Mount Greenwood Elementary School
Here are two photos of the elementary school I attended for eight long years on the south side of Chicago. I graduated from the 8th grade in 1963. These photos were taken in 1992, and the place seems to have changed basically not at all in the intervening 30 years.
The photo on the top, with no vegetation of any kind (except for the tree which found its way into the frame, actually across the street), is the rear of the school; all that blacktop or asphalt is where we had recess. The other photo, with a tree and a tiny bit of grass and MORE asphalt, is the front of the school. We kids rarely saw the front of the school, as we entered through the huge rear doors and had recess in the back as well. Seems like there was a chain-link fence around a portion of that vast sea of asphalt when I was there.
This school is typical of urban school architecture of a certain period in American history - a fairly long period, actually. Can you imagine attending a school like this? No air conditioning, no trees, cement to play on, an emphasis on conformity above all else, mass production of students. It was like going into a factory. Child labor was outlawed by the time I was born, but this school scenario wasn't so terribly different. God bless the teachers (some of them) who labored heroically to (try to) make our education interesting in such appalling conditions.
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