By Antigone Barton
A casual passerby might have trouble imagining the battered old building in downtown Boynton Beach as the vibrant gathering place city commissioners hoped for at their August meeting.
But coastal residents who went to high school there don’t have to imagine. They remember.
Dorothy McNeice of Briny Breezes remembers the years before World War II, when the building brought people together, to see a play or watch a game in the school’s combination gym and theater, its “gymnatorium.” She sees the friends she made there to this day, at Boynton Beach Historical Society meetings.
Bob Kraft, also of Briny Breezes, remembers the day after the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, when the student body sat in the gymnatorium to hear a radio broadcast of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s address to Congress, calling the nation to war against Japan in response to “a date which will live in infamy.”
And Boynton Beach native and businessman Harvey Oyer remembers study hall, where a farm boy took the trouble to help him with his algebra, in spite of his own doubts he would ever master the subject.
It was a time when seasonal residents like McNeice and Kraft got an extra mini vacation in the beginning of the school year in a required two-week quarantine for children who came down from the North. It was a time when the city was smaller, when State Road A1A was more scrub than building, and a time before a succession of storms tore away at the once-grand 1920s-era structure.
But with city commissioners’ agreement at their Aug. 3 meeting to seek expert input on funding to restore the old Boynton Beach High School, the building’s history may be the foundation of its future as, once again, a center of community life.
After years of contention over the old building — with plans to knock it down countered by pleas to preserve it — while rain poured through the gymnatorium ceiling, the commission’s decision in May to temporarily patch the roof served as a signal of hope for the building.
The commission’s decision in August to put out a request for candidates to find ways to restore the building, signals hope for public-private partnerships that will restore the building to its former state, draw visitors and residents to downtown Boynton Beach, and draw jobs and money to the area, Mayor Jose Rodriguez said.
“Potentially, we could redevelop the high school with no cost to taxpayers,” Rodriguez said. “A game plan,” he adds, should be in place by the end of October.
His thoughts are not at odds with the hopes of others interested in the building’s future, a promising sign for a place that owes much of its current state of disrepair to delays caused by differing views.
Barbara Ready, chair of Save the Old School Space committee has long hoped that the building would be used for community activities.
“It’s true we have a box-full of studies,” Ready said, citing a point made at the August meeting. “The one we don’t have, but need, is a financial feasibility study.”
Such a study will show how the school can be sustained as a community venue, with some space available for businesses, she said.
And that is in line with a vision held by Oyer, who now operates his insurance business blocks from the building where he finally mastered algebra.
Like others, he saw the building’s memories disperse, as the nation joined World War II. The boy who taught him algebra joined the military and was killed in France. Seasonal residents like McNeice finished their school years back North where their parents returned to do war-related work. In 1949, Kraft says, the building held its last graduation.
Now, Oyer sees an audience gathering once again in the gymnatorium.
“The stage area is big enough to put on a lot of fine entertainment,” he said. Downstairs a café can supply refreshments, he added.
Civic clubs, which, he points out, “have kind of gone downhill, in part because there’s no central place to meet.” They could contribute financially, he adds, “to make the thing a success.”
Comments