Old Middle School Annex Demolition

The Northfield High School Class of 2010, which graduated on Saturday evening, June 5, was the last class to start middle school in the old Northfield Middle School.  When the more than 300 members of the class of 2010 entered sixth grade in the fall of 2003, the 92-year old building was already overcrowded and in poor condition.  Two years earlier, in 2001, Northfield voters had approved a referendum to construct a new middle school south of Bridgewater Elementary School, which was ready for occupancy when the class of 2010 started 7th grade in the fall of 2004. 

Meanwhile, Carleton College purchased the old middle school building and began to draw up plans to convert it to an arts building, to include a new theater, cinema, cinema and media studies studio space, classrooms, and a "teaching museum."  After Carleton received a $25 million gift from the Weitz Family Foundation earlier this year, the creation of the Arts Union is finally underway—beginning with the demolition of the 1950s classroom annex and cafeteria  on the east side of the building, facing Central Park. 

The old Northfield Middle School was completed in 1911, at a cost of $90,000 (approximately $2 million in 2010 dollars), and replaced an older school on the site that was destroyed by fire in April 1908.  (A crowd gathered on the corner of 4th and Union to watch the old school burn.  According to the Northfield News, "Most of the those present did not refrain from expressing the hope that the building would be totally destroyed, and when the flames gained headway there would be a suppressed cheer, and when the firemen would drown the blaze a groan would be heard.")  The building originally served the town as a high school.

By 1927, the new building was already overcrowded, and the school district began to prepare to ask voters to approve construction of an addition.  Then came the Depression, which postponed the initiative until 1935, when a combination of a $54,000 Federal grant and an additional $70,000 in local bonding made possible the construction of an addition to the north of the original building, including an auditorium.  Before the construction of the new addition, the building had been at 175% capacity.

Another classroom addition was constructed in the 1950s, and it is this addition which is being demolished as part of Carleton's Arts Union project.  The original 1911 building and the 1935 addition will be preserved as part of the Arts Union.  According to Dean of the College Beverly Nagel, the demolition will be completed by the second week of July 2010, and the Arts Union will be completed by the fall of 2011—the centennial of the the original building's completion.  For more information on the Arts Union, see the Carleton Arts Union website.  For photographs of the demolition, see this Northfield.org Flickr Set, or watch the slideshow below.

As she watched a wrecking ball crash into a former 8th grade ACE classroom, retired Northfield teacher Claire Fox commented, "I taught there for twenty-one years."