DESTRUCTION AND RESURRECTION: HOLLENBECK JUNIOR HIGH

By Abe Hoffman

On March 10, 1933, a major earthquake struck the Long Beach area leaving 120 people dead and many more injured. However, in one sense Long Beach was fortunate. The earthquake hit at 5:44 p.m. Had it happened just a few hours earlier, casualties would likely have been in the hundreds if not thousands killed or severely injured. Those victims would have been the children in the county’s schools.

Some 270 schools in the region’s epicenter were damaged, and another shake could have reduced school buildings into rubble. At Garden Grove High School, a girl waiting on the school’s front steps planning a party with a few friends died when bricks from the school’s façade fell on her when the earthquake hit.

Schools outside the immediate area were also badly damaged. In the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, Theodore Roosevelt High School’s administration building, four stories high, had its top floor so severely hit that it was subsequently removed. Classroom buildings were also affected, resulting in a tent city being set up while buildings were repaired, where classes would meet for a year. (1)

Hollenbeck Junior High School, located at Sixth and Soto Streets and just a block away from Roosevelt High, was so destroyed that almost all of the buildings had to be razed. Only the School’s Home Economics Building, with the school’s cafeteria, survived the quake. An entirely new school would have to be built to replace the old one.

Shortly after the earthquake, Assemblyman Don C. Field introduced the Field Act, which was passed by the legislature in just thirty days. The law required the construction of all California schools to meet earthquake standards (a loophole in the law did not cover schools constructed before the earthquake) (2).

In Los Angeles, the school district authorized the construction of several new schools, one of which was designed by Richard Neutra (1892-1970), a noted architect, to create a new school in Westwood, Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High, completed in 1938. Meanwhile, Alfred E. Rosenheim (1859-1943), accepted the assignment for a new junior high school in Boyle Heights. (3).

Born in Missouri, Rosenheim studied architecture in Germany and as his career evolved, he moved to Los Angeles where he designed some downtown office buildings. However, his career would be tarnished by a minor scandal. The owner of a jewelry store wanted an ornamental clock placed on the sidewalk outside his store. When he asked Rosenheim, a member of the city’s Municipal Arts Commission to approve the necessary plan, Rosenheim said he could get the proposal approved for $250. Word got out about the bribe, and he was removed from his position on the commission. He was also suspended temporarily from the local branch of the American Institute of Architects (4).

Rosenheim overcame the scandal and went on to design other buildings in the city. He accepted the proposal to design a new Hollenbeck Junior High School on the grounds of the old one. It would be his last major commission. Some critics considered the design as “modern,” though Rosenheim felt his work less deserving of that description. After the construction was completed in 1938, he wrote the following statement:

“I do not consider the buildings particularly ‘modern’ although the administration and assembly hall units may possess something akin to the so-called ‘contemporary’ style. Personally, I do not hesitate to express the fervent hope that ‘modernistic’ architecture is not a permanent trend. I have a strong feeling that the bulk of modern work we see in the country has very little claim to architectural beauty. I am inclined to doubt whether it can strictly be regarded as architecture…But whatever one chooses to call the style of my Hollenbeck school, it seemed to appeal to the Board of Education and its architect” (5)

Regardless of Rosenheim’s critical opinion of his work, Hollenbeck’s buildings stood the test of time for many decades. The campus consisted of an Administration building that included the school library and some second-floor classrooms, the East and West Academic two-story classroom buildings, a true Auditorium (6), an Industrial Arts building that included a Physical Education room, with lockers and showers (a separate Boy’s Gym would be built years later), and a Girl’s Gym. The classroom buildings featured a radiator that ran the length of the room below the wall where large boule windows provided fresh air. The upper window could be opened or closed by the use of a long pole—and generations of students considered it a great privilege to be assigned the pole to open or close the windows at the start or end of the school day!

Students attending Hollenbeck included a diversity of races and religions, and recollections of Boyle Heights residents remembered that relations were generally harmonious (7).

Changes in the architectural design in the 1960s included an English as a Second Language building that ignored the design of the 1930s campus, but was merely a box-shaped structure with a metal stairway to the second floor, and the creation of several cement “umbrella” posts to provide shade in the schoolyard that took years to complete. The Home Economics building lasted well into the 1970s.

In the 1980s the Los Angeles Unified School District established major changes in its grade system. Junior high schools became Middle Schools, with the sixth-grade elementary schools moving into the secondary level; Ninth-grade students moved from junior high to high schools. More recently, many schools in the district have been reconfigured as Magnet or special Center schools. Hollenbeck Middle School now has a Magnet STEEMM Program (8), and a Partnership program with other schools in the Boyle Heights area.

Alfred Rosenheim’s original design has been modified by renovation and new construction to meet the concerns of Boyle Heights families who want their children to meet the challenges of 21st-century technological and educational challenges. To put it another way, what goes on inside its buildings is perhaps more important than what it looks like on the outside (9).

NOTES

Abraham Hoffman, California’s Deadliest Earthquake: A History. Charleston: The History Press, 2017, pp.69-72.
Ibid, p. 74.
Some writers, including this author, have erred in dealing with Richard Neutra’s Emerson Junior High design with the work of Alfred Rosenheim and Hollenbeck Junior High. Both lived in Los Angeles and designed many buildings and private homes. They both received commissions for creating junior high schools at approximately the same time, with similar plans suggested by the school district.
“Any Unseat and Cause Him to be Prosecuted as Well,” Los Angeles Times, February 21, 1921.
Alfred F. Rosenheim, “Half Century of Architectural Practice,” Architect and Engineer, April 1939.
Abraham Hoffman, Boyle Heights: Recollections and Remembrances of the Boyle Heights Jewish Community of Los Angeles, 1920-1960s. Los Angeles: Western States Jewish History, 2011. Originally published as a special issue of Western States Jewish History, 43 (Spring/Summer 2011).
Later schools in Los Angeles would be built with “multi-purpose” rooms, serving as a basketball court and a variety of meetings.
The acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and Medical Magnet.
For a view of Hollenbeck a decade before the Long Beach Earthquake, see Paul R. Spitzzeri, “Read All About It While Getting Schooled in ‘The Siren,’ the Hollenbeck Heights Middle School Newspaper, Boyle Heights, 5 May 1926.” The Homestead Blog, https://homesteadmuseum.blog/?s=Hollenbeck. Earlier titles for the school vary: Boyle Heights Intermediate School, Hollenbeck Heights Junior High School, Hollenbeck Junior High School, Hollenbeck Middle School. The blog is incorrect in using “Middle School” in 1924.