Roosevelt School, 1975.

The first section of this Roosevelt School, on 23rd Avenue (Avenue of the Cities) and 35th Street, was completed in 1939. However, the roots of the school go back to a one-room country school built before the Civil War. Fairview, as it was named, was located at the current site of the Coolidge building, on the southeast corner of the Avenue of the Cities and 34th Street. A second Fairview was built about 1875. By 1910, with urban expansion first reaching Highland, classes were split, one teacher holding forth in the Fairview building and another in the Town Hall a few blocks west on 23rd Avenue. Then a third Fairview School, with three classrooms, was completed in 1913. In 1922 its name was changed to Roosevelt, in honor of President Theodore Roosevelt who had passed away three years earlier. In 1924, 23rd Avenue was paved as far east as 34th Street, just short of the location of Roosevelt. In 1935, during the Depression, the 1913 school was displaced by a new building on the same site that would eventually be expanded to become Coolidge Junior High. Then in September 1939, the first part of the current Roosevelt School was opened in a location just a stone’s throw to the east. Both of the 1930s school projects were partly supported by Federal depression-era grants.

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