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Public School No. 4 in Jacksonville, Fla…currently burning to the ground. R.I.P.

For the uninitiated, School 4 was built in the 1910s to replace a nineteenth-century wooden schoolhouse. The school was in operation until the early 1960s, when declining enrollment and the construction of a highway overpass blocked traffic and prompted the school board to convert it to a storage and meeting facility. It closed permanently a few years later and was left to rot, with no kind of maintenance or oversight except the construction of a large fence around the lot. Various plans for restoration, demolition, and development for the site have come and gone over the years, the most recent being another plan for the building to be razed and condos built in its place. I doubt any of the development plans will ever actually go through; the overpass is no joke and completely restricts any kind of significant traffic to the area, to say nothing of the noise. The entire area surrounding it is blighted.

While the city hemmed and hawed over the fate of the lot, the school itself became a rite of passage for Jacksonville teens. Everybody I knew as a high-schooler at least talked about breaking in, and a pretty high percentage of us, myself included, did. Because stories of urban decay prompting population decline and highway overpasses restricting traffic flow are very boring, a whole mythology sprung up around the school and its closure. My personal favorite involved a crazed, sadistic janitor who murdered several students before he was caught, but there were also tales of persistent hauntings, lynchings, and tawdry affairs ending in murder. After a fire in the early 1990s left a gaping hole in the roof, stories of exploding boilers killing children and fires set by vengeful teachers became common. I don’t think anybody really believed these stories, but they were fun to tell and made the experience even scarier, which was delightful since frankly for a fifteen-year-old that place is already pretty damn scary. When I went over a decade ago you could still see student papers and furniture, which would bring terrible evil upon you if you removed them from the premises, and of course tons of graffiti, which brought no penalty from the supernatural world. You definitely couldn’t leave without making your mark, so of course we had Sharpies on us because SOMEONE who will remain nameless chickened out on buying spray-paint. Another someone did succeed in obtaining four cans of Bud Light from their garage, where they had simmered in 95F degree heat for several days, but beggars can’t be choosers.

My understanding is that security was tightened in recent years, making it very difficult to get in. I have no idea if this is true or not because I am no longer fifteen and therefore uninterested in telling ghost stories in an abandoned building (in related news, I have lost my soul, possibly because I took home an old spelling test). But even if the flow of terrified kids with flashlights and spray paint has been reduced to a trickle, I am still saddened by the building’s demise and would dearly love to punch whoever started that fire. 

About to go for a run by the aftermath. I don’t know what to expect. Definitely explains all the sirens I heard passing by my apartment last night.

don’t forget about the principal who killed trouble-makers in his office. i hope the ambassador hotel doesn’t burn down next.

Reblogging this for my own personal documentation. Sorry for the length. 

:(

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