Boulder High

In 1934, Boulder was still dealing with the Great Depression, but its school officials were faced with a large, additional problem: an aging, inadequate and dangerous high-school facility.  

Although Boulder schools graduated its first high-school seniors in 1876, there was no standalone building until 1896, when the State Preparatory School building was constructed (at a cost of about $25,000) at 1720 Pearl Street (near Frasca’s current location).  At that time the school was affiliated with the University and for that reason known as Boulder Preparatory, or Prep. School.   That building’s original student population of about 180 (almost the same exact number of students then in the University!), had swelled to more than 740 by the 1930’s.  Repeated inspections by national school accreditation authorities had been increasingly critical of the inadequacy of the old building to meet the needs of so many students.  A report in 1929 blasted the school’s conditions as “the most inadequate to be found in any high school in the state.”  The building’s only student toilets, with one minor exception, were in its basement, requiring a five-flight walk from fourth-floor classrooms; the library could house only 70 students at a time and the auditorium’s total seating capacity was only 550; there was no physical education program and “dangerous fire conditions” existed.  (Photos courtesy of Boulder’s Carnegie Library for Local History/Museum of Boulder.) 

State Preparatory School, no longer in use, with “For Sale” sign in window. 1938. 1720 Pearl Street

In 1934, the Boulder school district, not surprisingly, called for an election to approve bonds for new school construction; the bonds were soundly defeated. An even more scathing accreditation report the following year resulted in the board successfully obtaining a $246,000 grant from FDR’s newly-formed Public Works Administration. The grant was conditioned on Boulder obtaining an additional $300,000 funds in bonds, and this time the bonds were approved. 

Several sites were explored for the new school: “Lover’s Hill” (essentially 16th and High Streets), Marine Street between 9th and 11th, the corner of Broadway and Arapahoe, and Arapahoe between 15th and 16th. This last site was chosen (despite opposition claiming that carbon monoxide from traffic on Arapahoe would poison the students), “because of its central location, proximity to the athletic field, cheapness of land, safety from flooding and location on the highway into Boulder.” Land was purchased, including a number of homes in the area, which were razed after their owners and occupants were forced to relocate.

The school board selected Boulder architect Glen Huntington as the primary architect-of-record, and the Denver architectural firm of Frewen and Morris to provide creative design and school-layout design expertise. Huntington had already designed the downtown Courthouse and his choices of native stone and concrete recalled both that structure and aspects of buildings on CU’s campus. Designed in the Art Moderne style, the building features an asymmetric floor plan. The main entrance bay extends three stories and features fixed pane windows in groups of four. Flat roofed wings with a narrow concrete cornice extend from the entrance area. The design also features a four-story tower with a clock and glass block. A Denver firm was chosen as the general contractor, with Boulder companies selected for foundation and plumbing and heating work. 

The official groundbreaking was on December 12, 1935, and the official cornerstone-laying ceremony on September 26, 1936. The cornerstone, with an internal time-capsule whose contents are fairly unremarkable, later provided some controversy when the PWA initially withheld its final amount of funding because it contended that the listing of Huntington as being from Boulder violated its ban on commercial advertising.

The building was finished in a relatively short amount of time, with dedication on November 11, 1937. The Boulder Daily Camera declared it to be the “most modern” school in the Rocky Mountain region.

Boulder High Newly Completed 1937

A powerful demonstration of the significance of the new building was provided in September of 1938, when the prestigious Architectural Forum devoted a full four pages to its design and appearance, with text, photographs, and floor plans. This appears to have been the only Boulder building, other than CU campus buildings and the Federal Laboratories, to have been featured in this national publication. The complete article may be accessed here: https://www.usmodernist.org/AF/AF-1938-09.pdf, at pages 63-66.

The old Prep School building was unceremoniously razed in 1939, having proved eventually inadequate to house a school. Unfortunately, there was no Historic Boulder, Inc. then in existence to advocate for its preservation and adaptive reuse.