The Terminal Years of AMS
After the community struck down a levy to fund new schools on May 3, we take a photography adventure into the dark hull of Ashland's most troubled asset. (Two slideshows below)
ASHLAND OHIO--It’s cloudy. A bit of rain is coming down on a cold spring afternoon as I drive with my photographer, Chris Casey, to a school I once attended 13 years ago as a 7th grader in Ashland Ohio. A current Ashland University Student, Casey is no older than 20, but he reminds me of the wily Boston Red Sox infielder, Kevin Youkilis. His strong red beard covers his jaw, his hair is cut short, and his eyes have an athlete’s good humor. Chris offered to take the job to photograph Ashland Middle School after overhearing that I needed someone near free for this project when I was in Common Grounds, a local, ultra-religious coffee shop on the corner of Claremont and College Avenue where they will serve you coffee and reference Jesus every chance they get. He seems interested in the idea we could shoot a place that’s as awful as it is majestic. That’s how I sold the idea of photographing an exquisitely run-down building based on my memory from more than a decade ago. I plan to show him.
Driving down Claremont Avenue, I tell him we’re on a bit of an adventure as I list some of the legends that have been passed down about Ashland Middle School. For starters, there’s always been a mention that it was made to withstand nuclear fallout—some half-baked myth from Soviet nuclear peril in the sixties. Such bragging rights for a building are grounded most likely in cavernous basement tunnels below the main floors of the building. Protection from nuclear fallout isn’t a reality, of course. In a cosmically unlikely nuclear event in rural Ashland, everyone would be dead for being in that building, but it gives the middle school a fitting connection to its protracted downfall in an absurd century of nuclear standoffs and brute irrational American confidence. I move on and tell Chris about the occasional bats that fly around the gym during musicals held in the spring, the creepy dungeons that lay in the hull, mythic tunnels leading to the neighboring courthouse, and the condemned catwalk that sits above McDowell Auditorium that I hope we can brave. Chris grins—he has a Cannon camera he’s assured me takes pictures at an adequate level hidden away in a small bag he’s holding like a bible.
When we pull up to the Fourth Street door entrance, two teenage girls are waiting for their ride safe inside from the steady rain. They stare at us through the locked glass doors until a series of good natured glances force them to finally let us in. At once we’re immersed in the odd spectacle that is, and always has been, the warped, crumbling, slow death of The Ashland Middle School. If anything has changed in the 14 years since I was here, I’m sure it’s just myself. It’s hard to know if, like the people who work here everyday, AMS is an all-too-familiar place to realize it strange that an otherwise functional middle school where children come every day to learn is also one in full structural decline—an edifice that should have been torn down a long time ago but now stands as some sick joke the town plays on its youth for the sake of sparing the ungrateful aging community some property tax. I sincerely hope the photography we gather answers that question beyond my own ruminations.
Matt White, the assistant principal, immediately greets us in the main hall. It took some negotiating and a few contentious emails to get the higher-ups at the city school offices to agree to let us come in and shoot under the uncertain times just before the bond issue vote held on May 3rd that would have gone a a long way in funding the replacement of two elementary schools, and building a new high school which would then move the middle school world to the current high school on Catherine Avenue. White is friendly, though; he turns down my apology for the chilly, wet hand I offer as we shake and tells us his afternoon is wide open and he’ll be taking us around.
I’m glad he’s received us so warmly, even though to this point I still haven’t given the clearest idea what I’m doing there shooting photos of a rundown school amidst the uncertainty of the May 3rd vote. I guess it’s obvious to a point; I’m an advocate of exposing the building to a larger public so they can see what I saw in 1997, what people have been living in 8-12 hours a day, 180 plus days a year for decades. But there were also politics in play when we were allowed to visit: the group Citizens for Ashland City Schools, led by local businesses and community leaders, had launched a well-funded, highly organized campaign to get the measure passed, and nobody under their watchful eye was taking a piss until they got permission, and certainly not a piss that involved strangers photographing one of the most urgent reasons for their cause without showing due diligence. I’m not the enemy of their expansion plans, but I haven’t expressed exactly what I’m doing in their war either. Despite that, White has a key chain fit for a janitor and we’re off…
As we begin, I’m nervous he won’t take us to some of the stranger, side-show dungeons I bragged about to Chris, but White reassures us his afternoon is free, and we’ll go see everything worth seeing on the tour. The assistant principal five years running, White is of quality leadership height, maybe around six feet, 2 inches, medium build. He wears a pink dress shirt with a silk tie, and dark brown slacks. He has a casual disposition that lures me into telling him not to check my old disciplinary file as we start walking around on the second floor. His hair is cut short, not military short or military shape, but I’m sure a 14 year old with bloody knuckles and a half ripped t-shirt knows the hammer can come down and the cordial smiles are done when the door shuts in his office. He tells us as we begin that he took a tour of AMS when he arrived on the job, but some of the places he’s taking us he’s only seen or opened once or twice, which is reassuring for his sake because this building has asbestos loaded in the walls and exposed in some locked away rooms that have strict warning posters so old they too are falling off the doors.
As an aspiring photographer, Chris is first drawn to the gold trophies in the little glass case at the top of the stairs on the second floor hallway where the administrative offices are stationed. All those shiny awards—minor achievements that never make the local paper—don’t count for shit the second they are stuffed in the little wood and glass cabinet, there only for visitors. Golden male and female statues frozen in glory and excellence. It’s a little reminder that often enough, winning does happen, even inside the shambles of AMS.
White wants us to take a ride on the school’s only elevator, an amusement ride of sorts and one that has a history of scaring the shit out of people for good reason. It’s ostensibly for heavy lifting, janitors, and kids in wheelchairs but doesn’t seem fitting for any of that. This is the dated elevator that one can earn the privilege of using when a leg breaks or the ability to walk was never an option. The lift is industrial, and it’s truly unfitting for daily use considering it moves slowly and holds only about two people comfortably. There’s an accordion-like folding steel gate that has to be pulled back for the three of us get on. When I was in school here, hundreds—maybe thousands of names—were scratched and drawn into the exposed shaft walls that you can see as the elevator moves up or down. But recently a fresh coat of paint has covered all but the most deeply etched names—signatures by the most dogged self promoters remain below layers of paint that couldn’t quite erase their dedicated, hard work. White assures us the rickety little elevator is inspected at least a couple times a year but then tells us a teacher got stuck in it and they found her screaming to be saved. The regulated safety checks are reassuring enough, but I remember as a student thinking the elevator was a death trap and its only pleasure was the risk. The door closes heavily behind us with a bang, you roll the cage closed and you hope like a 1960s-era astronaut to reach the moon’s surface or get back to earth safely on some mysteriously tough equipment that has less technological know-how than a pocket watch.
Up on the third floor, cracked windows interrupt bland, empty walls. There is an undeniable dreariness to the building that even a newly dropped ceiling, lighting, and fresh coat of soothing periwinkle on the walls can’t dispel. The uneven, sloping concrete slab floors are a mystery. They look older than the building itself, which is quite an achievement. White points out where the school had once been a three story, narrow building by itself but was then added upon with the McDowell Auditorium expansion in the mid 1920s. The levels between the new and old do not quite meet each other evenly; a little drop in the floor and a change in the tiling design still show. Outside a courtyard window into a separation between the old and older building, water is falling onto a series of flat roofs where it collects, and even below that, the ground level is finally exposed in a little useless five by ten foot space that a single door accesses seemingly for no reason at all.
If they didn’t shoot the rooftop scene from Mary Poppins at AMS, they should have. The M.C. Escher-like collection of multiple-level tops running into each other, a myriad of conjoining levels, and endless stacks of brick chimneys confuse the eye while giving a Dickensian austerity as one haphazard construction connects to another, some I guess that literally date back to the actual industrial revolution. To be sure, AMS is no prison or jail of the sort, but the overall effect of walking through the hallways closes you off from the outside world of downtown Ashland by windowless outer walls on one side of the hallway, and on the inside wall, provide a view of a towering brick industrial conclave within the courtyard that can be seen from the windows. It’s lost on no one, even if they don’t have the words for it at 13 years old, that this is the Institution.
On the third floor, White unlocks a door to a little room housing a giant ventilation unit—so absurdly 1900s looking, you expect to see some soot faced immigrant sweating away and returning a black stained rag to his hip pocket after coughing up pieces of his lung. By now, Chris is humored by all of these oddities he can photograph. If the antique buttons in the elevator didn’t do it, the 1950 etching in the ventilation machine has made him a believer.
As we continue down the hall, we can see into cluttered little classrooms that use precious shelf space so meticulously, it defines the room as nothing more than people making do, something that might also define the town’s use of this building. In an age when flat screens can be mounted with fiber optic internet and a whole age of classroom aesthetics have come to assist in a conducive learning environment, AMS has held on to its time capsule classrooms, a throwback to an age when all those educational bells and whistles didn’t matter and students better shut up, stop looking out the window to day dream and get back to writing down what’s on the overhead projection screen. At best, a series of top heavy TV carts can be rolled into the classrooms at a teacher’s request, but for the most part, the globalized, technological world is racing endlessly somewhere far away from inside these walls.
The next door we open on the third floor hallway is to an immense, sprawling crawl space above the auditorium where chandeliers are reinforced and lighting and ceiling panels are fastened to roof beams above McDowell Auditorium. If a thousand bats are about to slam into us and flood the school, it would be right now. There’s no disrepair to speak of here, though—just an aged, eerie little boardwalk akin to a tree house ladder one could crawl on if one felt like risking the chance their own weight would be enough to fall through the ceiling and 50 foot drop onto the auditorium floor. Chris and I wanted to experience some danger on this rainy spring afternoon, but a few snaps from the entrance will suffice. Seeing our hesitation, White quickly mentions that city schools field technician, Phillip McNaull, routinely goes in this bizarre crawl space to “do work.” I feel bad for Phillip, but it requires a bit of respect, too.
Later we ran into McNaull as he was adjusting the weights to bring up a lighting apparatus above the gym floor. McNaull is a jack of all trades. He seems to literally do anything and everything for city schools if it involves something getting plugged in or turned on electrically. He shows us some construction mistakes in the original McDowell auditorium where the measurement for a doorway was miscalculated and new brickwork had to be added to hide it. We’re now some 50 feet above the gym floor where below us there are cheerleader tryouts. All I can think is that the metal beams sprawling across the gym, each one a few inches apart from the other that span the catwalk better not all come down while we’re up here. This is the crumbling fortress, a crow’s nest where McNaull routinely works in the dark shadows of the Ashland City’s most troubled asset.
As we come back downstairs, McNaull tells us about partial remains of a high school that originally was here before anything else was built on the structure still standing for 100 plus years. His rapid, steady delivery of facts gives way to a more impassioned plea. “People say, “’Why don’t you take care of the building, that’s the problem, you’re not taking care of it!’”…but it’s such an old building, you can’t fix some of these things, there are some things that can’t be reversed.” In that way, AMS is like a terminal cancer patient and instead of admitting its impending death is near and making preparations to move on, the critics of the bond issue feel it best to repeat the dangers of smoking.
White then takes us to the cafeteria where he explains how a teacher-led, trouble-shooting group devised a plan that would creatively keep only about 70-80 kids eating in the cramped little cafeteria at any one time. Twenty minutes and then students are to leave, headed to some kind of study hall, allowing a new group in the cafeteria to feast and clear out once more. That’s 10 minutes less to eat lunch than they gave me at the second worst summer job of my life, stacking boxes all day at the shipping end of McGraw Hill’s sprawling warehouse on the edge of town. Twenty minutes to get through the lunch line and sit down and wolf it down. Then back to the hallways wet from leaks and on to cluttered little classrooms suited for the emerging world of the 1950s.
The entire cafeteria has been painted in kitschy little drawings and different inspirational sayings in a kind of antique script that a mother took the initiative to paint freehand all over the school’s empty walls. The optimistic little clichés are hard to find endearing past the first one we encountered on a stairwell which reads, “You don’t have to be great to start but you have to start to be great;” a thoroughly stupid quote though unattributed as it sits on the wall, is from Zig Ziglar, a business man and motivational speaker who once wrote a book entitled Success For Dummies.
Around the backside of the kitchen entrance, we run into one of the janitors, a woman of maybe late 50s who is mopping. We frightened her on such an ordinarily quiet day after school hours when everyone has left. Feeling like lightening the mood, I ask her if the building is haunted.
“I hope not,” she says.
I press her further for the joke, “But have you ever observed any paranormal activity while working here?”
“I’ve heard things here,” she says solemnly, and now we’re not so much joking.
I ask her seriously, “Like what?”
“Just weird things,” she says dramatically and stares off.
“Maybe the building is haunted,” I suggest.
“I hope not. If there are ghosts here, they’re unhappy,” she says grimly.
“Maybe they loved it here so much, they couldn’t leave?” I say with a smile.
She’s not buying it though, as she patiently puts up with my poor attempts at a joke as we slowly depart and her endless mopping resumes. As we walk along further, I wish I had more time to think about the possibilities of a haunted middle school and the town that forces its existence to continue, but as we move on through the school, I instead notice the collection of individuals doing janitorial work and wonder what it means to be stuck in a crummy building every day, to see it endlessly empty and then filled with children, turned to a mess, then do the best one can to make the rubble look sort of clean. What’s scarier, I think, ghosts haunting the halls at night or having to clean this miserable place for two decades and retire poor? The innumerable hours in a day to wash broken windows to an unused courtyard or spread water over the surfaces of a dying concrete maze is wholly Kafkaesque.
White then leads us to the real gem, the best and worst the middle school has to offer. McDowell Auditorium holds about 1500 people at capacity but now is starkly empty until the three of us enter its chilly, damp air. In some ways, it’s the biggest and oddest room in Ashland County. In looking at materials the Ashland Historic society has on the history of the city schools, I saw that upon the completion of construction, one critic described the giant auditorium as the town’s white elephant—predicting it could never be filled to capacity.
We’ve entered from the balcony. The contrast of piercing grey, afternoon light flooding from the back wall windows at the top down to an empty stage in waiting is majestic. A rail that can’t possibly meet safety codes comes up to below my hip and is the one safety measure that stops people from falling down 15 feet or so to the lower level. Being near it unavoidably invites such grim fantasies. But the balcony as a whole has a quiet kind of poetry to it as well. This is where you, all alone with your first girlfriend, tell her you’re in love only to break up two days later over a rumor she likes an 8th grader. It’s the first and last place you’ll be if you have the pleasure of spending 2 years here as a student or 20 as faculty. It’s also where so many in Ashland have watched so many musicals, so many Christmas choir concerts from the talented high school choirs in years past. This is where they bused elementary children in to see morning concerts. This is where you would have to sit and listen to someone you never heard of or met before in your life talk to you at some out-of-touch school assembly about the dangers of drinking and smoking, or having unprotected sex, or any sex, or bullying, or cheating, or tax evasion. Everything happens here. And nothing does when it’s not. It’s a room too big for small events, and still often dwarfing the crowd that shows up for even the town’s biggest shows.
On the wall closest to the stage where curtains typically hide the fact that there is no box seating, heavy plaster is coming down almost by the hour. The walls and ceiling are peeling and coming apart like a grenade went off nearby. The rubble is accumulating down below in slow motion and according to White, no effort has abated the deterioration. We’re told they don’t even seat students in the area below where the ceiling and walls are coming down as a safety precaution. It then dawns on me very succinctly that this building is just plain falling apart right now as I write this, as you read it—it’s coming down irreparably so and it’s usually dark little enough known location that most of the town doesn’t have to acknowledge it. Of all the arguments to not replace the building, of instead adding on, of renovating, of taking “better care of it” there is the undeniable truth that there are some manmade edifices—constructions of yesteryear—that hit the terminal velocity of free fall decay and cannot be fixed. Welcome to Ashland. Welcome to your future, junior high students.
The Citizens Group for Ashland has a powerfully convincing argument to replace this school for the sake of Ashland’s commercial business future summed up in a power point and speech by Jim Hess, during the run up to the vote, looping on the local channel and a power point and video available on their website as if the nonbelievers still need to hear the gospel to turn away—all failing to sufficiently supplant the entrenched view in town that schools aren’t worth the money. But, it’s kind of hard to know who the hell wouldn’t really want to see AMS fall down upon itself in a cloud of smoke if cost wasn’t a factor. This is a town of church goers, of teachers and rural folk, of people who deeply want to be proud of their community and ordinarily claim they know better. Maybe more than a few kids over the years who got bullied, pissed on, knocked down, treated like shit during their two to three years here as students might also want to see the thing come down and have a video keepsake to hold on to for posterity. But when you hear the angels sing on a snowy December night, when it feels like half the town has showed up together to listen to carols, and the fucking walls are literally coming down, what more real reason do you need to say that Ashland needs to escape this middle school and build a new, safer place for the voices of angels.
White takes us down to the basement where ISD (in-school detention) used to be kept. I mention I was incarcerated for two miserable days ‘in the hole’ as they called it back then for tampering with the school’s fire extinguishers. He laughs, but tells me that ISD has been moved upstairs. Grant money transformed the old punishment room into a collection of cheap keyboards on top of desks for students to practice after school. It’s an uplifting moment in our miserable tour. In the mud of AMS, there are these little pearls here and there where you can see that money, good will and a bit of creativity have retained some hope, like the fitness room that has new lifting gear, elliptical machines and big screens on the wall also paid for through a grant. I don’t know if these two rooms bring the school an inch closer to salvation or is a foil to the greater, convincing decay in every other place we step into, but I’m siding with the latter.
From there we head to the embarrassingly beat up band and choir room. In the main room, a collection of mismatching seats are arranged in a horseshoe; a low hanging ceiling helps the room lack all the good acoustics the auditorium above enjoys. Outside of the band room, a number of rooms contain partial desks, broken chairs, lights out, the works. Doors have been removed from their hinges or the knobs no longer work, twisting without unlatching. These are, allegedly, ‘practice rooms’ where drywall has been ripped away and piping is exposed. It’s kind of a tortured place for children to learn the joy of music.
White then takes us down to one of the more strange rooms I have ever had the pleasure of entering: a dark, narrow, low ceiling corridor that leads to a giant iron door with a large latch. We lift the latch and the door opens on a chain pulley system. Inside, the room starts as some kind of ventilation unit storage and place for water works but then quickly descends into something less room-like and more of a cave. The floor turns almost to mud. Concrete so worn and broken apart, stagnant puddles of water have collected. Lights don’t turn on. Warning posters of asbestos are on every door. Odds and ends, a room of clutter of empty barrels, a brick wall half knocked down into a cavernous area with no light fixture. We’re visiting Ashland’s current Middle School, and at that moment I feel dumb we didn’t bring flashlights. We keep thanking White and saying how interesting it is as we kind of chuckle about these moments of discovery, but it’s amusing only in the same way a head pops easily off a rabbit’s body, or the color of vomit can be one pure color instead of a total mix.
White’s spending so much time and effort with us, referencing this levy every once in a while, but never making a value judgment so much on it. I tell him I’ve been out of town for quite a while, but I ask I ask what he senses will happen. He says he has no idea. It could be a landslide. It could be 51-49 either way. This town, still to this day, either hates its young people and schools, or wants to bring them finally into the new century. No one can be sure but a 55-45 vote striking down the bond in a year when unprecedented efforts were taken to get it passed speaks volumes.
Earlier in the day, I stopped by the Ashland Historic Society and ran into Betty Plank, a woman who’s written as much as anyone in print about Ashland history over the years. She’s an elderly woman that mentions emails and her next article she’s working on. Once inside from the rain she is immediately more busy doing her research and on task than I am as I look through four giant manila folders full of newspaper clippings and old photos the lady at the front desk brought me. Plank’s husband sits next to me at a table as we talk about the school and he tells me some of the history the middle school has. As we talked, I couldn’t help but notice how proud the school had been in the images from when it was first erected. How it had post cards made of it. How it had led the news on its opening. Now, the people who work there are ill at ease. They are hoping it gets torn down but have no idea how and when that could happen given the town of today up until now has been satisfied enough to see them wallow in the wrecked castle. Nobody is sending out post cards from Ashland now of the middle school. It’s a building to look away from rather than remember.
It seems nobody is even allowed to say enough is enough in properly angry terms; everything has to be couched in business friendly, community hand-holding that doesn’t offend the undecided or their penny pinching neighbors. This town is big enough and old enough to demand better. Maybe this isn’t vocalized enough because it’s too late for such obvious sentiments by those who are closest to it. They’ve gotten used to the levies being struck down, periodic motions to get this building replaced inked in the local Times Gazette only to routinely see it fail to gain traction. In nearby Wooster, a community center and high school has been holding neighborhood bragging rights for over a decade. An Olympic sized pool, a YMCA, a real cafeteria. I talk to some retired teachers in Ashland about the AMS ruins and invariably their eyes glaze over and they speak slowly and plaintively. “We gotta get them out of there,” as if we’re talking about our men and women serving in the Middle East.
As Chris and I shake hands with White for his time and head back into the rain outside, into the car and drive away, Chris mentions he was most surprised by how little is on the walls of the school. “What kinds of things would you put on the walls?” I ask, thinking the décor at least was normal. “Memories.” Chris replies, “…Like field trips and school events. Photos of all the things that were great when you are a student there.” And then I realize something I really couldn’t say to Principal White when we took the tour or to myself for a long time since I was a student there, but perhaps was obvious from the day I stepped foot in AMS as a 12 year old: I don’t think people go to AMS and make memories as much as they just get through it so they don’t have to be there anymore.
This town has held on to this building in such disrepair for so long, it’s become them. They’ve become a town of penny pinchers instead of investors. To a neighboring town like Wooster, Ashland has repeatedly said to hell with your nice schools and vibrant community. Ashland itself has become this old rotten school sitting on Orange Street and Fourth. And there’s always another side, people say, well, yeah but… why should I pay for a school I don’t go to…and what do I get from a new school? When the real question should be what have we become? What are we waiting for in this life? A second coming, I hope. Perhaps the greatest lesson ever taught at Ashland Middle School, the greatest show McDowell will ever hold, is when they finally knock it down.