South Side School
Built 1922, listed in the National Register of Historic Places 2006
701 South Andrews Avenue, Fort Lauderdale
Photo captions:
South Side School, 1922
Image Courtesy of the Broward County Historical Commission, Gertrude Boyd Collection
South Side School Children
Image Courtesy of Helen Herriot Landers
South Side School, 2011
Image Courtesy of Broward County Libraries Division
The South Side School is an 11,000-square-foot, two-story Masonry Mediterranean Revival building with Pueblo inspired decorative elements. It has a stucco exterior, flat roof with a parapet, and banks of awning style windows. As originally built in 1922, the building had a rectangular T-shaped footprint and its parapet was accented with pent roofs. In 1949, the building was expanded on the west and the east sides and, in 1954, a further addition was made to the southeast corner (rear) of the school.
The school opened in 1923, the same year West Side Grade School opened. Schools were needed to meet the explosive growth in population of South Florida due to the land boom. From the 1920s on, the land adjacent to the school was managed by the city of Fort Lauderdale as a park. In the 1930s, the H.C. Davis Baseball Field was built at the southwest corner of the property and tennis courts, shuffleboard courts and a lawn bowling club and clubhouse were built with Works Progress Administration funding at the northwest corner.
Located in an intersection shared with two other very significant historic buildings, the 1938 Coca Cola Building and the 1925 South Side Fire Station, this is one of the most historic spots left in Fort Lauderdale.
The school was closed in 1967. The building was then used as a school for emotionally and physically disabled children, and psychology department offices. When the school recently closed, in the early 1990s, it suffered damage from vandalism and neglect. In 2004 the City of Fort Lauderdale acquired the building and has embarked on a multi-phase rehabilitation program to adaptively reuse the building to serve the needs of the community.