The walls of a 99-year-old school building have started to come crashing down in what was once a historically Black neighborhood near Washington and Studemont.
Construction crews have demolished part of the old Harper School building on Center Street west of Studemont less than a year after HISD’s state-appointed Board of Managers voted to sell the abandoned property to limited liability company BKR Memorial IV. The building was constructed in 1927 and was part of a thriving Black industrial neighborhood known as Chaneyville in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, according to the Preservation Houston nonprofit organization.
“There’s just not much physical left of the community, so that to me makes the school even more important because it’s one of the few reminders of this place that a lot of people don’t know ever existed,” said Jim Parsons, the organization’s programs and communications director.
Ten people, including Patricia Bonner, a former teacher at Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, showed up on Sunday afternoon to protest its demolition and call for any preservation possible, even if it’s just the historic facade.
Bonner attended the Harper School during the 1950s and 1960s, taking the bus to the school from Houston’s West End. She said Harper was the only school she could attend, as a Black child at the time, and cherishes her time there. She can still name teacher after teacher, and she remembers the interest they showed in her and other students. Bonner said they were the reason she pursued a career in education.
“It had such a history, and you don’t want the whole history to be gone,” she said. “The history is in the people who attended here, but the building stands for the people who attended here.”
The school building was named after Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a Black poet, author and an advocate for abolition and women’s suffrage. She co-founded the National Association of Colored Women in 1894.
The Harper School continued to run for decades, later housing a disciplinary alternative education program until 2007, according to HISD. The school district called it an “old administrative building” in a statement to the Chronicle earlier this summer.
Mayor John Whitmire said he would work to preserve the Center Street property after part of the building caught fire in late July, but a demolition permit was filed less than three weeks later. He said the school was an “important piece of Houston’s Black history.”
Whitmire’s office did not respond to a request for comment, and BKR Memorial IV could not be reached.
About half of the former school’s facade was still standing on Sunday, and lettering that once spelled out “Harper School” was no longer visible. Other portions of the building were reduced to piles of brick, stone and metal. An empty bulldozer stood nearby. “No trespassing” signs along the property’s fence warned passersby to severe fire damage that made the land unsafe.
Center Street resident Candi Cardona, who organized Sunday’s protest, said she would like the property to be protected as green space, if the structure can’t be saved.
Nusiaba Mizan contributed reporting.