Ruins of Jacksonville: Annie Lytle Public School

[Metro Jacksonville]

Ruins of Jacksonville: Annie Lytle Public School



Have a look inside one of Jacksonville's most endangered historic structures: Annie Lytle Public School Number Four.

Full Article
http://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2009-oct-ruins-of-jacksonville-annie-lytle-public-school

[riverside planner]

Yes, I am told that it was briefly Central Christian School in the early 1970s.  My aunt was a student there.

[BridgeTroll]

Looks in pretty bad shape...

[David]

I've always thought the auditorium area would make a great live music venue.



I know it's probably not feasible financially, but out of all the possible uses for Annie Lytle, a club/music venue makes sense to me since most people wouldn’t want to live under a highway overpass. Or at the very least a cultural venue of some sort, museum etc.

[blizz01]

You could have the best Hall of Terror / haunted house there.  Ever.  Period.

[Hurricane]

It would make for one hell of a haunted house for Halloween!

[dknighton]

Why is it that Jacksonville can't embrace and cherish its historical buildings, instead of abandoning everything like an out-of-vogue strip-mall?  I totally agree that this would be a perfect location for a music/cultural/multi-purpose venue, but then again, this city wouldn't understand culture if it stood up and hit it over the head with a large-print, KJV Bible.

That's the legacy of Jacksonville....potential never fully realized.

[vicupstate]

Looks like one of those Detriot schools that was in the link in a different thread. 

There is a school VERY similiar to Lytle in Washington D.C.  that was converted into a Health Club.  Like Lytle it is within splitting distance of a raised highway.

It is popular, functional and totally cool looking.

YMCA, are you reading this ??

 

[SunKing]

Why would the Y want to go into there?

[Ocklawaha]

Bring that Skyway from Riverside Av to Roselle, and from Roselle make a sharp left coming in with one line on each side of the auditorium, second floor. Below that running crosswise under the Skyway, you create another
Rosa Parks, with streetcar pre installed. Lastly, revamp the diagonal sidewalk in Riverside Park, to accommodate pedestrian and bike traffic, brand it with a name like "Paseo Grande" (Grand Walk).

Inside the building, you do exactly as the others have suggested. Take the auditorium as a fantastic pup and theater. The rest of the building gets built out as TOD shops, art studios, craft and other unusual microbusinesses.

POOF, when the trains, buses and streetcars arrive the place would take off like Moody's Goose!

OCKLAWAHA

[stephendare]

Ock and I had quite the day of it when we took about a hundred pictures of the interior.  Its also quite beautiful as well as these scarier photos!

Bob, did any of the really beautiful upstairs vistas come out?  Or the interior courtyard where the roof has collapsed?

Where did you find this guy's photos?

[DavidWilliams]

Encounter any ghosts, Stephen?

[ac]

Why would the Y want to go into there?

Why do they want to go in strip malls and office parks?

[Ocklawaha]

Don't know what file I stuck them in but it's got to be somewhere on the memory card... before the camera went skinny dipping at Lake Eufaula, Oklahoma. I'll see if I can recover them and maybe we could do another photo article.

OCKLAWAHA

[stephendare]

No ghosts, David.

Just me and Ock on a discovery and reconnaissance mission.  Its actually a very beautiful building whose bones are as solid as bedrock.  The photographer in the series of photos above kind of went out of their way to play up the Blair Witch look of the place, but it looks like the carefully constructed ruins of an english garden through most of it.  The collapsed roof of the gymnasium has aired the place out and instead of the old smells of collapse and decay, there is a very wholesome air circulating.

The graffiti is colorful and ubiquitous all the way throughout, and the interior now posesses a very timeless ambiance despite the dilapidation.

Ive been in School Number 4 many times over the decades.  Ive seen it pass from abandoned to creepy.  It progressed onto dangerous and fully into scary.  Ive been there at night and over time it became a gothic setting where the sense of foreboding was palpable and you could hear the movement of unseen inhabitants in the pitch darkness.

That seems to have ended: whatever spirits the building used to house: Dread, fear, wretches hiding from the police and the outside world in the darkness have been exorcised by the clean light of day.

BTW, it was quite the sight to see the two of us hoisting up and crawling through broken windows to enter (Doug, if your reading, thanks for not shooting us!)