Evans School - Denver, Colorado, USA
Posted by: 
Big B Bob
N 39° 44.059 W 104° 59.332
13S E 500953 N 4398269
A former school for the handicap now being remodeled as condos... we think.
Waymark Code: WM3R58
Location: Colorado, United States
Date Posted: 05/09/2008
Views: 71
Denver architect David Dryden designed the 1904 Evans School, utilizing Classical Revival and Colonial Revival style elements. The red brick, three-story building features a formal facade portico and a large copper-clad cupola. Dryden held the position of supervising architect for School District No. 1 from 1901 until 1912. Evans School served as an elementary school for 69 years, briefly containing junior high classes in 1917. For many years the school was the only one in the area that served deaf, blind, or physically handicapped students. The school was retired and closed in the early 1970s and has sat empty ever since.
from The Westword, Published: February 12, 2004
A century ago, builders got a lot of bang -- and bricks, concrete blocks, wood planks and steel railings -- for their buck; $115,000 was all it took to turn architect David Dryden's blueprints into a finished school at the corner of 11th Avenue and Acoma Street. Labor was cheap, too, and abundant in the working-class neighborhood: Strong-backed masons, steelworkers and bricklayers crowded the site as construction got under way.
In May 1904, a few months after the crew broke ground, Robert Speer was sworn in as Denver's mayor, bringing with him big plans for a classically styled city, one modeled on the designs of the old masters. And Dryden, who went on to design 22 more Denver schools, had set the tone with his plans for Evans Elementary.
Completed in 1905, the Evans school could accommodate 750 children. When the weather was good, students tended plants and did calisthenics on the roof, beneath a bright copper dome that crowned a classical-style portico -- a structure designed to rival those of fifteenth-century Florence.
The dome -- if not the boys and girls who stretched, bent and jumped jacks in its shadow -- was visible for miles, from across the flat plains and from the attic windows of the new Queen Anne mansions just east of downtown. Three stories high, the school loomed over the low-slung storefronts and modest one-story houses that surrounded it. Only the brand-new State Capitol and the old courthouse stood higher, towering over the growing city below.