A two-alarm fire Saturday night decimated most of the roof of a shuttered Gary high school listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Firefighters responded to the blaze at Ralph Waldo Emerson High School, 716 E. 7th Ave., around 9:45 p.m., the Gary Fire Department said. Crews arrived on scene within three minutes and found heavy fire conditions in the roof and attic space above the third floor rapidly spreading across the span of the structure, according to a release from the city. Winds out of the west at 20 mph helped the blaze spread, which required firefighters to exit the structure and attack the blaze from outside with elevated master streams, the release stated.
Concrete barricades blocking access to the north side of the building also hampered fire suppression efforts.
The department said the fire was mostly extinguished by 3:30 a.m. Investigators have not yet determined the cause of the fire, and Gary said its department and the Indiana State Fire Marshal’s Office will process evidence from the scene.
Fire Chief Mark Terry said it was devastating to witness the damage to Emerson.
“This building contains so much history to so many of us in Gary,” he said in a statement. “I have many fond memories here having attended many events when my son was a student here.
“The birthplace of our modern educational system was started right here, and this school was the first school in the country to have a swimming pool. There have been so many famous alumni that roamed these halls.”
With the help of the Munster and Merrillville Fire Departments, firefighters extinguished the fire early Sunday morning with no injuries.
The fire’s cause is under investigation, but arson investigators were at the scene, officials said.
The smell of smoke still hung heavy in the air, and water could be heard pouring down to the building’s lower levels Sunday afternoon as people came to see the damage. Ebony and Rodney Nash said they attended the school during its final years as performing arts magnet school and pointed out from the sidewalk on the east side the various classrooms they remembered.
“That was Mr. Stanley’s room right there (on the third floor), and Mrs. Smith-Richardson’s was next to it,” said Rodney Nash, who attended Emerson between sixth and 10th grades before transferring, said before turning to his sister. “The inside jokes that only Emerson kids would understand? So many. You remember the 30-minute sock hops during lunch? And during performance time, you had no room for error. Our teachers demanded perfection, and that’s what they got.”
Ebony Nash, who was one of the last classes to graduate from Emerson before it merged with William Wirt High School in Gary’s Miller section in 2008, said she saw the news as she was leaving church Sunday morning. She was a Drama major and cherishes the memory of her senior year in 2006-07.
“I’d finished all the classes for my major and was taking filler classes. No kid wants to go to school, but my friends made it go by faster,” Ebony Nash said. “That was the year I finally got to drive to school, and I had to get a parking pass to park out front.”
“This building wasn’t bothering nobody. Hopefully, this will be a wake-up call to the city,” Rodney Nash added.
Renee Forbes, who graduated from Emerson in 1979, lives a few blocks away from the school and found out about the fire from a home camera alert. She was saddened by the fire.
“It seems like they could’ve saved the building at some point, but it’s been here like this too long,” she said.
Bruce Stahl, a teacher in Michigan City, would’ve gone to Emerson in the 1960s if his family hadn’t moved to the Horace Mann High School district, he said. Stahl said he’s a city historian of sorts who comes back to Gary a couple times a week because the landscape of the old buildings changes in the blink of an eye.
“Gary was one of the best school districts in the nation. Emerson was the first one with a pool, and it even had a zoo. It was put on the National Historic register in 1995 — now, almost every school building is empty,” Stahl said. “It’s a shame.”
Known for a four-day boycott in 1927, where hundreds of students demanded that administrators kick out 17 Black students after they’d been transferred there due to overcrowding at their school, the Emerson building has more recently been the backdrop for blight and crime. Gunfire erupted inside vacant Gary Emerson High School in July, leading to the arrests of three East Chicago men and a juvenile girl.
Police responded to the school after a report of shots fired, according to a police release. As officers arrived at the school, shots were still being fired, the Post-Tribune previously reported.
Firefighters in June responded to an arson fire at the school, once the grandest and oldest in the Gary system, opening in 1909. As enrollment declined, the district couldn’t keep up maintenance at the three-story school plagued by mold.
After it closed in 2008, scrappers and vandals invaded it, and windows are still wide open for easy access.
In 2015, police found a 17-year-old Chicago teen dead inside the blighted building. Police said Connita L. Richardson had been strangled.
Both Emerson and Horace Mann are owned by the Gary Housing Authority.
Carole Carlson contributed.
Michelle L. Quinn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
