Schools
Grant Elementary School
Empire Gardens Elementary School This NNA web page sponsored by eNative,
"Know YOUR neighborhood!"
Grant Academy is one of the oldest schools in San Jose. Originally known as the Second Ward School, it opened on the corner of N. 11th and Empire St. in April 1877. The school had eight rooms and an assembly hall in a two-story frame building with a distinctive bell tower. Construction costs were $19,000.
In 1892, the Second Ward School was renamed Grant Grammar School in honor of former President Ulysses S. Grant. The name Grant has identified the school in various permutations ever since.
Grant School was originally quite small. There were eight pupils in the graduating class of 1901, for example. A century later, the class of 2001 is projected to be 114, with a total enrollment of 662.
The terrible 1906 San Francisco Earthquake destroyed the Grant School building. [Click here to read about the Grant School & the 1906 Quake]. Temporary structures were erected so classes could continue. By 1908 a new Grant School was erected with 14 classrooms. Telephones were installed in 1909, along with playground equipment.
During the First World War, satellite bungalows with extra classrooms were constructed at the corners of N. 10th and N. 11 th and Jackson Sts. The bungalows stood until they were demolished in 1970. A fire in 1918 destroyed the main building, and the children were forced to attend Jefferson Elementary School during the renovation.
In 1972, the main Grant School building was relocated to the other side of the block, from Empire and N. 11th St. to Jackson and N. 10th St. Empire Library now occupies the original site of the main school building. In 1998, additional classroom structures were built along Eleventh St. at the corner of Jackson, readying the school for a third century of service to the Northside neighborhood.
The 1972 building sports a mural within neighborhood scenes. "It has never been defaced," says Joyce Ellington, a late 1930s Grant School alumnus who was later a longtime president of the Grant PTA and a founding member of the Northside Neighborhood Association (NNA). "We feel it is because the children were involved in its creation from the beginning."
Grant School was, dating back to the nineteenth century, a cross-roads of diverse people and cultures. Long before the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Grant had an amicably integrated student body.
Connie Young Yu in her history of Northside's Heinlenville district, Chinatown, San Jose, USA, writes: "In San Francisco Chinese children until the 1930s attended the Oriental School. But from the beginning (circa 1888) Heinlenville's youngsters were expected to go to the local public grammar school, Grant, where may of their classmates were also children of immigrants, mainly Italians and Portuguese." Pearl Shew Lee, born in 1913, later recalled "how kind her kindergarten teacher was when she first felt shy and uncomfortable among the white children." And when Mrs. Young Soong Quoung attended a PTA tea "in her Chinese clothes and even though she could not speak a word of English, [she] was treated to tea and warm hospitality."
Corroborating Yu's account, Mattie Barry, a black woman who attended Grant School in the 1800s and lived to be 94, was quoted in a 1978 History of Black Americans in Santa Clara Valley: "I came to San Jose in 1889, when I was six years old. . . I went to grade school here, and at that time there were all nationalities of children. We had Italians, Chinese, some Negroes, Mexicans - and we had no racial problems."
During the 1940s, Grant School offered black history classes to adults, something virtually unheard of elsewhere at the time. The classes took place in the Grant School bungalows along Jackson St. Alumnus Joyce Ellington also recalls that Grant School offered during the same period English as a second language classes, which were popular among the Northside's Italian immigrant population.
Ellington, who is African-American, her husband Bob, her mother, her aunts and uncles, her mother-in-law, and all five of her children attended Grant School.
Joyce Ellington remembers Grant as a school girl in the late 1930s. The two-story structure, which "was as old as the hills," used to have a boy's side on 10th St. and a girl's side on 11th St., and "if you got to close to the line, you were brought into see the principal." Joyce also remembers there being student monitors in the halls and student crossing guards - usually fifth- or sixth-graders - along 10th and 11th Sts. "Of course," she says, "there wasn't the traffic we have now." And at the time, these streets were not one-way thoroughfares as they currently are.
One of the student crossing guards during the 1950s was Glen Ishiwata, who was stationed at a "subway" under 13th St. at either Empire or Jackson St. Ishiwata, who was born in Japan shortly after the Second World War, spoke only Japanese before coming to this country. He remembers that he "made the greatest transition in language during that period of time" when he attended first and second grade with teacher Lucille Travis. Ishiwata was inspired to pursue a career in education, and is now the principal at San Jose's Trace School in the Rose Garden area. (Coincidentally his teacher, Ms. Travis, also later became principal at Trace School during the early 1970s. Ishiwata was then a newly-minted teacher and ran into her at a multi-school event. "Hi, Glenny!," the diminutive teacher exclaimed to her former first-grader, destroying Ishiwata's tough facade in front of his class.)
Ishiwata says he "didn't perceive" any overt discrimination at the Grant School during the time he attended in the 1950s. There were "quite a few Japanese in the neighborhood at the time, but the block I grew up on" around Seventh and Washington St. "was mixed," Ishiwata says. "Sometimes kids would tease me for being different." Nonetheless, Ishiwata's two closest friends in his Grant School days were Italian kids, one of which he's still in touch with.
Joyce Ellington recalls of her time at Grant School in the 1930s that at point a couple of boys did something wrong, and the principal tied them to large trees outside the school. She doesn't remember whether there was corporal punishment. "I was a good girl," she laughs. Joyce does admit, however, to occasionally daydreaming while looking out the large second story windows in the back row of one of her classrooms.
One of the more significant figures in the history of Grant School was William E. Niles, principal from 1944 until 1967. Niles "was endeared to two generations of Grant School pupils," according to a 1970s history of the school. Niles was also among the founding members of NNA. During this time, Grant students were involved in poster campaign for, "Let's Light Up the Northside," a highly-successful early neighborhood association endeavor to replace the pre-World War I streetlighting with modern fixtures. Neighborhood activists Lucille Lawson and Rose Taylor (Joyce Ellington's aunt and a Grant School alumnus) coordinated the poster contest.
Niles also worked closely with the Grant School PTA, recalls Joyce Ellington, who was president of that organization for what "seemed like forever" during the 1960s and 1970s. It was a very active PTA, says Ellington. "We had enough women to fill all 21 departments." The school's PTA was also a fertile ground for breeding neighborhood activists. "That's were I met a lot of the women who became active in Northside," according to Ellington, who has served on NNA's board during the neighborhood association's entire 35 year history, making her the dean of all neighborhood activists in the City.
One of Joyce's children, Danny, died in a car accident in the late 1970s. As a memorial, a painting of the old Grant School hangs in Empire Library in his honor, a testament to the special place the school holds in her family's hearts.
Grant School appears to have always evoked warm memories from its alumni. Says Ishiwata: "I have very vivid memories, like snapshots" of his time at Grant School. "I remember the auditorium upstairs in the main building; one afternoon per week the upper classes would assemble and sing while a teacher played piano."
Bob Ellington, seven years his wife Joyce's senior, remembers that, "it was a lot of fun" attending Grant roughly 70 years ago. "Some of the kids I'm still close to." One friend of Bob's in particular, Dominic Zucoli, passed away a couple years ago after having lived his entire life in the Northside - on N. 19th St. growing up and on N. 20th St. in adulthood.
Another NNA founder and Grant School alum, the late Florence Menteer, who passed away in her sixties in 1996, wrote in a previous edition of the Northside newsletter that, "My father took me to my first day of school on a horse driven wagon with a large head of cabbage for my teacher, Miss Barge. First and second grades at Grant were located on this corner [at 11th and Jackson] and were called 'the bungalows.' The main building and annex were facing Empire.
"Miss Barge was a wonderful dimpled teacher who we all just loved. I remember her bringing her parrot and monkey to class on occasion. I would go home and play school as Miss Barge with such intensity that I wound up with the life-long name of Barge. My brother started teasing me by calling me Miss Barge, [and] his friends the Turner brothers picked it up by chanting, "Barge, Barge, are you still at large." The more I protested, the more it stuck . . ."
Thankfully, Grant School is still "at large," and is still serving as a cultural crossroads for the next generation of Northside residents.
Education and Schools Committee
Don Gagliardi
Cathy Novello
Mary Swickrath