![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/1756551075_328_WESRFNJONZCZDPYZZAHCM6H2U4.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
From the spring of 2008 until the fall of 2010, the Dallas Independent School District did just about everything it could to stop W.H. Adamson High School from becoming a historic Dallas landmark. It was a particularly ugly battle, as far as these things go, pitting the graduates of the former Oak Cliff High School, built in 1915, against the DISD administration, including a superintendent, Michael Hinojosa, who began his career as coach and educator at the school he was trying to raze.<\/p>\n
Glenn Straus, president of the Adamson Alumni Association at the time of the tussle, told me Thursday that it got to the point where he couldn\u2019t sleep most nights. \u201cI was so worried about Adamson being torn down,\u201d said Straus, retired at 87 and now living in Poetry, Texas. \u201cIt was not pleasant.\u201d<\/p>\n
In June 2011, the association got what it wanted \u2014 and more. And it might all have been for nothing.<\/p>\n
The original Adamson, sitting next door to its sprawling replacement, became a Dallas landmark<\/a>, with all the protections (allegedly) afforded such historic structures. Shortly thereafter, Dallas\u2019 second-oldest public high school was added to the National Register of Historic Places<\/a>. A year later, a Texas Historical Commission marker was planted in front of the building, noting its place, at the time, as \u201cthe oldest continuously operating high school<\/a>\u201d in the district.<\/p>\n News Roundups<\/p>\n By signing up, you agree to our\u00a0Terms of Service<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Privacy Policy.<\/a><\/p>\n When I went to the campus on Thursday, that historic marker was slathered in yellow spray paint. It\u2019s been like that for months<\/a>.<\/p>\n The front of old W.H. Adamson High School, which appears to have far more boarded-up windows today than it did just eight months ago<\/p>\n Robert Wilonsky<\/p>\n I walked around the original school on East Ninth Street, which is surrounded by vague vestiges of a chain-link fence erected a couple of years ago<\/a>. A gate, which is supposed to be locked to keep people from entering the back of the campus, was wide open. It\u2019s decorated with \u201cNO TRESPASSING\u201d and \u201cRESTRICTED AREA\u201d signs. Most of its windows are broken, boarded up or just wide open \u2014 the result, I was told, of kids throwing rocks at the school and of the unsheltered getting inside. <\/p>\n The campus \u2014 designed by a St. Louis architect, William Ittner<\/a>, who has 34 other structures on the National Register of Historic Places \u2014 now looks like any other derelict, abandoned, battered and bruised building, just another neighborhood eyesore. Because that\u2019s all it is now, a languishing landmark being destroyed in slow motion \u2013 demolition by neglect, in other words, a violation of the very ordinance meant to preserve and protect Adamson<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are fearful it will be mysteriously burned or just fall down one day,\u201d alumni association vice president Linda Pauz\u00e9 told me Thursday. She worked for the district for 38 years, 18 of those spent teaching English at her alma mater, and still lives nearby, in North Oak Cliff. \u201cIt makes me sick to my stomach. That\u2019s why I quit driving by the building. I couldn\u2019t stand to see it deteriorate.\u201d<\/p>\n But that\u2019s the idea. I\u2019m pretty sure that\u2019s the plan.<\/p>\n Drawing obtained from DISD vault of the new Oak Cliff High School, now W.H. Adamson High School, in 1916.<\/p>\n Randy Eli Grothe \/ 99071<\/p>\n DISD, which has long been loath to spend money on preserving shuttered schools no matter how historic, says it has no choice but to tear down the building, insisting that numerous efforts to convert the moribund Adamson into a \u201cDigital Arts and Creative Technology campus\u201d have failed repeatedly because the building is too far gone \u2014 and, now, too expensive \u2014 to save. In letters and documents sent to the alumni association and Dallas\u2019 Landmark Commission, DISD officials say the building is an \u201cimminent threat to public health or safety,\u201d and that it will cost \u201cmore than $102.5 million to shore the building so it can be repurposed.\u201d<\/p>\n In May, several district officials went to Dallas City Hall to begin pleading their case to a very skeptical Landmark Commission<\/a>, which would have to approve a demolition. A month earlier, a Landmark task force said it could not support such a request, and suggested this was a clear case of demolition by neglect. <\/p>\n Landmark wouldn\u2019t go that far \u2014 yet \u2014 but commissioners said they were concerned that the district hadn\u2019t done everything it could to at least preserve the building. <\/p>\n District officials said they\u2019ve spent $6 million on site studies and designs for a future arts magnet campus, but added that they couldn\u2019t find contractors willing to do the work given the building\u2019s unsafe conditions. The district\u2019s chief construction officer, Brent Alfred, also told the commission that \u201csometimes teenagers are sneaking in there just to be, you know, teenagers,\u201d and that he didn\u2019t think the campus was safe \u201cbecause people may be hiding in there.\u201d<\/p>\n Commissioners wanted to see more proof the building was unsalvageable, which the district said it will provide when it comes back for a demo permit. The commission determined that if the campus could at least be properly secured, then it would no longer be \u201can imminent threat.\u201d Yet the property remained unfenced and unprotected as of Thursday. Several members of the alumni association with whom I spoke in recent days can\u2019t help but think that\u2019s intentional, to hasten its demise.<\/p>\n W.H. Adamson was built in 1915. Whether it survives until 2026 is another question.<\/p>\n Robert Wilonsky<\/p>\n Adamson boasts an impressive roster of alumni<\/a>, among them former Speaker of the House Jim Wright, singer-songwriters Ray Wylie Hubbard<\/a> and Michael Martin Murphey<\/a>, and E. King Gill, Texas A&M\u2019s original 12th Man<\/a>. But the association isn\u2019t merely about nostalgia: It maintains a $2 million endowment for scholarships doled out each year to Adamson grads, and keeps in close contact with those recipients. <\/p>\n Alfred reached out last year with a missive seeking the association\u2019s counsel on how to best proceed. Alfred said the district had two options: spend that $102.5 million, which it doesn\u2019t have, or \u201cdemolish the fa\u00e7ade, since it poses a threat to public safety and replace it with a memorial\/green space to honor the school\u2019s unique legacy and celebrate the rich history of Adamson High School.\u201d <\/p>\n He said he was open to other suggestions. A DISD spokesperson told me Thursday that could include selling the building to a developer, as it did in 2011, when the landmark 123-year-old Davy Crockett School on Carroll Avenue, likewise suffering from demolition by neglect<\/a>, was eventually reborn as 52 luxury apartments now called The Principal Residences<\/a>.<\/p>\n But the association and preservationists believe the district has already made up its mind. Again.<\/p>\n The alumni association began its first fight to save the old campus in March 2008, when it got word the building would be razed and replaced with a replacement next door. Within two months, they recruited preservation architect Marcel Quimby and asked the Landmark Commission to consider adding it to Dallas\u2019 relatively short list of landmarks. The commission voted unanimously to move forward, which would have paused demolition for two years. That proved to be the first bell in what became a bruising fight<\/a> between the district and its former students that lasted three years.<\/p>\n District officials say kids have been getting inside the 1915 W.H. Adamson campus, which the city landmarked in 2011. One official told the Landmark Commission in May that he didn’t think the building was safe \u201cbecause people may be hiding in there.\u201d<\/p>\n Robert Wilonsky<\/p>\n Local architecture firm Corgan told the district Adamson was in lousy shape \u2014 and had been for decades \u2014 and that it should be razed, with a few surviving scraps repurposed for the new campus. The district insisted that the alumni\u2019s demands would add tens of millions to the new school\u2019s final price tag<\/a>. In September 2009 the school board passed a resolution<\/a> that said it \u201copposed and rejected\u201d any attempt by anyone to landmark Adamson.<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/J4R7RMSN5NDWZDSLYWSYCLARHY.JPG\")
<\/p>\n![\"Drawing](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/JDLAJNMNBZDM7JE5XOXSLJ6BYY.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"W.H.](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/ETQ65YJ26JC6PE4BS7PYN2MEGE.JPG\")
<\/p>\n![\"District](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/ZT3Y6DR54NCAJHDYM5R2SHAF5U.JPG\")
<\/p>\n