Froebel School Indiana Historical Marker is located in Froebel Park at the southern portion of 400 W 15th Ave, Gary, IN 46407. It commemorates events that followed the experimental desegregation of Indiana schools in 1945. The park is currently extremely run down and not well maintained. There are a few
architectural remains. The text from the marker reads:
Side One
Froebel opened here, 1912, as many European immigrants and southern blacks moved to Gary for jobs in steel mills. An experiment in progressive education, it served students of diverse backgrounds and the local community. Despite early status as integrated school, black students were excluded from many extracurricular activities and facilities into 1940s. Closed 1977.
Side Two
After WWII, Froebel made national headlines when hundreds of white students walked out protesting "integration experiment" there. "Hate strikes" lasted several weeks in 1945 and reflected growing racial tension in North. In 1946, Gary school board adopted desegregation policy, but discrimination continued. Indiana state law desegregating public schools passed 1949.
For more reading on this subject of Indiana history see
A Challenge to Integration: The Froebel School Strikes of 1945
Architecture:
"William B. Ittner, a Saint Louis architect born in 1865, became one of the premier school architects in the first quarter of the 20th-century. Educated in what could be described as dreary, prison-like schools, Ittner refused to design such buildings during his fifteen-year career as the building commissioner of the School Board of Saint Louis. Such schools were still the norm and had dimly-lit corridors; too-wide classrooms that received light from only one source, resulting in difficult working conditions; no indoor plumbing, with unsanitary facilities behind the school and children drinking from a community schoolyard dipper, unsafe stairways and too few exits; dingy basement classrooms; and generally had inadequate and inconvenient facilities necessary to provide a quality education.
Ittner wanted schools to inspire students, not intimidate them and thus began his quest to design a better school. He traveled to several Midwestern cities to study what their current schools looked like. His first schools were not revolutionary but there were interior improvements in lighting, indoor plumbing, heating and cooling systems, and fireproof construction. A trip to Europe broadened Ittner's vision and, upon his return, he began utilizing his signature "open plan" which called for classrooms on only one side of the hallway. He incorporated this into a variety of H-, cruciform, and U-shaped school buildings before finally settling on an E-shape for the majority of his schools. The Froebel School is an example of the E-shaped open plan.
Ittner wanted to make schools safer and healthier for students. He declared: "the complete school environment should be a model for health. To accomplish this desired goal, sanitation, cleanliness, perfect lighting, airiness, and cheerfulness must, of necessity, constitute the eternal, unwritten laws of successful school planning." He used as many windows as possible for increased lighting and better air circulation. He also carefully chose materials to ensure that the schools would be fireproof. Ittner chose to surround his schools with park-like landscapes.
As word spread of the innovative work he was doing for schools in Saint Louis, other communities hired Ittner to design schools for them. He worked in twenty-nine states and designed over 500 schools. "Ittner's intelligence, sophistication, intuition, training and civitas translated high standards into a physical form of grace and rationality."
Obviously schools primarily served children but Ittner wrote that education "is a continuous process, with the public school serving all ages." No where was this more true than at the Gary schools and it is no wonder that Superintendent William Wirt chose William Ittner, a fellow leader in school reform, to design the city's schools. It is known that he designed Ralph Waldo Emerson (1908), Froebel (1912), Horace Mann (1926), Roosevelt (1928), and Lew Wallace (1931) schools. With the exception of Lew Wallace, all of the schools received an outstanding rating in the Lake County Interim Report. Emerson School is the only Ittner-designed school to predate Froebel. The two are similar in form and in plan. Both are three-story, E-shaped buildings set in a large, park-like setting with ball fields, playgrounds, and basketball courts (Froebel also has a cinder track). They have centralized projecting entrance bays and projecting end bays. Both are red brick with limestone accents. Emerson utilizes Jacobean Revival details on the entrance and along the parapet and brick quoining at the corners but is a relatively plain building. Froebel, also Jacobean in style, exhibits much more detail. The interior surfaces incorporate linoleum, terrazzo, marble, glazed brick, and plaster, The. most notable difference between the two buildings is that Froebel was closed in 1977 while Emerson remained in use as a visual and performing arts high school until closing in 2008.-
Historic Structures