Carver School To Be Demolished

Of New Orleans’ three Modern schools eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, only George Washington Carver Junior-Senior High in the Ninth Ward will be demolished without the benefit of the standard federally mandated historic preservation consultation process (Section 106 review). Unlike Lafon and Wheatley schools, decisions concerning Carver’s fate were streamlined through a Secondary Programmatic Agreement between FEMA and the Recovery School District (RSD). Under this, the district recommended demolition and FEMA and the SHPO agreed with minimal feedback from outside parties. While it is neither reasonable nor feasible to put every historic structure through the full consultation process, it is sad indeed that buildings as important as those on the Carver campus will be lost with so little public input.

Designed by Curtis & Davis and completed in 1958, Carver was part of the $30 million building program which gave New Orleans its outstanding collection of modern schools. The program, headed by a progressive Orleans Parish School Board and Tulane School of Architecture’s Charles Colbert, had been launched five years earlier in response to antiquated conditions found throughout the district after World War II.

Curtis & Davis had recently completed their award-winning Thomy Lafon Elementary when they won the commission for the $3 million Carver complex. Their cruciform design consisted of a central raised classroom building flanked by wings to the east and west, connected by walkways to a gymnasium and cafeteria to the north and auditorium to the south. The auditorium was the campus’ stylistic jewel, with dramatic hinged concrete buttresses anchoring its vaulted roof. Carver received Progressive Architecture’s highest honor, the First Design Award, in 1957, and was hailed one of the most forward-thinking school designs in the nation.

While most of Carver’s buildings have been seriously altered over the years, both the auditorium and butterfly-roofed cafeteria retain their architectural integrity despite flooding after Hurricane Katrina. The auditorium in particular is in excellent condition, and could easily be incorporated into designs for the new school intended for the thirty-three acre site.

As the story goes though, the RSD has no interest in retaining either building. Its representatives blame bat and rat infestations on the auditorium’s design – which could instead have something to do with the fact that the building is open to the elements – and state that both structures are functionally obsolete. Citing similarities between the buttresses Curtis & Davis used at Carver and those they used for the Louisiana State Penitentiary cafeteria, the RSD believes that children would relate their school to a prison if the auditorium were preserved. This argument is somewhat hard to swallow, since buildings of similar eras tend to share similar elements; it is a little like insisting that schools featuring Classical Revival or Art Deco elements should be razed because of their similarities to the Criminal Courts Building in front of Orleans Parish Prison.

Rebuilding Carver is slated for the first phase of the school district’s rebuilding program, and the January 2010 RSD Capital Update states that demolition will begin December of this year. The RSD will be required to document and memorialize the historic buildings on-site, but they will be demolished nonetheless. Breathtaking in its monumentality, the auditorium is one of the most important modern structures in New Orleans.