The Making of CHS : Second CHS Facility 1854-1901
 Image 3 of 75 
 

Back to Site
Located at Broad & Green Streets on the northeast side of the street, the second facility served its ever-increasing student body until the larger building was constructed across Broad Street and opened in 1901. The second facility remained in use for nearly half a century. After the construction of the larger facility, this building then served as an annex for the Central Manual Training School (CMTS)vocational program until CHS was relocated in 1939. "As the organizational history of the Philadelphia schools evolved, there was a major shift in the position of CHS. No longer the agent of centralization, Central became the object of the process; less and less the dominant power within the system, it gradually became subordinate to the growing power of the Superintendent. CHS gradually lost its entrepreneurial role in the fading market structure of schooling and acquired a formal structural niche within the new bureaucratic order [of the school system]", (Labaree, 76). "By the 1880s, Central High School's powerful position in the secondary-education market provoked widespread demand for access to its credentials and substantial resentment over its elitism. While the surging market had subdued the high school's original political aims, the high school's market success eventually stirred a powerful political reaction against this market. The result was a sharp increase in the high school enrollment in the city and the subordination of Central to the political authority of the school board. The effect of this intervention was to flood the market and thereby lower the value of Central's credentials. But the response of Central's middle-class constituents was to try to restore this value by adopting a stratified model for the new high schools, ranking both curricula and schools and then claiming the exclusive top stratum for themselves". (Labaree, 175)Photo April 17, 1911. (Photo courtesy of www.phillyhistory.org)
Second CHS Facility 1854-1901