Uh oh. The principal’s office! (Image: Broadway High Alumni)
(Image: Elif Koc)
What is known today as Capitol Hill’s Seattle Central Community College was once the first high school in Seattle. Founded in 1902, Broadway High School educated Seattle teens on the corner of Broadway and Pine until 1946 when the demand for higher education rose dramatically as young troops came home from war.
A group of the high school’s students and partners are beginning to plan the funding and start of a new historical project to capture memorabilia from the school’s past and incorporate personal narratives of alumni through filmed interviews.
The stories will come from former students like August Reinhardt, a graduate of the class of 1940.
“The fountain that’s used by the college now was still around when I went to school here,” Reinhardt said. “We used to sit there on sunny days and fish for coins that people would drop.”
After graduating, Reinhardt was drafted into the military. Years later, he returned to Seattle and hasn’t left since.
The group has already received $20,000 in grant money from the Department of Neighborhoods, and another $10,000 from the Broadway High School Alumni Association. In order to become successful, the group needs another $30,000 in funding. They plan to complete filming by the fall of 2013.
The project is led by archivist Jeff Watts. “Seattle’s first high school has so many historical and wonderful stories that need to be captured and shared,” Watts said.
During the group’s first meeting earlier this week, the students, now grown older, wiser, etc. spoke of their high school memories. They provided historical color to recognizable Seattle landmarks and told tales of skipping the last class of the day to shoot ducks at Lake Union or jumping off the pier docks downtown together.
To learn more about this project, visit the Broadway High School Archives Room at the Broadway Performance Hall. If you’d like to help support the project, drop us a line and CHS can connect you. Or you can write to the group at:
Broadway Alumni Association
c/o SCCC
1701 Broadway, BE 4180
Seattle WA 98122
Neat! I was on a similar research project earlier regarding the transition to SCCC, so I ended up getting to see a lot of the neat stuff related to it, like the City Collegian coverage of the “Save The Best” campaign that preserved what is now the Broadway Perfornance Hall and the original Seattle School Board minutes that appropriated land for the purposes of building Broadway High way back over 100 years ago
Can’t wait to see what this turns up!
I wish the old Broadway High School had been preserved. So much nicer than the SCCC building.