Maple Street School

As Newark's population skyrocketed well into the 1920's, city infrastructure was being overwhemled by the influx of residents. Particularly hurt by this boom was the public school system. The Maple Street School was built in 1925 to deal with overcrowing at the Hawthorne and Peshine Avenue schools.

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Guilbert & Betelle designed the new building in a modest Collegiate Gothic style, which had become one of the most common architectural styles for schools of the time. The structure was quite large, to accomidate kindergarden through 8th grade. The three story, L- shaped building took up the entire width of the block, and had a gymnasium and a gorgeous auditorium incorporated into the dead space between the wings.

The art department had painted this gorgeous mural backstage, which was painted over by the time we visited. Source

An addition to the right side brought the total square footage to 60,760. After the addition the school was shaped like a U, with the right side being just a little longer than the left. This floorplan is common of "Platoon Plan" schools, which refers to an idealized school design which allowed arts and literacy education to flourish together. Maple Street School is the last platoon plan school Newark ever constructed.

The school operated humbly over the years, with very few physical alterations to the structure. Eventually the school became overcrowded like many others, but instead of adding onto the building a nearby synagague was purchased and retrofitted into the Maple Street School Annex. In November of 2010 the school was visited by Michelle Obama as part of her "Let's move!" inititaive which aimed to help put an end to childhood obesity. Only five years later the school and annex were shuttered, as a result of declining enrolment. The buildings were turned over to the Newark Housimg authority to aution off the following year. It was snatched up by BN Property Group LLC. The school sat vacant until 2018 when work began to convert the building into apartments. Shortly avterward the project stalled, and plans changed to reopen the building as a school. By 2021 the structure was open as the KIPP Seek Charter school. I'm very grateful the city is fortunate enough to have such a well built school for the neighborhood children. While I haven't been inside to see the renovations myself yet, I'm hoping they did justice to the historical features pictured above. Regardless, it's nice to see a historic Newark school reopen.