Once a High School

Part of

Once the Black Bottom: The Wheel is Come Full Circle

This article notes the process by which the University City High School site was sold to Drexel University and leveled for redevelopment—a process that begs photographic comparison with the 1967–1968 leveling of the site (see the first article in this collection: “The University City Science Center and the Black Bottom”). It also notes what is known of the disposition of the high school’s plastic arts installations.

Drexel’s Big Purchase

In the late spring of 2014, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic Inga Saffron wrote sardonically on the “battle royal over the University City High School on Drexel University’s western border,” a site that was “the stolen heart of Black Bottom, a district that was cruelly razed in 1968 to accommodate the University of Pennsylvania.” At issue was the most valuable property for sale in the School District of Philadelphia’s portfolio of closed schools. Drexel and its partner Wexford Science & Technology, a biomedical realty firm, posted the winning bid, a bit more than $25 million. Saffron compared it to a used-car sale. “It’s hard to imagine another major city simply selling such a high-profile piece of land, no strings attached,” she said. “Millions of taxpayer dollars were sunk into the site—first by the federal government through eminent-domain evictions of nearly 3,000 people; then by the city for the construction of the high school in 1971. (Intended as a showpiece, it was deemed a failure after just three years.)”¹ 

Following the building’s closing in 2013 and Drexel’s purchase of the site in 2014, a remaining vestige of the former high school was the garden “farm” that was maintained by UCHS students, with adult oversight and resources provided by the Penn Netter Center’s Agatston Urban Nutrition Initiative (AUNI). Twelve high schoolers were paid as interns to receive on-the-job-training in urban gardening and nutrition; they marketed the farm’s produce at the weekly Clark Park Farmer’s Market; they also donated, or sold at low cost, a portion of their produce to low-income residents. Drew Elementary students were also engaged in the garden. They sold their mint to an award-winning choclatier.²

Yet the garden farm, and the greenspace it occupied on both sides of the projected 37th Street extension, was doomed. Drexel officials served notice for the property to be vacated by fall 2014. Critics described this eviction as a second Black Bottom removal.³ With respect to a possible relocation, it is important to note that this was a school-based community garden. Once the site was fully closed, a School District and Drexel action, there was no obvious way to sustain this project; even with continued funding, it is hard to imagine another West Philadelphia site that could replicate the long-in-the-making Penn–UCHS partnership and its communal ties, as well as the pedagogical value of the project.

By the time UCHS was shuttered, the Black Bottom Memorial Wall’s mosaic tiles, which were created by Penn and UCHS students under Andrea Zemel’s adroit direction in 1999 (see the previous article in this collection), had deteriorated badly while being perennially exposed to the elements. While some of the tiles were expertly gathered up before the 2015 demolition, the state of their decay likely rules out even a partial restoration.⁴

As for the two sculpted columns designed by the 1998 version of the Zemel-directed undergraduate–UCHS collaboration, Martin Bean Renovations single-handedly undertook “a multi-faceted uninstallation, removal, and storage of [the] two [18-year-old] concrete, mosaic art structures weighing an estimate of 8000-pounds combined.” When Drexel University failed to offer any funds to defray the roughly $50K cost of the operation, Martin Bean Renovations reallocated its company resources to save the structures in their entirety. The operation was successfully completed on 22 June 2015.⁵

For Andrea Zemel, her experience at UCHS was bittersweet. “It is (and was) such a disappointment that the University, my department (Fine Arts) and the local media (for the most part) took no interest in the telling of this story,” she has written. “I do believe there was a blurb on one television station but I can’t recall at this point which one. The dedication ceremony, as a result, was my last involvement with Penn. After considerable thought, I submitted my resignation to my department a month later and left academia altogether. I started a design business in NYC with my partner (and husband now of 20 years), and have continued to create mosaics as part of my studio practice. At the time, the lack of support—especially from my own department, was extremely demoralizing. Not a single member of the Fine Arts faculty attended the dedication ceremony, most likely since this kind of activity was not valued then as ‘serious’ art. Ironically, the mural gave so much more to the community placed as it was than in a gallery . . . they rallied to salvage what was left of it before the site was demolished in 2015.”⁶

Three terra cotta murals—artistic artifacts from the high school’s early years—survived the property’s transfer to Drexel. Backstory: In 1975, the Redevelopment Authority’s “Percent for Art” program commissioned the ceramic artist John Costanza, a professor and department chair at the Moore College of Art & Design, to create three terra cotta murals for the new high school’s lobby—“22 feet long by 6 feet high; 24 by 7; and 3 by 5.”⁷ Foreshadowing the community-based approach of today’s Philadelphia Mural Arts program, Costanza engaged some 50 UCHS students in designing and handcrafting the murals, giving these youths an authentic stake in every phase of the production. Each mural portrayed African American historical figures chosen by the students, who helped carve the linoleum tiles for the project; some of the students also volunteered to have their faces incorporated as casts into the design. During the four months it took to complete the project, a video was made of the construction process and a “spiritual music performance” by the UCHS Choir.⁸

On the eve of destruction in June 2014, after he discovered that the school was boarded up, Costanza was allowed into the vacant building to inspect the condition of the murals. By now the building’s interior was a mess. "It looked like it was vacant for years," Costanza told the Philadelphia Inquirer. "There were broken windows, trash all over the place, and it was chained up. And I mean chained up." Costanza turned to the Drexel–Wexford partnership to save the murals.⁹

Wexford’s director of development, Pete Cramer, took the lead in assisting Costanza. His organization commissioned and funded Costanza’s son, Jon, owner of Sun Power Builders, to engage his firm to remove every tile by hand—a two-week process overseen by his father. The tiles were curated, boxed, and stored in John Costanza’s studio.¹⁰ Judith Guerrero, of the Redevelopment Authority, found a new home for one of the murals, fittingly the Moore College of Art & Design, at 1916 Race St., the very institution where Costanza had been a department chair when he completed the 1975 project. Honoring the mural’s reinstallation in the Outdoor Courtyard, a dedication ceremony was held on 28 July 2021.¹¹

Black Bottom Denouement

University City High School’s demolition was completed in the summer and early fall of 2015, and the Drew and Walnut Center (Drew Annex) sites were also cleared.¹² Once envisioned as a high school of science, UCHS had served as a comprehensive high school for 40 years.¹³

In the late spring of 2019, the Board of Education approved Drexel’s plan for constructing a new two-story school building on the former UCHS site in which to relocate two small high-performing schools—the Samuel Powel Elementary School (from 36th Street & Powelton Avenue) and SLAMS (the Science Leadership Academy Middle School). The final article in this collection, “The Market Corridor’s Millennial Building Boom,” takes up this project, viewing it in the context of Drexel’s recent campus expansion and the uCity Square megaproject.