Grant Wood mural, the current school has a mural in Wood’s style created by one of his proteges, William Henning. The then-23 year-old Henning painted the 22’ x 5’ mural over the course of nine months in 1935.
Inspired by the nearby railroad tracks, the mural depicts the development of transportation in the United States, from Native American canoes to trains and steamships. It was originally on the second floor of the building but was moved to the first floor in 1984, and now hangs in the front hallway.
The Time Check neighborhood was badly damaged by the 2008 flood — some scars are still visible — but Harrison came through the flood unscathed.
“The decision was made very quickly before the end of the summer of 2008. ‘We’ve got to get Harrison open,’” said Hunter. “That brick building has got to be a symbol of hope for these people. Just like in 1930 when that building first opened, it was a symbol of hope after the first Harrison fire, and the flood in 1929, and the economic downturn in the 1930s …. So it really is the only Cedar Rapids school building in history that has these two amazing emotional stories connected to it that mean a lot for the entire community coming back, and certainly at the hearts and souls of what this Time Check Northwest neighborhood means for Cedar Rapids.”