The future was bright for Detroit in 1911 when Caroline Crosman Alternative High School at 9027 John C. Lodge Freeway in the Virginia Park neighborhood opened. The Tigers' Ty Cobb won the first of five straight batting titles that year and the automobile industry, set to boom in the next decade, was firmly established there.
According to Detroiturbex, a site that has been quite helpful to me in researching my Motor City urban exploration posts, Crosman High was a "non-traditional, African-centered" remedial school.
Coincidentally, the final Detroit home for Cobb, a notorious racist, was just a few blocks from Crosman at 800 Atkinson Street.
The school was named for a popular 19th century Detroit teacher.
Let's head inside.
Last year ABC 7 Detroit broadcast a story about Crosman being a target for scrappers. The school, which closed in 2007, wasn't boarded up then and it's not boarded up now. Detroit Public Schools is no inept it cannot even manage shuttering schools properly.
The bulkiness of the equipment in the boiler room saved it from the scavengers.
Those are fallen ceiling tiles, not old textbooks, on the floor of the hallway.
"I have never seen a place this beautiful." Someone needs to get out more.
I'm going to assume that Operation Education was a failure.
It appears someone drew the TARDIS from Doctor Who near the center of the large blackboard. As with the Doctor's adventures, I ventured to Detroit unarmed, because I was on a peaceful mission.
However the chalkboards in this decaying classroom have been scavenged.
This classroom gets an "F" for cleanliness.
Class is dismissed--time to walk through the rubble and head to the exit.
The scrappers couldn't reach these top floor windows.
After this facility closed in 2007, Crosman reopened at the old Harry B. Hutchins Intermediate School, which I profiled in July. Hutchins/Crosman closed for good in 2010.
This adaptation of Detroit's flag is a fitting tribute to the city.
One last look.
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