National Register Listing

Dallas High School Historic District

a.k.a. Dallas Technical High School;Norman Robert Crozier Technical

2218 Bryan St., Dallas, TX

The Dallas High School, later known as Nathan Robert Crozier Technical High School, complex at Bryan and Pearl Street is one of the most prominent landmarks in the city. The Auditorium and Classroom Building opened on this site in 1908 replacing a late 19th-century building. From 1907 to 1954, a period of significance, the Dallas Independent School District added four more buildings on the site and operated under seven different names. The Dallas High School complex meets Criterion A in the area of Education at the local level as one of the oldest intact educational facilities in Dallas. This historic district constituent is the only intact complex that reflects the evolution of vocational training theories and practices at the secondary level in Dallas. Dallas High School complex is some of the oldest institutional buildings on the local school district property roles and remained in continuous use until September 1995. All five buildings are Contributing to the site.

Three Dallas men, Colonel Leonidas M. Martin, Dr. Emanuel M. Tillman, and Richard D. Coughanour, met in the law office of Mr. Coughanour on June 16, 1884, to hire a full-time superintendent of schools for the Dallas school system. They initiated the directive that evolved into today's Dallas Independent School District and began to address the lack of an adequate educational system and facilities in the city of Dallas. As a result of their efforts, the first high school classes in Dallas were held in 1884 on Bryan Street. Although no longer extant, the original building had served as an elementary school and one of the first school buildings in the ward. The original property is adjacent to the site being nominated.

The 1884 high school classes were the beginning of secondary education along Bryan Street between Pearl and Hawkins. Shortly after the turn of the century, administrators of the Dallas Independent School District began to plan a new complex for high school classes on Bryan Street. The new building was designed by the Dallas firm of Lang and Witchell Architects. The building contained most of the vocational programs already taught at the school except for the domestic arts and drawing class, first introduced in 1905, that was held in the old fire station adjacent to the school. Dr. Schiebel described the original 1907 Classical Revival building in his book Education in Dallas: "The new building was equipped with an auditorium seating 1200 students, five manual training shops, one domestic science room and one sewing room, a large lunchroom in the basement, offices for the superintendent and principal and, on the third floor, a large "lantern room," quite likely the beginning of the visual aid program in the Dallas schools." Also, rooms for chemistry, physics, and biology were specified. "The school had a small library as early as 1886 located in the principal'774s office, this new building had a room with two doors on the second floor above the front entrance designated as a school library. This beautiful new 60-room brick school was open for classes in September 1908."

The building was adequate for school needs until 1911 when space requirements necessitated the addition of six new classrooms to the south wing on the Live Oak Street side. The addition was also by the firm of Lang and Witchell, who is 1919, designed the Girls' Gymnasium and Manual Training Building.

The large population growth of Dallas from 1910 to 1930 continued to demand additional classroom space. An additional five high schools were built in Dallas, and a 1930 addition was added to the Dallas High School site. The school also was renamed Dallas Technical High School.

The new Art Deco style building had been authorized in 1928, along what is now the North Central Expressway, but was not completed until 1930. This latest addition allowed expanded facilities in home economics, including a cottage apartment on the second floor, nicely equipped with the modern decor of the day; electric shop; six rooms were assigned to art: two for commercial art, one for etching, and one for sculpture and life drawing, and two for art pottery. It was designed by the firm of Greene, LaRoche, and Dahl.
In 1941, the Arts and Science Building was added to the school site adjacent to the 1930 building. This 3-story Art Deco style building also was designed by the firm of LaRoche and Dahl architects. The new building gave additional space and room for finished art products to be displayed.

The school had an excellent academic program from the beginning. The 1907 building provided for a continuation of many programs begun earlier. These included a department of music and manual arts course for both boys and girls (1885), industrial drawing (1887), and stenography and typewriting (1895). The 1907 building allowed additional training in the wood shop, machine shop, pattern making, joinery, and turning shop. In 1915 a Cadet Corps was organized, the first ROTC unit. The school also offered music classes as early as 1909. In 1909 architectural blueprint reading and mathematics for building trades were authorized. In 1912 a commercial course for boys consisting of bookkeeping, commercial law, geography, stenography, and typewriting was added. Even though the music had been taught, in 1931 the school's first full-time music director was hired. Cosmetology was established for girls in 1942 supported by a state certificate.

An important operation of the school was the night school. Although underway since 1892, it closed shortly after the death of the first teacher. In 1900 it reopened and operated there until recent years.

In 1933, during the Depression, vocational classes were offered at Dallas Technical High School under state and federal financial subsidies. Adults who were unemployed and who presented prospects for training or retraining were served. Industrial cooperative training and distributive education were added to the vocational program in 1937, also in that year, a course in television was authorized. Early in World War II, classes were added to train personnel for employment in the war plants, this was in a separate vocational building on Ross Avenue. With the return of veterans from World War II special classes were set up in the school with some 2000 men and women receiving their diplomas.

In the post-World War II years, Dallas' school-age population grew annually as new housing developments spread in all directions. The Dallas Independent School District responded by building 97 new schools between 1946 and 1966. Hundreds of additions were added as well to existing school facilities. The opening of Thomas Jefferson High School in 1956 in north Dallas and the construction of three more high schools in the same year made the 1956-57 school year the "catch-up year" for the DISD building program. At Dallas High School, the Boys' Gymnasium and Dressing Room became the last addition to its facilities when completed in 1954. This building reflected both the response to the upgrading of facilities across the district and the change in physical education instruction after the 1940s that called for separate boys' and girls gyms and dressing rooms.

Dr. Norman Robert Crozier was one of two significant principals during the school's history. He served as principal of the school, then known as Central High School from 1914-1919 when he was elected assistant superintendent and then superintendent of schools in 1924. He remained superintendent until his death in 1940. These are the years of much improvement to the school. He was instrumental in promoting and developing the vocational area of the school.

The other principal of special note is Dr. Walter John Edward Schiebel who served the school from 1932 until his retirement in 1965. Dr. Schiebel was instrumental in carrying through the concept of the vocational program after its formation and directing the school's academic and vocational program to its very high level of success.

Dr. Schiebel, the long-time administrator for DISD, felt that Dallas High School adjusted to the ever-changing needs of the community. At the time of its construction in 1907, the curriculum offered standard coursework but added vocational elements. When the neighborhood demographics changed, the school expanded vocational and skill-oriented training that attracted students from across the school district. By the late 1920s students competed to attend Dallas High School with its "special classes." As the composition of the neighborhood changed again, DISD adjusted the curricula to include remedial classes in general subjects and expanded vocational training. The willingness to adjust to the community's needs is the reason for the extended use of these facilities and the strong community associations with the complex.

The last and most recent evolution of education on this site was its conversion by the Dallas Independent School District (DISD) to use as a magnet school. In 1975 DISD converted the school into the Business and Management Magnet Center. This center was closed in September 1995 and moved to the new Townview Magnet Center in Oak Cliff. The future of the site is now an undetermined fact, but it continues to be an asset to the community.

The school through the years has operated under seven names: Central High School, 1884; Dallas High School (The name embossed over the entrance doors of the 1907-08 building), 1908; Main High School, 1916; Bryan Street High School, 1917; Dallas Technical High School, 1928; Norman Robert Crozier Technical High School, 1942; and last, the Business and Management Magnet Center, 1975.
In personal interviews with ex-students, the one remark made most often is: "The school trained me for my life's work I owe my livelihood to the training I received as a student there." Many ex-students who did not have the opportunity to attend college chose to attend the school to receive training in a skill that they could use upon graduation. This has to be the true measure of the school's success.

Dallas High School, despite its long use and updating, retains much of the original educational complex atmosphere familiar to generations of students. Exterior views are remarkably intact and well preserved for a collection of buildings of this age and intensive use. Some interior portions have been altered including much of the grander spaces of the original auditorium, but much of the classroom and laboratory areas are true to their respective periods of construction. Considerable materials and detailing including mosaic tile, marble, built-in items, ceiling fan hangers, and laboratory workstations are still in place.

Dallas High School represents one of the few remaining nonresidential links to Dallas' past. Its period of service spans most of the 20th century and unifies the generation that gave their lives in the trenches of France, with the arrival of Fascism and the Atomic Era to those that witnessed Korea, the journey to the Moon, Vietnam and the Computer age. The visual contribution to the contemporary, downtown streetscape with its mass of offices, hotel, and high rise, provide a dramatic recall of a past in Dallas when life (and values) were far different from that of the present era.

Local significance of the district:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1996.